Why has a PIM become essential?
In the era of omnichannel commerce and personalized customer experiences, effectively managing product information is no longer an option but a strategic necessity. Companies juggle growing volumes of product data (descriptions, technical specifications, prices, images, videos…), scattered across various systems (ERP, Excel files, internal databases…), and must distribute them consistently across a multitude of channels (e-commerce site, mobile apps, marketplaces, social media, print catalogs…). Without centralized management, this process leads to errors, inconsistencies, wasted time, and damages the customer experience. This is where Product Information Management (PIM) comes in.
What is a PIM and how does it work?
A PIM system is a software solution designed to centralize, manage, enrich, and distribute all product-related information for a company. It acts as a “Single Source of Truth” for product data. Specifically, a PIM allows you to:
- Collect and Consolidate: Import data from various sources (ERP, suppliers, files…).
- Standardize and Structure: Organize information according to a flexible, defined data model (categories, attributes, variants…).
- Enrich: Add marketing information (SEO-optimized descriptions, translations, highlights…), technical, or logistical details.
- Manage Media: Associate images, videos, technical sheets with the corresponding products (features sometimes overlapping with a DAM’s).
- Control Quality: Implement rules to ensure data completeness and accuracy.
- Contextualize: Manage information variations by channel, language, or region.
- Distribute: Export formatted and validated data to various sales and communication channels via connectors or APIs.
Solutions like Akeneo, Contentserv, Salsify, or inRiver PIM are examples of leading PIM platforms on the market.
Key benefits of implementing a PIM
Implementing a PIM system brings tangible and measurable benefits to the company:
- Improved Data Quality and Consistency: By centralizing and controlling information, the PIM eliminates duplicates, errors, and inconsistencies across different channels, strengthening brand credibility.
- Accelerated Time-to-Market: Centralization and streamlined enrichment workflows allow launching new products or updating information much faster across all channels.
- Optimized Customer Experience: Rich, accurate, and consistent product information improves the online and offline shopping experience, increasing satisfaction and conversion rates (especially crucial in e-commerce).
- Increased Team Productivity: Marketing, product, and e-commerce teams spend less time searching for, verifying, and correcting product information, focusing on higher value-added tasks.
- Better Collaboration: The PIM provides a single platform for collaboration around product data enrichment and validation.
- Facilitated International Expansion: Centralized management of translations and local adaptations simplifies deployment into new markets.
- Support for Omnichannel Strategies: Ensures consistent information delivery across all touchpoints (web, mobile, print, store…).
Integrating PIM into the Martech ecosystem: the role of Brandeploy
While a PIM is essential for managing product information, its full value is unlocked when connected to the rest of the Martech ecosystem, especially content creation tools. Perfect product information in the PIM is useless if it’s not used correctly and effectively in final marketing materials (banners, videos, web pages…). This is where Brandeploy, a Creative Automation platform, plays a crucial role.
Brandeploy integrates natively (via API or connectors) with leading PIMs (like Akeneo, Contentserv, etc.) to:
- Activate PIM Data in Creation: Use product information (texts, prices, images…) directly from the PIM to automatically populate intelligent templates in Brandeploy.
- Generate Marketing Content at Scale: Automatically produce thousands of personalized and always up-to-date creatives (product banners, social posts, technical sheets…) by combining Brandeploy templates and PIM data.
- Ensure Global Consistency (Data + Brand): Combine the reliability of PIM data with the guarantee of brand consistency from Brandeploy templates.
- Integrate Workflows: Get final content (using PIM data) validated via Brandeploy workflows before distribution (e.g., to the CMS or DAM).
Conclusion: A PIM system is an indispensable foundation for any company managing a product catalog. Its benefits in terms of data quality, efficiency, and customer experience are major. To maximize its ROI, it’s essential to connect it to a platform like Brandeploy that leverages this data to automate marketing content creation at scale, consistently and controllably.
Unlock the power of your product data with Brandeploy
Have you invested in a PIM but still struggle to quickly and effectively create all the necessary marketing content? Discover how the PIM + Brandeploy integration can transform your content production. Request a personalized demo.
