Top 10 reasons your competitors are beating you to market

In today's dynamic business landscape, the race to market dominance is more competitive than ever. Achieving your key performance indicators (KPIs), boosting sales, and securing personal success all hinge on one critical factor: outpacing your competitors. This blog is your guide to uncovering the top 10 reasons why your competitors are ahead of you and how you can catch up and surpass them. In the following sections, we'll look at 10 factors contributing to your competitors' success, all to help you gain a competitive edge when syndicating product content.

1. Global readiness

Your competitors have a clear market edge due to their global readiness, a factor often overlooked in the feed management landscape. While many feed management tools struggle with handling multiple languages, currencies, and local product regulations, your competitors have embraced global readiness from day one.

Managing product data in multiple languages presents complexities in translation, localization, and accuracy. Adhering to diverse local product regulations and compliance requirements can pose legal and operational hurdles. The ability to seamlessly manage product data across regions is crucial in an interconnected global market. Global readiness ensures that your product content is not only accurate but also compliant with local regulations, enabling your brand to thrive on a global scale.

How to overcome this challenge

To get ahead of your competitors, ensure efficient content syndication, consider the following steps:

Prioritize global-ready tools: Before committing to a solution, carefully assess the tool’s ability to import and syndicate product content to the global market, and prioritize global-readiness from the get-go. Stay compliant: Ensure that your feed management offering helps you comply with local product regulations and standards, limiting legal risk.

2. Knowledge challenges

One significant challenge in feed management solutions and its ability to help you take your products to market is the speed of training and knowledge transfer. The need to invest considerable time in onboarding new colleagues, often due to a challenging interface and poor user experience, can slow down your operations and impede additional growth and scalability. Choosing the wrong platform may necessitate significant investments in both time and money for employee training.

But what happens when an employee departs? When an employee leaves, their knowledge departs with them. Employee departures can significantly lose institutional knowledge, making it difficult to maintain and optimize feed management processes. These delays act as further bottlenecks to taking your product to market faster.

How to overcome these challenges

To address the challenge of training and knowledge transfer, consider these strategies:

• Invest in Comprehensive Training: Ensure that your chosen platform offers comprehensive training resources, including an Academy with informative content and training sessions. These resources can accelerate the onboarding of new team members and facilitate knowledge transfer.
• Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Check if the solution implements robust documentation and knowledge-sharing practices. Ensure they have a training and support team that provides round-the-clock support for your team.
• Continuous Learning: Foster a culture of continuous learning and skill development among your team members to adapt to changing technologies and tools.

3. Feed management tool not being user-friendly

Another significant hurdle in achieving faster product content syndication is the complexity of many feed management software interfaces. When your team encounters software that needs more intuitiveness and user-friendliness, it can lead to manya host of challenges that slow down your operations and hinder your competitive edge. Software with complex and convoluted user interfaces can lead to frustration, errors, and inefficiencies as your team struggles to navigate and perform tasks. A lack of intuitiveness and user-friendliness in feed management software can have a direct impact on your ability to syndicate product content rapidly. It can result in errors, missed opportunities, and slower response times in a market that demands agility.

How to overcome this challenge

To address the challenge of complex user interfaces and lack of user-friendliness, consider the following strategies:

• User-Centric Selection: When choosing feed management software, prioritize platforms that are known for their user-friendliness and intuitive design. Read user reviews and seek recommendations to make an informed choice.
• Feedback Loop: Encourage your team to provide feedback on the software's usability and user interface. Many software providers value user input and make updates accordingly.
• Simplify Workflows: Streamline your internal processes and workflows to align with the software's capabilities. This can reduce complexity and make it easier for your team to use the software effectively.

4. Lack of a 24/7 customer support

One often-overlooked challenge for a faster go-to-market is the absence of 24/7 human customer support from most vendors. The reason behind this gap is the complexity of setting up such support, as there is a need for a global presence to overcome time zone issues. As a result, many feed management vendors in the field need more resources to offer round-the-clock assistance. However, the ability to reach someone 24/7 can be of utmost importance, especially in moments when your business encounters critical issues.

