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Are you a brand or manufacturer who's interested in maximizing your business’s revenue potential for retail channels like Walmart, Home Depot, Otto, Amazon Vendor Central, CVS, Google Manufacturer Center and more? This article on product content syndication is for you.
Today’s consumers are more tech-savvy and information-hungry than ever before. Faced with a near unlimited number of buying options, they are leveraging multiple channels and devices to conduct product research. But with this shift also comes new expectations. Consumers expect the item they are looking for to be wherever they are looking and for its information to be accurate, complete and consistent across all touchpoints. This is true for all products, whether it’s on your website, a major online marketplace like Amazon, Walmart, Otto, or a niche retail site.
“Over half of all customer interactions happen during a multi-event, multi-channel journey.” - __McKinsey & Company__
If your products aren’t where consumers are looking, you’re going to miss out on potential sales and decrease consumer satisfaction with your brand. Moreover, if your product content is poor-quality or inconsistent across channels, you’re likely to confuse shoppers enough to drive them away and increase product return rates.
So what does this mean for brands and manufacturers? To put it simply, your end-consumers are omnichannel and you need to be too.
In order to provide consumers with consistent product stories across the board, you need to have a seamless product content distribution or syndication strategy set in place. But what exactly does this look like and can it even be executed manually?
This article will take an in-depth look at the challenges that brands and manufacturers are likely to face when manually executing omnichannel product content distribution. Then, we’ll examine how product content syndication software and automation can help your business build an effective digital presence.
The frustrations of manual product content syndication
Most brands and manufacturers are already familiar with strict requirements from retailers. For years they’ve had to adhere to guidelines for shipping labels and packaging formats in order to avoid chargebacks. But tailoring and distributing- or syndicating -product catalogs in accordance with a channel’s rules is still quite new to a lot of companies and many are still executing this manually.
While certain aspects of your overall digital strategy may require some manual upkeep, product content syndication should not be one of them.
With each channel boasting their own unique product content specifications and rules, delivering a tailored product catalog to multiple channels can take months and requires the handling of hundreds of complex spreadsheets. With this approach, it’s all about maintaining existing channels and can often result in human errors or inconsistent product information being delivered across touchpoints. That said, companies executing content syndication manually often face these key challenges:
Lost revenue on disapproved products
Not only do all channels have their own unique product content requirements, but they are also constantly changing and updating their rules. Manually preparing and tailoring a channel-specific product content catalog requires complex code and hundreds of spreadsheets, increasing the risk of human error and ultimately getting your products rejected. Once your product content catalogs are tailored, they still must be distributed to the channels. Which output format does each channel require- XML, CSV? Even the format in which you send your product content will differ between channels.
Moreover, every time a channel changes its specifications, like the length of the product title or description, your product catalog will need to be adjusted accordingly and redistributed. If it’s not, your live products could be removed. Any downtime brought on by disapproved products could be the difference between making a sale and not.
High opportunity costs
Maintaining and keeping your existing channels up-to-date is a time-consuming process and requires a lot of internal resources. So when new, revenue-driving opportunities present themselves, brands and manufacturers are often unable to pursue them due to lack of available resources. With IT and marketing preoccupied with preparing and monitoring product catalogs, companies simply aren’t able to think about growing or scaling their business.
High running costs
Companies without automated syndication spend excess amounts of time and money maintaining their product content distribution strategy. Faced with hundreds of spreadsheets that require detailed monitoring and manual upkeep, a number of your most valuable employees will have to take time away from other projects in order to see it through. This results in an increased need for human resources and more money spent overall.
Are any of the above challenges giving you headaches or getting in the way of realizing your company’s revenue potential? Product content syndication software is for you!
How powerful product content syndication software increases revenue
Product content syndication software was built to help you manage the distribution of product content. Best-in-class syndication software takes it up a notch and allows you to optimize, tailor, and distribute perfectly structured product content to any channel at any time, easily and quickly. Powerful software can be leveraged to create consistent product stories across all channels, ensuring a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
The Productsup Data Syndication software, for example, is stocked full of tools and features, including smart machine learning technology, that allows commerce players to efficiently optimize, tailor, and syndicate their product content to over 1,500 channels.
That said, here are a few of the many benefits of good product content syndication software, all of which can help drive revenue to your business:
Faster time to market
With the help of powerful product content syndication software like Productsup, you no longer have to waste time keeping track of all the changes channels makes to their requirements. Moreover, the software makes your data agile, so it can easily take any form - allowing you to boast consistent and accurate information across all digital touchpoints. Being able to easily reshape your product content means it can more quickly be delivered to new channels and updated for the ones already existing in your portfolio.
Increased efficiency
The tailoring and delivering of product content without automation requires hundreds of spreadsheets and wasted working hours. This rings especially true since, in order to keep your information up-to-date on all your channels, your catalog needs to be exported regularly. The right automated syndication software will eliminate the need to manually edit, tailor, and export your catalog. This way you waste fewer resources, dedicate less time, require fewer working hours, and can get things done a lot more efficiently.
Healthier partnerships
Automated product content syndication enables you to get things right the first time. By always delivering specially-tailored, channel-ready product catalogs, you’re going to avoid fewer fees from retailers and avoid having your catalog disapproved by channels. Moreover, providing high-quality product content to your partners makes their jobs easier as well, which makes it more likely that they’ll want to continue or grow the mutually-beneficial partnership.
Time & resources necessary to scale
For brands and manufacturers, maintaining already existing channels allocates so much manpower, it is near impossible to start thinking about growing or scaling the business. By automating product content syndication, companies have both more time and manpower free to spend on growth strategy. Moreover, with a product content syndication platform like Productsup, thousands of channel templates are already integrated into the software. This makes it easy to try out new channels and find which are best suited for your companies digital strategy, or even to globalize!
Want to grab hold of these benefits and start taking your digital commerce strategy to the next level? Productsup can help.
Automate product content syndication with Productsup
Productsup is a certified global leader in product content syndication. With the software, brands and manufacturers can easily create high-quality, channel-ready product feeds for over 1,500 retailers, marketplaces, and marketing channels.
While PIM systems are great for dispensing product information, the data stored in them lacks the agility required to carry omnichannel product content syndication. That’s where Productsup comes in.
The Productsup software allows you to tailor and optimize your product feeds in bulk using a variety of powerful tools and features, including machine learning technology to automate most of your work.
From image optimization with the Productsup Image Designer and preconfigured export templates to drag-and-drop data editing technology and bulk transformations, Productsup makes any data agile and high-quality enough to fit any destination. No matter how large your feed, you’ll never have to write a single line of code.
Is your business working with SAP Hybris? Learn why Productsup Data Syndication 1.2 was one of the first solutions to become SAP Premium Certified.