4 Ways to Deliver Better Digital Experiences Using Product Data
Does your marketing focus on capturing consumers’ attention?
Or does it focus on your start-to-finish digital experience?
Most brand manufacturers feel that their marketing strategies are built around the overall customer experience. However, just look at the state of product data to see which brands aren’t delivering what they think they are.
Bad customer experiences come down to interruptions and miscommunications throughout the digital experience. Is the brand recognizable and tied to a certain class of products? Does a product description lack key information? Does the experience of shopping for the product include real-life applications or interactive media evocative of the end goal? Does the brand fail to communicate key shipment updates? Does the product truly match the description once the package is received?
The top brand manufacturers build perfectly delivered digital experiences. These experiences are mapped out by solid marketing. Then, the potential leaks in the ship are each sealed with intentional product data management. No brand can deliver the optimal experience without the product data to support it.
These are the 4 ways to deliver better digital experiences using optimized and enriched product data.
1.Product Data Used Right Avoids BAD Digital Experiences
Product data—including product descriptions, product images and videos, user manuals, “how to” materials, and all product-specific marketing collateral—is notoriously hard to manage. Especially in the digital era with multiple marketing and sales channels that require product data in different formats, most brands continue to manage product data in mismatched spreadsheets that have created an unsustainably arduous manual process.
Product data has to be cleaned up or it affects a brand’s bottom line. The most troublesome consequences unoptimized product data has are on the digital experience.
If a consumer sees an ad for a product of interest, that consumer expects visual harmony once the link is clicked. The consumer wants to find exactly the product that will solve his or her pain or satisfy his or her desire.
If the ad isn’t harmonious with the product listing, the consumer wonders if s/he’s in the right place. If product data is incomplete, or simply boring (without interactive product visuals or real-life applications for the product’s purpose), the listing will disappoint.
Worse yet, if the consumer buys the product but it doesn’t match the description, that consumer will feel jarred, even angry. The sale will result in a return and a bad review.
These are avoidable disasters. For a brand to set a foundation to deliver better digital experiences, they use optimized product data that’s accurate, complete, and compelling for the target consumer.
2.Offer Seamless Audio-Visual Experiences
The last 20 years have brought astounding change to consumer retail. Marketplaces have driven much of the innovation. With the new digital experiences they can offer, brands had to make the move to enhanced digital media allowing consumers to interact more with their products.
For example:
- Augmented reality allows consumers to “try on” clothes or accessories, or place a scaled image of a couch in their living rooms.
- Virtual reality provides a new platform for consumers to experience totally new kinds of products.
- Even the basic expectation around product imagery has changed. Consumers expect to see high-quality images and 3D renderings of products. They expect to be able to look inside complex products. They expect product videos depicting products in their intended environments in ways those consumers can relate to.
The technology and internal brand practices behind these changes represent 20 years of disruption. Brands have shifted again and again. Add in crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting supply chain shortages, and brands were forced to reinvent the digital experience yet again.
It’s become more complex to deliver better digital experiences. Product data supports these efforts in many ways, but perhaps the most impactful way is in product imagery. The simple fact that consumers are buying 22% of products entirely online in the United States means they need better images to find what they want and know what they’re buying.
Fortunately, the next-gen PIM (product information management) technology has kept pace with the marketplaces to give brands the tool to manage product imagery. Brand manufacturers no longer need to organize product pictures, renderings, and videos in a labyrinth of folders. Instead, this crucial audio-visual product data can be organized right inside the catalog with the rest of the product information.
3.Marketing Gets More Personal with Polished Product Data
The most compelling digital experiences are delivered now with personalization. Consumers constantly try to funnel their attention to the products that speak to them—and only those products. The onslaught of ads and product information they’re faced with has turned them off to anything that doesn’t strike a personal cord.
Brands don’t discover ways to deliver better digital experiences by simply adding new automation or implementing innovative technology. Brands have to know what consumers want and then find the most automatic way to deliver exactly that. Because today’s consumers want personalization, product data is leveraged in these digital experiences.
Consumers want a sense of control over their digital experience, and they want the validation that what they’re after exists. They aren’t alone. There’s a product for exactly what they want, and it’s shared with them exactly when they want it.
Using the next-gen PIM, brand manufacturers add custom attributes and logic to product data to keep internal catalog information entirely sortable and searchable. Whole catalogs can be filtered or saved to static or dynamic lists. Customers who have one product and will soon need another, for example, can be easily reached with a product catalog organized by custom attributes.
Marketing implementation benefits from product data optimizations, too. Look at how teamwork with the marketing department is unlocked for a whole organization using PIM technology.
4.Better Branding
Along similar lines (but still its own thing), brand manufacturers also uncover ways to deliver better digital experiences with optimized product data because their brands become more recognizable. Branding itself is superior when it’s backed with a catalog of organized, accurate, and consistent product information.
Today, 43% of shoppers around the world research products on social networks before they buy. What consumers don’t actively research on social will still probably show up on social media as they scroll past ads in their feeds. This means that branding has to be consistent across all channels so that the social media spark will launch them into product pages that match what they clicked.
Another recent study by Gartner found that 14% of customers who had digital experiences with a brand were “compelled to do something differently.” Let that sink in. That means a recognizable brand can influence its customers’ decisions.
What a brand’s customers do says something about what that brand does to impact their lives. What do the actions of your customers say about your brand?
Better branding is achieved with the cleanest and most accurate product data that’s consistent across all marketing and sales channels. That product data represents the countless grains of sand that make up the mountain that customers choose to climb to get what they want. If the branding is inconsistent, the sand is loose beneath their feet. Superior branding packs the sand together so that customers can keep climbing.
A brand that delivers better digital experiences gives its customers a compelling “why” to keep climbing. That brand shows customers the version of themselves they want to be. That’s why they choose to climb one brand’s summit.
Keep reading to learn how to get product data to work harder for your brand and the ways to deliver better digital experiences.