Access to 24/7 human customer support is necessary for you to be able to receive assistance only during business hours, potentially leading to task delays and operational disruptions. In busy seasons such as Black Friday or Christmas, when every minute counts, encountering a technical issue in the evening that requires immediate attention can result in significant revenue losses if support is unavailable until the next business day. Consider this scenario: During a peak sales period, late in the evening, a critical issue threatens to disrupt your operations. Without access to 24/7 customer support, you're left in a precarious situation, potentially losing substantial revenue as you wait for assistance.

How to address this challenge

To mitigate the challenge of limited support availability, here are some steps to consider:

• Vendor Evaluation: When selecting a feed management solution, inquire about their customer support options. Opt for vendors that offer robust 24/7 support or alternative support arrangements to cater to your business needs.
• Emergency Protocols: Develop emergency response protocols within your organization to handle critical issues during non-business hours. Identify key contacts and escalation procedures to minimize downtime.
• Downtime Risk Assessment: Continuously assess the potential impact of technical issues on your revenue, especially during peak seasons, and allocate resources accordingly.

5. Poor image design capabilities

Another critical challenge is the time wastage associated with depending on graphic design teams for image optimizations. Many solutions in the market lack an in-built Image Designer, and implementing such a feature is technically complex and requires careful attention to interface UI/UX. Companies that don’t have access to an Image Designer feature often rely on internal designers to create visuals for their top-selling products, which can significantly slow down their processes. However, with software that offers an in-built Image Designer, businesses can streamline their operations by designing visuals for every SKU in their catalog independently, thus reducing the time to market.

Relying on graphic design teams, whether internal or external, for image optimization can lead to bottlenecks and delays in getting product content ready for syndication. Businesses may find themselves lacking control over the design and optimization process, resulting in potential discrepancies between the desired output and the final visuals. The reliance on external design teams and the absence of a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) feature within feed management solutions can hinder the timely preparation and optimization of product images, slowing down the overall time to market.

How to address this challenge

When evaluating feed management solutions, inquire about the availability of an in-built Image Designer or WYSIWYG features. Choose a platform that offers these capabilities to empower your team to optimize images efficiently.

6. Capability to adapt to a dynamic market

In today's rapidly evolving social media landscape, adapting swiftly to emerging advertising channels is crucial for staying competitive. New channels are emerging at an unprecedented pace. However, for brands, adding and maintaining these channels can be daunting and expensive. This inefficiency stems from the need to allocate valuable developer resources that could be better utilized elsewhere, such as improving the online shopping experience or enhancing the core product.

Adding and maintaining channels requires significant developer resources, diverting them from more critical tasks. The manual process of managing multiple channels can be both inefficient and costly for brands. The inability to adapt quickly to emerging advertising channels can lead to missed opportunities, slower time-to-market, and increased costs.

How to address this challenge

To tackle the challenge of adapting to a dynamic market, consider these strategies:

Partner with Scalable Tools: Seek feed management tools that can efficiently add and update channels. Look for solutions that provide and maintain services that cater to all new marketplaces. By choosing the right feed management tools and strategies, you can position your brand to adapt rapidly to a dynamic market, seize first-mover advantages, and expedite the syndication of product content to drive revenue and success.

Relevance to Ecosystem Partners: Consider the size and relevance of your chosen feed management vendor to key ecosystem partners like Meta, Google, and TikTok. A larger vendor is more likely to be an enabler of revenue for these partners, attracting ad dollars and fostering mutually beneficial relationships.

7. Scale limitation

Another reason your competitors are beating you to market is that you might lack the ability to process and update vast numbers of offers or SKUs within minutes. The inability to process and update large catalogs efficiently can result in delays and inaccuracies in product content syndication. Some businesses require real-time updates to reflect changes in availability or stock status throughout the day, necessitating a platform that can handle frequent updates without issues. Hence, when it comes to taking to market a large number of SKUs, scalability is vital for staying competitive and accelerating product content syndication.

How to address this challenge

To overcome the challenge of scale limitation, consider the following strategies:

• Choose Proven Platforms: Select feed management platforms with a proven track record of handling and efficiently syndicating large volumes of SKUs. Ensure the platform can handle frequent updates, especially if your business requires real-time or near-real-time catalog updates to reflect availability and stock status changes. Look for vendors with close relationships with Solution Engineers from major advertising channels like Google, Meta, and TikTok. They can often build customized solutions that go beyond standard API rate limits, ensuring smooth operation even with large catalogs.
• Cost Efficiency: Consider that the infrastructure cost, including servers and cloud hosting, can sometimes outweigh the software license cost when dealing with massive catalogs. Specialized feed management vendors can provide cost-effective solutions without requiring extensive Dev-Ops and custom development.

