To demonstrate true ROI, Product Content Solution projects should be backed by a well-thought-out strategy that resonates with a company’s customers, personnel, and goals. In other words, any product content project that is going to be truly transformational will need to be aligned with greater business initiatives.

Here are four types of product content projects that support strategic business goals and that can help unite stakeholders from various different departments.

Product Taxonomy Development

Product content taxonomy creation is basically the process of determining how products will be categorized and organized.

Having a shared taxonomy is important because it gets everyone across an organization to use a common system to communicate about its products. This can help with accounting, operations, and sales — as well as coordinate between those functions.

To develop a taxonomy, a product content solutions provider will

• Audit the current database
• Look at incoming manufacturer product data classifications
• Review competitor, marketplace, and industry taxonomies
• Analyze how customers search for products

These findings will then inform a recommendation for a coherent taxonomy that will serve all the interested parties’ needs. Often, the hardest part of a taxonomy development product content project is making sure all these different stakeholder perspectives are represented — and getting them to ratify the final taxonomy.

Attribute and Content Modeling

Once a taxonomy has been created, a common schema for attribute and product information can be developed for products in each category. Essentially, this means deciding which bits of information need to be provided for each product as part of a standard product listing — e.g. name, photo, weight, dimensions, etc.

As with taxonomy development, attribute and content modelling needs to be done with the input and feedback from the various stakeholders at a company if the result is to reflect their viewpoints and garner team support for the enterprise-wide digital initiative.

Product Content Normalization & Cleansing

Creating lists of valid data values for each attribute, including abbreviations, symbols, fonts, and image and file naming conventions, helps standardize product content, making it much more useful for customers and internal reporting.

These sorts of details — such as where to put hyphens in an SKU, if pounds will be abbreviated “lbs.”, and whether or not prices should include a currency symbol — can make a huge difference when it comes to standardizing presentation and reporting.

Once decisions have been made regarding these approved product data values, all attributes associated with individual products in a database can be formatted (or “normalized”) to conform to the pre-ordained list of approved values.

The product content normalization process can include

• Merging data from various sources
• Eliminating duplicate products listings
• Removing discontinued products
• “Cleansing” all the content so it is formatted consistently (e.g., changing “&” to “and”)
• Identifying missing collateral information

Normalizing data in this way assures accuracy and supports basic online store functions such as filters and onsite search, as well as more advanced features such as suggested products and visual search.

Product Content Enrichment

If an online store is missing crucial pieces of product information — such as images, MSDS sheets, or user information — a product content enrichment project can improve the quality of individual product listings.

The benefits of product content enrichment are most tangible for customers and salespeople since studies show that customers are much more likely to buy from retailers that provide more product information.

Whereas taxonomy development and product data normalization involve making strategic decisions about how to group and arrange products among internal stakeholders, product content enrichment projects primarily comprise outbound detective work like:

• Going to manufacturers’ sites or other published sources of product information (e.g., PDF catalogs, spec sheets) to collect technical information about the products
• Accessing other sources — such as industry databases — to secure any additional available assets
• Creating enriched product titles and descriptions
• Image sizing, cropping, and improvement
• Video and graphics editing and enhancement
• Renaming digital files with keywords for SEO
• Adding product reviews and evaluations

Getting Started on Strategic Product Content Projects

Product content projects can — and should — be more than just tactical clean-up initiatives for the e-commerce or marketing teams. If handled correctly, they can benefit various departments at an organization and play a crucial role in forward-thinking business strategy.

 

Sulak B

eCommerce Strategist helping with effective eStore Product Data and increase conversions

A focus on product content is especially critical when undertaking transformative e-commerce projects, such as migrating e-commerce platforms, onboarding new product lines or vendors, improving onsite and/or offsite search performance, or simply building an e-commerce site in the first place.

Backed by good content, the following types of projects can promise real bottom-line improvements, rather than just deliverables:

1. New e-commerce website build
2. Platform migration
3. New products onboarding
4. Site search optimization

Below we explore how each of these e-commerce projects benefits from a focus on product content. For more information on how to make great product content, download our e-book, “The Expert’s Guide to B2B Product Content.”

Project #1: New E-Commerce Website Build

Too often, when a company decides to launch or relaunch an e-commerce site, they relegate product content considerations to a future date. This is a mistake.

Product content is more than just the “raw material” that goes onto a product detail page. Successful content management requires important decisions about what information is most valuable and how it will be organized into an appropriate product information structure. Moreover, a site that treats product data as an afterthought will suffer post-launch when it comes to SEO and onsite search (see below).

Project #2: New Products Onboarding

Once an online store has established a taxonomy and has attributes that reflect how its customers search and shop, the next big challenge is to manage incoming product information.

