With economies around the world going through turbulent times, it’s no wonder that consumer spending is slowing. The result is that ecommerce sellers are looking for ways to consolidate what they have and save time and resources where they can. Already overstretched marketing teams worldwide are revising their growth roadmaps just to try to maintain their current sales volume on existing channels. Although many companies will adjust their strategies successfully, some will struggle. Here are 5 ways to help your business consolidate its resources, save time and money, and connect with new channels, markets, and customers.
1. Onboard feed management software with machine learning capabilities
One of the greatest challenges facing marketing teams is the amount of time spent working on spreadsheets to merge, format, edit, and enhance product data. Some businesses are forced to engage IT teams to help prepare product information data for export to channels.
There is currently a handful of product-to-consumer (P2C) management platforms that specialize in importing files of any size, in any format, and from all sources and then automatically merging, mapping, and enhancing that product data. The automation and visualization on centralized dashboards remove the need for any IT or technical resources when marketing teams want to export or publish product data on their current channels or a new channel. Next-gen feed management processes usually create ready-made channel templates where the imported product data can then be mapped to in a matter of minutes.
2. Experiment with more social commerce campaigns
With everyone talking about social commerce, it may surprise you that only 25% of businesses advertise on any of these platforms. Some of the reasons include complicated and changing requirements and specs for data and creative assets for each channel, the need to create sub-channels for each new market or language, slow-go-to-market times for new products or sales campaigns, lacking an image or video designer to create high-quality ads for large volumes of SKUs, or lack of experience on multiple social commerce platforms.
Smart social commerce solutions enable companies to rapidly list new products on whatever social commerce platform they choose in record time. This means businesses can experiment with audience targeting and product testing without risking sizable financial losses or wasting precious employee time figuring out how to access the huge potential audience on these constantly evolving channels.
3. Redeploy marketing teams and feed managers to work on new marketing campaigns and channels
If channel onboarding can be reduced from days or weeks to minutes and the team is no longer struggling with manual and labor-intensive feed optimization tasks, move those resources to work on getting products to new channels and find more consumers. Comprehensive feed management and social commerce tools allow businesses to create and manage all of their sales events from centralized easy-to-use dashboards.
By returning full control over product data to marketing teams, P2C management platforms open up a world of marketing campaign possibilities for companies looking to expand their market reach through experimentation with marketplaces, social commerce platforms or websites.
4. Centralized product data means cross-channel insights and reporting from multiple markets
Use the pooling of all product information sources and exports to gather information on what products are selling where and to whom and on which channels. Only by centralizing all of your feed management efforts can you get truly global reporting on the current trends. Innovative insights solutions will visualize the multi-channel data in real-time, allowing the marketing team to remove products from markets, shift target audiences, or even launch products on multiple markets in only a few minutes.
5. Optimize your D2C or vendor onboarding efforts with dedicated solutions
With commerce anarchy beginning to disrupt and challenge straightforward direct-to-consumer or vendor publishing marketing, it’s time to cut through the digital complexity and consider the latest P2C solutions for Product Content Syndication (PCS) and Seller and Vendor onboarding.
The insane acceleration of the complexity of all digital marketing since early 2020, means that even large manufacturers have to find specialists to maintain their D2C growth. Easy-to-use content syndication software is essential if producers or manufacturers want to deploy their resources effectively, in a way that is consistent and accurate across all destinations. Removing third-party businesses from the product-to-consumer chain to increase margins is the whole point of D2C marketing. However, the complex nature of the market has made it impossible for a marketing department to manage multiple channels on multiple marketers without solutions that automate the manual work.
Publishing product information on websites or marketplaces also suffers from overwhelming complexity in the digital commerce space. Importing product data from multiple sources – even within single companies – and then merging and optimizing the discrete data for publication on a website now requires automated systems. Human error, compliance, and product availability are just three factors that, unless automated and proofed by AI-based systems, can cause irreparable damage to a brand publishing on a third-party site.