8. Complex data mapping process

Complex data mapping processes pose a significant challenge when taking your product to market faster than your competitors. As catalogs grow larger, the task of mapping attributes and categories becomes increasingly tedious. The mapping of attributes directly affects catalog readiness, ensuring that all necessary attributes are in place to push the catalog to various channels. Similarly, mapping categories or taxonomies has a substantial impact on catalog readiness and sales performance.

The manual mapping of attributes and categories can be time-consuming and error-prone, leading to delays in syndicating product content. Different marketplaces may have unique ways of categorizing products, requiring mapping adjustments for each channel, and inaccurate mapping can result in lost sales opportunities.

How to address this challenge

To overcome the challenge of complex data mapping processes, consider the following strategies:

Automation with AI: Choose a feed management vendor that offers a high level of automation, especially through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. AI can significantly streamline the attribute and category mapping process, reducing manual efforts and improving accuracy. Look for vendors with access to vast volumes of product data to train their AI models effectively. More data can lead to more accurate and efficient mapping.

Quality Control: Implement quality control measures to verify the accuracy of attribute and category mapping, preventing costly errors that could lead to lost revenue.

9. Heavy reliance on IT teams

Your competitors are gaining a significant edge in the market by not relying heavily on their IT teams to manage their feed management platforms and enact necessary changes. In contrast, your digital marketing team may be hampered by the need for IT involvement or coding skills, limiting their autonomy and effectiveness.

Many feed management platforms require a basic coding understanding to implement sophisticated changes and optimizations. This coding requirement restricts the pool of business users who can effectively work on feed management, slowing down operations and reducing the potential for optimization. Users may be apprehensive about using programming languages, leading to hesitancy in working on the feed and realizing its full potential. Fear of complexity can result in missed revenue opportunities and reduced performance, including fewer clicks and lower Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

How to address this challenge

Seek feed management vendors that provide no-code environments, enabling business users to make changes and optimizations without coding expertise. Empowering your digital marketing team with a no-code environment is essential to staying competitive in the market. It ensures that more team members can effectively work on feed management and fully tap into your revenue potential. By providing a user-friendly, no-code environment, you can level the playing field with your competitors and accelerate your digital marketing efforts to capture more revenue and market share.

10. Lack of visibility

Your competitors have gained a substantial market advantage by addressing a critical challenge: the lack of visibility when something breaks in the complex process of moving thousands or millions of SKUs through various integrations and APIs. Manual monitoring of catalog health and integrations is nearly impossible, given the complexity of the task. However, your competitors have invested in sophisticated tools that efficiently monitor the health of catalogs and integrations.

Manually staying on top of catalog and integration health in a complex ecosystem is a daunting task, leaving room for errors and costly oversights. The impact of failed catalog integrations can be significant, especially for ad-based campaigns that can consume substantial ad spend. Using incorrect or outdated product data due to integration failures can result in wasted ad dollars and lost revenue.

How to address this challenge

To overcome this lack of visibility here are some things you might want to consider:

• Prioritize Monitoring Tools: When selecting a feed management vendor, prioritize those that offer sophisticated monitoring tools for catalog and integration health.. These tools monitor the import stage, data transformation, optimization processes, and the export stage.
• Automated Alerts: Ensure the tool can automatically trigger alerts and notifications when issues arise, enabling rapid response and resolution. Ensure they provide modern communication channels, such as Slack, for instant alerts to all relevant business and technical users.
• Real-time Insights: Embrace real-time or near-real-time insights into the health of your catalog and integrations to prevent revenue loss and optimize ad spend.

Conclusion

In a fiercely competitive market, strategic decision-making is key to taking your product content to market faster and outpacing your rivals. This blog will serve as your compass, and the information provided will help you navigate the complex world of feed management. By prioritizing modern monitoring tools, automation, no-code environments, and AI-powered solutions, you can empower your team to work more efficiently, adapt to dynamic markets, and seize opportunities quickly. Stay ahead of the curve and watch your revenue soar, leaving your competitors in the dust.