At first glance, 'product content management' seems like another meaningless buzzword.
As Destiny's product content manager, you will know better than anyone else what content needs to be generated to improve the customer experience. You'll gather customer feedback via the customers themselves or via the various Destiny teams and convert the resulting needs into videos, manuals, tutorials and other content for our knowledge base.
- Content Manager A custom launcher and content management app for Assetto Corsa.
- 39,172 Product Content Manager jobs available on Indeed.com. Apply to Product Manager, Content Manager, Associate Product Manager and more!
- Product Content Manager. As Destiny's product content manager, you will know better than anyone else what content needs to be generated to improve the customer experience. You'll gather customer feedback via the customers themselves or via the various Destiny teams and convert the resulting needs into videos, manuals, tutorials and other.
There are a lot of vendors touting their product content management systems. There are very few of them actually talking about the practice of product content management.
If vendors only use the term in an attempt to differentiate from the product information management marketplace, but still basically sell PIM, then what does 'product content management' even mean?
Well, fear not!
Product content management is actually a merchandising discipline that is worth understanding. It incorporates aspects of retail merchandising, digital marketing, and content strategy into one discipline. And, I'm going to actually give a real explanation for what it means, through the rest of this post.
Content Strategy & Content Management
Before we get into the meat of it, let's talk about two important marketing disciplines: content strategy and content management.
These terms may sound analogous, but they are not. They are two distinct, but related, marketing disciplines.
Content strategy is best defined by Kristina Halvorson, one of the most recognizable names in the discipline:
At its best, a content strategy defines: key themes and messages, recommended topics, content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements), content gap analysis, metadata frameworks and related content attributes, search engine optimization (SEO), and implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.
Content strategy is the driving strategy for any successful website. It's the discipline of deciding how you are going to use your web content to achieve your organizational goals.
Content management is the discipline of facilitating the content lifecycle–you know, that content that was derived from your content strategy. How do you create it? How do you manage and/or maintain it? How do you publish it? Are there approval workflows in place? Who is responsible for what?
Content strategy is the–well–strategy. Content management is the execution.
You'll often hear the term 'content management system' to describe the technology platform used to facilitate content management. These come in all shapes and sizes from the free and hugely popular WordPress all the way to six-figure enterprise systems like Adobe Experience Manager.
Remember though…content management is technology and process. A content management system won't just magically make it all work.
To execute a successful online strategy, some degree of content strategy and management are necessary. Smaller companies may be somewhat informal about these disciplines, but you can be assured they are thinking about it.
And, this poses very specific challenges for retailers…
The Challenge For Retailers
While generally accepted among digital marketers, content strategy and content management are a little tricky to apply to a retailer's specific business model. The ideas are still valid, but they're a bit too abstract when taken at face value.
This is especially true of content management. To a retailer 'content strategy' almost becomes retail merchandising. It's the discipline of determining how you want to bring products to your market. It's just missing a few technical details, like SEO strategy.
But, content management for retailers is different story.
Product Content Manager Resume
When you read the literature on content management, it isn't written to the retailer specifically. And, a retailer's content management challenges are unique to the retail business model, in a few ways:
- Retail websites are primarily product-driven, meaning most of the web 'content' is actually product detail pages.
- Retail content publishing processes are usually subservient to merchandising processes.
- Retailers often need to perform mass updates to content, in accordance with seasonality.
- Retail is a much older discipline than website management. There is a lot of 'old school' inertia to overcome.
Product Data Management: A Critical Retail Discipline
Retailers are challenged with managing a product assortment and vast amounts of product data to describe that assortment. This is something that other business models do not face.
There is no such thing as 'merchandising' in any business model other than retail.
Retailers must constantly source new products that will satisfy their customers. They must combine their separate supplier catalogs into a master catalog. They must enrich that catalog with descriptions and attributes that explain the products, while maintaining the desired brand experience.
To a retailer, the products are the content. So, the retailer has to fight two demons: the challenge of maintaining proper product data and the challenge of executing a well-managed web content. This is no easy task.
To an #eCommerce retailer, the products ARE the content. Click To TweetContent Management is insufficient for retailers.
Content management systems, like WordPress, are not built for retailers. They are not built to facilitate the processes of a retail business. They are built, mostly for managing content-driven websites, like blogs and marketing sites.
It is technically possible to run an eCommerce business on a basic content management site. And, some retailers have even tried to do it.
But, the technologies and the processes they facilitate are so different than what the retailer needs, it winds up costing a lot of time, money, and mistakes to customize the system. Content management is just simply not built for retailers!