Rich product data may be available from manufacturers and other sources. However, these sources rarely provide all the required data for every designated attribute, image, and information requirement. Transforming the content and filling information gaps to meet the organizing principles that govern a sites’ product content is an important product content projects — as well as an ongoing task.

Project #3: E-Commerce SEO and Onsite Search Optimization

Good product content is the backbone of any site search optimization project. It benefits both rankings with offsite search engines like Google and Bing and the user experience of onsite search tools such as filters and search bars.

As far as SEO is concerned, the first and obvious benefit of taking product content seriously is having product detail pages that are optimized for the product names and the associated keywords customers use to find those products.

Second, organizing products into a taxonomy that meets customer expectations will help users quickly find what they need, producing higher engagement metrics, which will register positively with search engines as “second order influences,” according to SEO authority Moz.

Finally, having robust product information that is specific to a site and organized to avoid redundancy will avoid offsite and onsite duplicate content — two missteps that often diminish B2B e-commerce site rankings with search engines, which have been “getting better and better at kicking websites down the rankings because of duplicate content,” according to Kissmetrics.

Offsite duplicate content is usually the result of using the same content manufacturers provide to all distributors and resellers. Onsite duplicate content, on the other hand, is a byproduct of poor product content governance and “makes it difficult for Google to decide which pages should rank for a particular keyword.”

For onsite search, robust product data is required to support the two tools that customers most frequently use to locate products: filters and search bars. Filters are the direct outgrowth of a rich, hierarchical product taxonomy and attribute system. And with good content, onsite search can be engineered to respond to varying terms customers may use (e.g., “bin” vs. “tote”) to facilitate cross-selling or to cross-reference products on multiple manufacturer model numbers, UPCs, or form-fit-function criteria.

Project #4: E-Commerce Platform Migration

Historically, many B2B e-commerce stores have operated with custom-coded solutions. But with the rise of enterprise-level, out-of-the-box e-commerce platforms and technology add-ons, many are looking to migrate to gain access to state-of-the-art features and efficiencies.
A migration e-commerce project is a great opportunity to reevaluate all the information that will be moved from an old site to a new one. Moreover, organizing, consolidating, and enriching the to-be-migrated product files will inevitably support the success of a new site.

Address Product Content Early on in Your E-Commerce Projects

E-commerce projects that account for product content from the outset will be set up for success. Not doing so is equivalent to opening a brick-and-mortar store without any plan for displaying the merchandise on the shop floor. This lack of planning leads to clutter, customer misunderstandings, and inevitable lost sales.

To find out how a partner specialized in product content enhancement, organization, and refinement can help by getting involved in e-commerce projects early on, contact product content solutions experts Altius today.

 

Deepika Ganapathi

Responsible for Revenue generation and Enhancing User Experience in e-stores

Supplier data comes in from multiple sources. Some may be adequate while some may not be. I would like to share my thoughts on how you can convert them into a data that sells for you.

The base data that comes in from your suppliers are those that your team uploads as part of providing information about your product.

Visualize this!!!

You upload your product data on a constant basis and your team is busy with loads of data to upload on a weekly basis. You have done an one time upload of the product data for a specific SKU and you are doing so many of those after that.

The previous upload of the data is ignored. You don’t know what facets of the data work and what does not. You often think about why those old products do not sell well.

It goes without saying that you are dependant on the product data from our suppliers since you only sell but do not manufacture.

However, there is a variety of data that comes in from multiple manufacturers and suppliers and hence the data will be a big garage.

You need to organize the data, standardize in a format which is easily digestible by the visitors.

The data should be simplified and prioritized based on the technicality of the product. The best use of the data can be felt not only by importing the data as given to you but also in deciphering the content.

Unfortunately, the data that comes in may not be in a direct upload format but would be in the forms of MRO, Electrical and Mechanical data. The data upload team needs to be supported by a functional team to help them decipher the data to upload the right kind of data.

A good knowledge in all of these data will help in the data getting high on technical ranking.

I have seen many instances where the retailers perceive the data that comes from multiple suppliers to be perfect.

However, the word docs or the pdf docs that comes from suppliers will be unique for each category and for the company themselves. It is a lot of work when the team wants to consolidate all these data in the backend.

Remember this, you have to make the product data content easy for the customer and not for the data uploading team.

This is how you can make your data sell for you.

How can you make it happen?

Use a combination of standardization and data enrichment process. Do it in multiple styles.

With a limited budget, you can map out the supplier data, migrate the standard supplier data into one standard acceptable format.

There are cases where you may feel that your data is still not unique in-spite of standardization.

You can add 3 or 4 additional attributes and can do the gap fill. You can add more specifications from the datasheet.

You can also benchmark a few named competitors and provide all the product categories if you want your product page to be the best among all distributors, you name your benchmarking competitors and give the product categories.

How can Altius help?

