What is PIM?

Product information management — or PIM, for short — is a strategy that involves optimizing your product-related content across your different marketing channels.

It’s a type of product marketing approach since the information you provide on your products should ideally entice more people to purchase them.

But how exactly does PIM work and why should you use it?

How Does PIM Work?

When you use PIM tools, you’re essentially looking to create engaging content-based marketing strategies that will help your product sell across platforms. These strategies are ideally suited for multichannel and omnichannel marketing.

The content you create should always relay information about your product. The same information should consistently be conveyed. If one piece of content suggests you exclusively use recycled materials to create your products, all the others should suggest the same (or at minimum, not contradict this).

PIM content can vary greatly. You might include, for example, videos, promotional images, slogans and other types of content that help your audience learn more about your product.

It’s important to highlight that PIM focuses not just on content marketing, but on cross-channel content marketing. In context, this means that changes made to one channel’s content affect all other channels. This is why PIM is perfectly suited to omnichannel marketing strategies.

What are the Benefits of PIM?

It’s clear now how PIM works. But why should you use it? Let’s have a look at the top three benefits of PIM:

It helps create structured product catalogs.

Having a well-organized inventory (and product catalog) is always a great plan. It helps your employees keep track of items and it helps customers find the perfect products.

With PIM, you can ensure your product catalogs are well-organized, structured and informative. Each item gets a matching description and each one corresponds with customized content designed to both provide information and encourage purchases.

It helps optimize quality content.

When every touchpoint offers the same high-quality information on the product, you can help ensure that your customers make informed purchases each time.

This is a key point in PIM’s favor. Since PIM is all about providing excellent quality content across platforms, you can use content like images and product descriptions to grow online sales.

It helps centralize all your data.

PIM solutions automatically track sales-related data across all your channels, gathering it onto a single platform. The result is accurate, real-time data that accounts for all of your marketing channels.

This makes PIM ideal for omnichannel marketing.

At the same time, you can use this centralized data as a cornerstone of your inventory management plan. With a central gathering of all your product data, you’ll have easy access to all the information you need to efficiently manage your inventory.

Who Benefits from PIM?

The points we’ve covered weigh strongly in PIM’s favor. That begs the question: Who can reap those benefits? This is what we’ll be exploring below:

Your marketing team.

Creating a marketing plan centered on sending the same message across all channels is very helpful for your marketing team. It helps give them direction and shows them what kinds of information to include in all content.

PIM takes this to the next level.

With PIM, your marketing team will be able to focus on pushing the same messaging throughout all channels you use. They’ll also know that content is at the heart of their plan. This gives clear direction and guidance.

Your sales team.

The fact that PIM helps ensure that your ecommerce order fulfillment is tracked across channels is one major reason why it helps your sales team.

Another is the unified messaging.

It’s much easier to make sales when any piece of content your prospective customer has interacted with sends the same message. This helps sales teams close deals, as well as ensure that any newly-generated leads are interested in a product they fully understand.

Your IT team.

Gathering and processing data should always be a key responsibility for your IT team and PIM directly helps with this due to centralizing all your data.

In short, your IT team won’t have to go looking for the data they need. It’ll all be in one place, ensuring they can work more efficiently.

Your customers.

PIM helps you cater to customers’ needs.

When your customers interact with your content, they want to learn more about your company and the products you sell. PIM helps get them the right information at every touchpoint. This lets customers connect with you via their channel(s) of choice while always receiving the same high-quality information.

At the same time, PIM reduces confusion by emphasizing consistency in terms of marketing. Information gathered at one touchpoint will always match information from any other touchpoints, ensuring customers are knowledgeable and well-informed.

The Final Word

Put simply, PIM is great for your business.

It comes with lots of benefits and is ideally suited for use with an omnichannel approach since this emphasizes the importance of delivering a seamless brand experience across channels.

The fact that the advantages of PIM affect both your company and your customers is a major bonus as well.

When you use PIM, you can be sure that your content strategy is optimal.