As a result, many retailers either spend millions building their own homegrown systems, designed to execute their processes. Others simply ignore the issue, move to an eCommerce platform like Shopify, and neglect to think in terms of 'content management'.
Neither of these is an effective or scalable strategy!
What retailers really need is a version of content management, adapted to their specific needs. They need best practices and technologies that are specifically designed to help them execute their content strategies–their merchandising strategies.
Product Content Strategy
We use the term 'product content strategy' to describe the hybrid discipline of retail merchandising and content strategy.
This is the plan. It's how you want to bring products to your market via eCommerce channels. It incorporates activities like:
- Defining your target audience as customer personas
- Mapping out their customer journey
- Defining a channel strategy to meet their needs
- And, determining how you will manage and publish product content to tie it all together
Product content strategy is the strategy (duh!). Product content management–the more difficult part–is the execution.
Product Content Management
Product content management is also a hybrid discipline, combining concepts from retail merchandising, product data management (sometimes called master data management), and content management.
It is exactly what retailers need to execute the strategies they define.
Data Management for Products
Product content management incorporates data management disciplines to ensure that your master product catalog is always accurate and always adheres to the brand.
- Content Manager A custom launcher and content management app for Assetto Corsa.
- 39,172 Product Content Manager jobs available on Indeed.com. Apply to Product Manager, Content Manager, Associate Product Manager and more!
- Product Content Manager. As Destiny's product content manager, you will know better than anyone else what content needs to be generated to improve the customer experience. You'll gather customer feedback via the customers themselves or via the various Destiny teams and convert the resulting needs into videos, manuals, tutorials and other.
There are a lot of vendors touting their product content management systems. There are very few of them actually talking about the practice of product content management.
If vendors only use the term in an attempt to differentiate from the product information management marketplace, but still basically sell PIM, then what does 'product content management' even mean?
Well, fear not!
Product content management is actually a merchandising discipline that is worth understanding. It incorporates aspects of retail merchandising, digital marketing, and content strategy into one discipline. And, I'm going to actually give a real explanation for what it means, through the rest of this post.
Content Strategy & Content Management
Before we get into the meat of it, let's talk about two important marketing disciplines: content strategy and content management.
These terms may sound analogous, but they are not. They are two distinct, but related, marketing disciplines.
Content strategy is best defined by Kristina Halvorson, one of the most recognizable names in the discipline:
At its best, a content strategy defines: key themes and messages, recommended topics, content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements), content gap analysis, metadata frameworks and related content attributes, search engine optimization (SEO), and implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.
Content strategy is the driving strategy for any successful website. It's the discipline of deciding how you are going to use your web content to achieve your organizational goals.
Content management is the discipline of facilitating the content lifecycle–you know, that content that was derived from your content strategy. How do you create it? How do you manage and/or maintain it? How do you publish it? Are there approval workflows in place? Who is responsible for what?
Content strategy is the–well–strategy. Content management is the execution.
You'll often hear the term 'content management system' to describe the technology platform used to facilitate content management. These come in all shapes and sizes from the free and hugely popular WordPress all the way to six-figure enterprise systems like Adobe Experience Manager.
Remember though…content management is technology and process. A content management system won't just magically make it all work.
To execute a successful online strategy, some degree of content strategy and management are necessary. Smaller companies may be somewhat informal about these disciplines, but you can be assured they are thinking about it.
And, this poses very specific challenges for retailers…
The Challenge For Retailers
While generally accepted among digital marketers, content strategy and content management are a little tricky to apply to a retailer's specific business model. The ideas are still valid, but they're a bit too abstract when taken at face value.
This is especially true of content management. To a retailer 'content strategy' almost becomes retail merchandising. It's the discipline of determining how you want to bring products to your market. It's just missing a few technical details, like SEO strategy.
But, content management for retailers is different story.
Product Content Manager Resume
When you read the literature on content management, it isn't written to the retailer specifically. And, a retailer's content management challenges are unique to the retail business model, in a few ways:
- Retail websites are primarily product-driven, meaning most of the web 'content' is actually product detail pages.
- Retail content publishing processes are usually subservient to merchandising processes.
- Retailers often need to perform mass updates to content, in accordance with seasonality.
- Retail is a much older discipline than website management. There is a lot of 'old school' inertia to overcome.
Product Data Management: A Critical Retail Discipline
Retailers are challenged with managing a product assortment and vast amounts of product data to describe that assortment. This is something that other business models do not face.
There is no such thing as 'merchandising' in any business model other than retail.