We can deploy full force to study multiple research on the category and the product. Our experienced team will understand the customer behavior for those product categories, collect the necessary fields or specifications. We will then coin or rank the list of attributes based on the customer buying or filtering behavior.

 

Govindaraj L

Responsible for Data Quality and Revenue Generation

Are you wondering why the success rate in getting visitors to your website is not that proportionately repeatable in converting them into customers?

The visitors find your product page the visitors are searching for. This is a high impact purchase for their company. They begin evaluating the product for the fitment of their needs.

The visitors are not able to find enough of information about the products they are looking for. They also know that the other 100s of competitors are one click away. They leave your website for others and don’t come back.

The efforts, money and time spent on getting the right customers to your website are going waste. This is because the product does not have adequate information that the visitors are looking for.

The Solution!!!

Data Enrichment – A+ Enhanced Product Content

It is the art of ensuring that the product page is complete. It is fair that you think that my supplier is giving me the data about the product. My IT team uploads only that data and why should I invest more money to organize the data.

I am not telling you that the data from your suppliers are not adequate. I am only asking you to look at the entire process from shoes of the customers perspective instead of looking from your point of view.

The product that you would upload should have a combination of data and images. How many times have you visited a variety of online stores for the sake of a Search for Information and Evaluation of Alternatives and have gone back to a store that has impressed you to make the purchase?

Can you recollect what impressed you the most? Was its ease of navigation of the product page, the product, the images, the information, the product, The UX (filtering mechanism), the ability to reach the product within a few clicks because hit understood your selection process? There could be many more parameters which would have made you make the purchase in a store among all the others.

There could be a possibility that your website may be missing some important parameters of configuring the product information in a better way that you have n’t thought about.

How can this situation be changed?

Let us look at the purchase process from a Buyers perspective. The buyers making a low involvement purchase or a routine purchase where they know what they want to buy may not look too much at the product information.

However, this changes if the buyers are making a high involvement purchase or you have some unique products that could be a potential replacement for the existing products that your buyers are using.

It is important that you provide enough of information about the product so that you influence the buyer in considering your product seriously. It is also proven that the lack of information on the product on your website may make your customers lose faith in your ability to deliver.

Even if buyers buy these products without lack of product information, there is a good chance that your return rates will increase because they would have purchased the wrong product.

So, it is important that you have a variety of parameters about the product data and should enrich your product with these types of data so that you can influence the buyers to buy the right products for them and come back to you because you have made their decision process much simpler.

 

Saravanan Baskaran

Observant to enrich & generate revenue for e-stores with the right product content and other SaaS Solutions.

You are selling 10s of 100s of products on your website. You have provided as much of information about the product as possible. You are spending a lot of money on Marketing and getting visitors coming to your website.

However, you don’t see sales improving and you also find out that the bounce rates on your website are very high.

What could be the reason?

Product Findability

You might have begun working on providing the adequate product data about your products in the recent past. However, there would be a lot of legacy data that will be in your database. This will mean that the products will never get found for the right searches your visitors will be doing. What can be the solution for this? Migration…

Migration is a process of cleansing the existing product data and make it searchable. The right information about the product is important because every product needs to be available for search. It goes without saying that Search is configurable to the keywords.

So you will have to provide the right data about the product. If you will do so, you will know what keywords have been used and still why sale has not happened. You will then be able to find out the fast moving and the obsolete products and you can take business decisions on what to do with those products.

To achieve this you have to narrow down the search and make the customer choice of products available to them within a few clicks. You will never think of caring about the dead stock or obsolete products if you can achieve this.

Both the new as well as the obsolete products that are on your website need to show up on the store for search. This will happen if you would give enough of the right words and provide additional product information.

If they can’t see it, they can’t buy it

Are you sure all your products are seen by your visitors?

Once you optimize all the products with the right keywords, then every product is ranked the same way. You will be able to run the analytics and find out which products were not showing up in the search. You can take decisions on whether to remove these products from the shelf, do rebate or push it back to the manufacturer.

In the absence of such scientific data, you will otherwise have to do this process manually. Your employees will be doing analysis checking the spreadsheets row by row. They will have to go check with the invoices on the total value of each product and will have to find if the product can be kept or to be removed.

The dependency of other departments to find out if the product has been sold or not is a bit long process and not a scientific one.

Analytics reports by providing the right data to the product help you not only in deciding on the existing products but also in identifying new products that will make you sell for all the search that happens on your website.

 

Sulak B

eCommerce Strategist helping with effective eStore Product Data and increase conversions

Want higher profits?

What else can Data Cleansing do?

• Data supply to customers is fast-moving
• Enhances accuracy
• Removes duplicate data

Take these tips to clean your data without any trouble

Figure out the goals of your data

Reduce the entry of bad data into your database

Make sure you revisit

Have a routine

Saravanan Baskaran

Observant to enrich & generate revenue for e-stores with the right product content and other SaaS Solutions.