PIM and DAM — a Marriage of Convenience
Do you need both separately or in a single platform?
With the emergence of numerous touchpoints — from physical stores to online portals, resellers, mobile applications, and social media — customers today are searching for products and making purchases at any time and on every device. As a brand owner, you have a few seconds to create a fantastic first impression and grab buyers’ eyeballs, fire up their imagination, and lure them into making the purchase. That is when your customer experience (CX) comes into play. Creating an impressive CX is possible if you have access to rich visual elements and reliable product-related content at your fingertips, literally.
One of the biggest challenges today’s business owners face is managing product information supported by related images, audio/video files, and other marketing content. Irrespective of the products on offer — tangible like furniture and clothes, or intangible like tourism and insurance — business success largely depends on the alignment of imagery and videos with precise product-specific technical information across all customer touchpoints. In a recent study, over 50% of businesses said that the variety and volume of content required to manage customer experience is their biggest challenge.
This challenge can be easily mitigated by implementing both Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions. With the ever-evolving eCommerce landscape, there has been a growing demand for both PIM and DAM solutions, and a heated debate on whether one can replace the other. Although they share a few similarities, they are designed to serve different purposes and have unique functionalities for their expected use. However, when PIM and DAM solutions are simultaneously implemented in a single business environment, both can be made to work as a ‘unified solution’ for creating unique, personalized customer experiences. Enterprise open source Pimcore Platform is one such platform that can solve any PIM and DAM challenge.
PIM plus DAM — best of both worlds
A PIM solution is a centralized system of collecting, managing, enriching, cataloging, and distributing product information to multiple sales channels. PIM deals with product specifications, product dimensions, and other technical details.
Digital Asset Management, or DAM, on the other hand, is a solution for storing and managing unstructured digital assets like images, documents, videos/audio files, fonts, graphics, etc. in a centralized, systematic, and searchable repository.
Implementing both PIM and DAM solutions in an integrated manner allows the benefits of one to complement the benefits of the other. Both drive towards improving customer experience and pumping up the revenue.
Here’s how a consolidated PIM and DAM solution can benefit you:
Faster time-to-market
PIM integrates all product data into one platform, and this shortens the product onboarding lifecycle. It also enables flexibility in responding to market changes. Updating product information and sharing it seamlessly across multiple channels results in a shorter time-to-market. DAM helps in finding, accessing, retrieving, and distributing all digital assets from a single repository. It ensures all files are indexed and structured appropriately with metadata so they can be retrieved easily during searches later. This results in easy access to digital assets and faster time-to-market.
With PIM and DAM together in one place, you can easily collaborate for planning, scheduling, designing, and distributing and rolling out your products to market faster. Pimcore Platform provides a stronger set of PIM and DAM capabilities to automate operational process, improve control over data and asset, and induce agility for faster time-to-market.
Operational excellence
With a single location for storing product information, PIM improves operational efficiency and ensures inventory accuracy. It aids in time management, eliminates manual tasks, automates workflows, minimizes delays on downstream processes, allows interoperability among various systems, and streamlines operations. DAM integrates with relevant applications and eliminates data silos, automates workflows, and improves productivity.
DAM helps to deliver personalized rich content, maintains brand consistency across channels, cuts marketing campaign costs, and boosts marketing productivity. Pimcore Platform gives you the edge of a single point of control to optimize performance, perform end-to-end data governance, and streamline life cycle management of product data.
Better collaboration
Organizations today must leverage data and content to personalize the customer experience. To serve their customers personalized offerings based on their preferences, brands need to manage various types of product data and several teams — purchasing, sales, marketing, technical support — dealing with that data. Implementing both PIM and DAM solutions together contribute to better workflows and enhanced efficiency in the long term. Integrated PIM and DAM software in Pimcore platform facilitates the collaboration of multichannel resources at points of purchase and manages product data at scale.
Reduced operating cost
Integrating PIM and DAM solutions enable organizations to leverage an automated product content management system for sharing content with different teams and agencies for marketing campaigns. By managing a single point of collaboration of product-related information and data and rich media assets internally, organizations can reduce operating costs significantly. PIM and DAM integration allows organizations to have a unified and intuitive content repository and streamline and simplify processes to access and distribute digital assets globally. With PIM and DAM in place, organizations can onboard products quickly, work seamlessly with suppliers and vendors, reduce product return rates, and significantly lower operating costs. Pimcore platform is an enterprise open source platform. Open source products typically feature lower license fees or no license fees. You can do the development in-house or by freely selected IT service providers. Therefore, open source often helps in reducing operating cost.
Improved customer journey
Product data is critical to the buying process. Everything from search results and brand recognition to product comparisons and purchase decisions is influenced by it. PIM helps in delivering a compelling product experience to improve customer journeys. Through cross-platform integrations, advanced search, creative proofing, and easy asset sharing, DAM helps in maintaining a cohesive and updated brand image. Well-tagged content can be found quickly and can also be transformed, repurposed, and reused to personalize CX and ramp up engagement. The Pimcore platform is the only enterprise open-source software for managing any digital data and customer experiences for any channel and device, thus providing engaging experiences during the whole customer journey.
With rising customer expectations, brands are forced to design synchronized experiences irrespective of channels or customer touchpoints. Transforming customer expectations into customer experience demands seamless integration of PIM and DAM solutions, which ultimately is the differentiator that builds customer loyalty and drives business revenue.