Retailers must constantly source new products that will satisfy their customers. They must combine their separate supplier catalogs into a master catalog. They must enrich that catalog with descriptions and attributes that explain the products, while maintaining the desired brand experience.
To a retailer, the products are the content. So, the retailer has to fight two demons: the challenge of maintaining proper product data and the challenge of executing a well-managed web content. This is no easy task.
To an #eCommerce retailer, the products ARE the content. Click To TweetContent Management is insufficient for retailers.
Content management systems, like WordPress, are not built for retailers. They are not built to facilitate the processes of a retail business. They are built, mostly for managing content-driven websites, like blogs and marketing sites.
It is technically possible to run an eCommerce business on a basic content management site. And, some retailers have even tried to do it.
But, the technologies and the processes they facilitate are so different than what the retailer needs, it winds up costing a lot of time, money, and mistakes to customize the system. Content management is just simply not built for retailers!
As a result, many retailers either spend millions building their own homegrown systems, designed to execute their processes. Others simply ignore the issue, move to an eCommerce platform like Shopify, and neglect to think in terms of 'content management'.
Neither of these is an effective or scalable strategy!
What retailers really need is a version of content management, adapted to their specific needs. They need best practices and technologies that are specifically designed to help them execute their content strategies–their merchandising strategies.
Product Content Strategy
We use the term 'product content strategy' to describe the hybrid discipline of retail merchandising and content strategy.
This is the plan. It's how you want to bring products to your market via eCommerce channels. It incorporates activities like:
- Defining your target audience as customer personas
- Mapping out their customer journey
- Defining a channel strategy to meet their needs
- And, determining how you will manage and publish product content to tie it all together
Product content strategy is the strategy (duh!). Product content management–the more difficult part–is the execution.
Product Content Management
Product content management is also a hybrid discipline, combining concepts from retail merchandising, product data management (sometimes called master data management), and content management.
It is exactly what retailers need to execute the strategies they define.
Data Management for Products
Product content management incorporates data management disciplines to ensure that your master product catalog is always accurate and always adheres to the brand.
How do you combine catalogs from multiple suppliers or manufacturers? Their data quality varies. Their data structures vary. Yet, retailers have to pull them together into a single cohesive catalog.
What are your practices for ensuring data cleanliness and auditing for accuracy? It's too difficult and expensive to manually check every item in a huge product catalog, so retailers must define ways to perform ongoing monitoring.
How do you link products, so that relationships, collections, assortments, and kits are appropriately represented by the data. This isn't just a housekeeping exercise. This is required if you want to effectively personalize the shopping experience or make strong product recommendations.
Rich metadata and digitally linked product data are not optional.
Product Lifecycle Management Workflows
Product content management includes the execution of product lifecycle management workflows for bringing in new products, maintaining existing ones, publishing them to sales channels, and sunsetting products.
In larger retail organizations, many people may touch the same product over the course of its life. Merchandiser A might source the product, adding it to the catalog. Merchandiser B might define the brand-friendly product descriptions. An eCommerce team member might worry about publishing. Merchandiser C decides when the product is dead.
Product content management should include workflow definitions and tools to help execute them. It should ensure that products can be managed in a scalable way, helping to avoid a giant mess of data.
Product Publishing
Just like a content management system facilitates publishing web content for the world to see, product content management includes publishing products to sales channels.
The publishing aspect of product content management may (or may not) happen in multiple technologies.
For example, you could execute product content management all right inside your eCommerce platform, like Shopify or Bigcommerce. You can bring in your products, update their attributes, and publish them to your webstore.
But, this single-technology approach has its shortcomings:
- Expanding to more sales channels is difficult, if even possible at all.
- These systems aren't built for managing the huge datasets of large catalogs. (I dare you to make a bulk update to product data in an endpoint system.)
- They also aren't built to merge separate supplier catalogs.
So, what you end up seeing is a multi-tier technology architecture for product content management. One system for managing the data, one or more for publishing the data.
Your exact technology architecture may vary, based on your needs. But as a discipline, product content management must include publishing that product content to the world.
Otherwise, what's the point?
Getting Started
Product content strategy and product content management might be a different way to look at your business than what you're used to. To be honest, a lot of really big, well-known retailers just aren't thinking about eCommerce in this way.
And, they should!
That's why we prepared this eBook to help you understand how to build a product content strategy that you can execute. Download it today!
Widen
Widen's digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) solutions power the marketing content for hundreds of global brands.
