Success Starts with Access to the Right Information

As I wrote in a previous post, product information is becoming more and more entwined with digital asset management. Does it make sense to have a marketing team that can’t access the information of the products they’re trying to sell? It’s not that product experts hide product information, it’s that often they simply work within different platforms. With the speed in which marketing has to move in this era, to not have the most up to date product information, pricing and data at their fingertips is not satisfactory.

How did this happen?

Two things happened that caused the need to integrate your PIM with your marketing platform. First, the technology became available. In no world does it make sense to not allow your marketing team to easily access necessary information. Once the technology became available, forward-thinking companies started to implement these systems and stay at the forefront of their respective industries. Second, once one company is using advanced technology, others have to catchup to stay relevant. Since this is a relatively new endeavor, that’s where many companies find themselves.

For the most part, companies have to departmentalize themselves in order to be productive. Accountants don’t need to sit with lawyers and lawyers don’t need to sit with marketers, but the company as a whole does still need to be able to work together. Sure, there are some departments that will simply never need to collaborate, but for the ones who should be collaborating, by not doing so your company is the worse for it.

Most business-centric people can get behind the idea of collaboration, but most department heads can’t get behind the idea of integration. There is a middle ground, though. Perhaps it is best to call it a streamlined approach.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat…

A streamlined process between the product team and the marketing team is essential in the modern era for a few reasons.

• There’s a fine line between marketing and ecommerce. An ecommerce platform has to have the product data and pricing available so a consumer can buy a product, but it’s marketing’s job to get them to drive them to the place to buy a product
• Marketing often doesn’t have time to dwell on a single product. They have to promote the company at large. But, there are plenty of times when a single product should be promoted, used in an overarching ad, or has been discontinued and can no longer be in ads which marketing definitely needs to know
• Marketing is the bridge between the company and sales, if the marketing team doesn’t know their products they simply aren’t doing their job.

While it makes sense to streamline the data between marketing and product and even beyond, how is it done? Can you do it with multiple systems? If there is a will there is a way, right? Human nature is human nature and there is only so much time in the day, so if you expect your team to willingly jump back and forth between different systems in a streamlined manner then you will be dissatisfied with the results. An integrated system incorporating digital asset management and product information management is the only way to ensure that a streamlined process can be implemented and followed.

We’re marketing in a time that if people can’t find what they’re looking for in a matter of seconds they can find it somewhere else within a few seconds more. If product data isn’t behind a product ad the odds of it being purchased go down. So, you can join your competitors and have the digital asset management software available to compete in this environment or you can wave at them as they lap you.