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May 4, 2021
Producing high-quality content and delivering it to customers at the right time is no easy task. It's something that companies of all sizes struggle with. According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Widen, 'Today's customers demand more digital content than ever before, and organizations are struggling to keep up.' Some brands have found a way to meet the demand, but many are running up against obstacles. For most organizations, the biggest challenge lies in integrating tools and processes to deliver relevant and valuable content at scale.
Recognise this problem? We did, too. Companies have been wrestling with these issues for years and now the drastically increased demand for digital experiences has magnified the challenges. So we decided to seek out new and relevant data that illuminates the current state of these familiar issues. The Forrester study found that current product content strategies lack the foundation for success. But what's actually missing?
In short, companies are missing a strategic and combined approach to their content technologies — specifically, digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software. Content production, storage, and management are spread across organizational silos and tools. And product data suffers the same lack of centralised management. Scattering your product content and data across so many tools makes it difficult to increase production volumes and content quality in order to enrich the customer experience.
Want to do it differently? Start by looking at the technology you use to manage your product content.
What's in your content technology stack?
Thanks to the pandemic, digital commerce is now the preferred way to shop and interact. Your customers expect content that aligns with their journey every step of the way. If you don't deliver, you'll lose them. That adds a huge amount of pressure on teams to find a way to evolve their product content strategy efforts. Content needs to be delivered faster, the quality needs to be higher, and eventually you're storing and publishing more content types than ever before just to stay competitive (e.g. 360º spin photography, video, etc.).
Does that sound like an impossible task based on your current production process? If so, then it's likely that your content technology stack is holding you back from the scale you need to achieve these goals. There are brands who are successfully adding new content types to their mix to meet the rising demand for meaningful e-commerce interactions. It can be done. And with the right content tools, you can create a solid back-end foundation for successful customer experiences on the front end.
According to the Forrester study, 'Roughly seven out of 10 content marketers use PIM solutions (72%), customer relationship management (CRM) solutions (72%), DAM solutions (69%), marketing automation platforms (69%), and SEO/SEM management systems (68%). Yet effective content optimisation is jeopardised if these technology solutions are not well-integrated.'
The integration of content technology is the key action point in that finding. Some teams have all the right tools and still can't deliver the product content experience that converts and retains customers. If your technology doesn't work together to support your process and strategies, it'll be all but impossible to deliver the personalised content experiences your customers expect.
Integrate product data and content to personalise experiences
Delivering product content at the right time in the customer journey sounds like it should be easy, but it's not. According to the Forrester study, 'Nearly half of organisations report the ‘discover' and ‘explore' phases as being the most difficult in which to deliver content. This also happens to be where consumers have the greatest need for accurate and detailed product content.' Without the right content, your potential customers won't complete their purchase with you. They'll find another brand with the product content they need to make an informed purchasing decision and buy from them.
In order to know what content to deliver during each phase, you need to provide accurate, complete, and relevant product information. That takes a combined approach to your DAM and PIM tools. When you're able to do this, you'll jump ahead of a large percentage of your market. Most companies lack these connected systems and that's a big reason why they struggle to segment and personalise their content delivery.
'Just five out of 10 content marketers feel their segmentation and level of product detail are sufficient, while a mere 43% consider their personalisation processes adequate to support content priorities.'
Enrich Customer Experiences With Product Content
Even with your DAM and PIM systems working together, there's still a big challenge to overcome. You have to campaign to get your organisation to treat content as a strategic asset and support an integrated approach to content management.
Convince decision makers that content is a strategic asset
Many companies still treat DAM and PIM technologies as line items instead of essential components of their strategic vision. They don't understand that content is a strategic asset and necessary to your brand's success.
Product Content Management Platform
According to the Forrester study, 'Nearly half of organisations use DAM or PIM tools to manage brand and product content at the department level, while fewer than a third manage DAM or PIM at an enterprise level. These solutions are critical to optimising content, but the lack of a holistic strategy puts organisations at risk of creating subpar workflows and analysis.'
Your customers suffer the most when your organisation doesn't see the big picture around content strategy. And that means your bottom line suffers, too. Want improved ROI on your product content? Do you wish you had clearer content insights? Are you trying to create higher-converting customer experiences? Get your decision makers to understand that content isn't just a marketing initiative. It's a company-wide goal.
We commissioned this Forrester Consulting study to help illuminate current challenges in product content strategy and provide information to help you enrich your customer experiences. To understand these struggles, Forrester surveyed 259 digital marketing decision makers and 360 consumers from across North America and Europe.
Product Content Manager Certification
Download the study today to begin filling in the gaps in your content strategy.
Product Manager Content Platform
Nate Holmes, product marketing manager, Widen
