5 Proven Ways To Scale Your Digital Ecosystem

2020 was a pivotal point for most organizations, forcing digital acceleration. In the manufacturing and distribution world, it forced organizations to assess their digital landscape and adapt: moving in-store/catalog purchases to online channels. This task is easier said than done, so you might be asking yourself - where do I start? 

Whether you're in the process of making the shift, or looking for cost effective ways to improve digital efficiency and performance, understanding master data management systems is a great place to start. 

Master data management (MDM) solutions transform data silos into connected systems, and disparate teams into well oiled machines. Your data strategy can centralize and standardize:

• product data
• marketing assets
• customer information
• and web development standards

across your organization; resulting in interoperability, consistency, and efficiency across your enterprise. Teams are united by a common and consistent set of core data, establishing governance, consistency, and competitive advantages within your organization.

While MDM systems are common among back office settings, this same approach is helping customer-facing teams drive value, increase efficiency, and ultimately improve sales and revenue.

#1 Product Information Management (PIM)

25% fewer returns for online orders thanks to rich product information and informed purchase decisions (source)

A product information management (PIM) system acts as a central hub for all of your product data. It is responsible for storing and organizing your company's product information and plays a vital role in how product data is presented across your company’s marketing and sales channels. When implemented thoughtfully, it ensures that your B2B or B2C audience receives accurate, consistent, and relevant product information so that your customers can make informed purchasing decisions, increasing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, while reducing the number of returns.

3x more output with the same team and 80% reduction of product data quality issues (source)

Centralized product information management helps improve processes, governance, and enables your organization to create efficiency. It helps eliminate costly errors that often result in product returns and poor customer experiences. PIM offers a one-to-many architecture that streamlines collaboration, and speeds time to market so that your organization quickly realizes revenue. In fact, industry research suggests that both B2B and B2C organizations that leverage PIM launched products four times faster and reduced the time to quote by 67%.

#2 Digital Asset Management (DAM)

The Global Digital Asset Management Market is set to grow from $1.24bn (2018) to $6.9bn by 2024 (source)

Implementing a Digital Asset Management system for your business is a great investment. Whether it’s lost files, searching for any one file, or a security breach in your storage system, insecure file storage is both inefficient and costly. Digital Asset Management systems help to ensure that both you and your team can operate without these needless process headaches. Similar to a PIM, centralized digital asset management (DAM) systems exist to ensure that stakeholders (and potentially external partners, distributors, or other vendors) can efficiently access approved assets and your team can unify all channels in your marketing stack, streamline processes, and track metrics that matter.

Considering that the assets are centralized, if you make an update to an asset, that update is distributed across all other channels connected to or using that asset, there is a one-to-many relationship that creates process efficiencies. For example, you’ve recently launched a new product. As a part of the rollout, you have created a white paper, landing page, new product page on your website, and will soon release it to your mobile application. Oops, you notice an issue with the product image that requires an update. Instead of replacing the image in four different locations, you can make the update within your DAM which automates the update process instantly; saving significant time and money.

Additionally, contemporary DAMs offer permissioning, expiration, and approval features to mitigate risks and avoid any fees associated with misuse of an asset. If your company is licensing tens of thousands of dollars of iStock photos or similar, this is a huge help because it will prevent the frustration of license fees, rights, and potential penalties.

#3 Component-Based Design

Similar to how PIM systems streamline product information management, component-based design systems streamline brand consistency, design accuracy, and development efficiency across your digital ecosystem.

Component-based design systems are built within a centralized library in which your team can design rapid prototypes, store digital brand guidelines, or retrieve approved design elements for use on your website(s) and applications. It solves long-standing problems associated with UI inconsistencies and theme implementation errors, and also offers a structured method for rapidly creating and delivering better user experiences across your enterprise.

While any company can use a component-based design system, it is immensely valuable for enterprise organizations (global manufacturers) that require consistency and efficiency across multiple web properties.

#4  Multisite Platform Architecture

Organizations (enterprises, universities, government agencies) with many websites, but limited resources are often challenged with timely releases, maintaining security and governance standards and providing ROI for their platforms. So how do you scale while maintaining efficiency and keeping everyone happy? Multisite architectures may be your answer.

Although there are different ways to approach multisite implementations, this architecture often shares a common, centralized codebase, but distinguishes each site through site-specific databases. This way, developers can actively build and maintain a single codebase, and deploy across all sites connected to the multisite platform, while business leads. 

Successful execution of this strategy requires that business segments across your enterprise communicate with each other, are willing to work together, have a strong governance model, and provide strong leadership to champion a unified digital roadmap. 

If you can eliminate silos and navigate corporate politics, the benefits of a multisite platform architecture are enormous. Scalability, improved time to market, increased productivity, transparency, and employee satisfaction are just a few of the benefits reported by organizations that successfully run multisite architectures.

#5  Investment in Good Search Solutions

When users visit your site, they want to find relevant content as quickly as possible. After pouring resources into perfecting your site, you want to ensure visitors can find what they need with as little effort as possible. 

Whether you are implementing faceted search and filtering, or federated search models, search is a powerful tool that benefits your overall business. By delivering a simpler, more efficient user experience, a well-planned and executed search solution increases customer engagement and satisfaction rates. It also improves discoverability, by providing the most relevant information in an intuitive format and even, at times, surfacing content a user didn’t even know they needed. 

Tying it all Together with Structured Content and Metadata

Since good quality metadata is the bedrock for searchability, consistency, and the reduction of technical debt, ensure that taxonomy is well organized and governed. Whether manual or automated, the metadata input methods should adapt to modern metadata standards.

Tying these five recommendations together with structured metadata has delivered  our customers:

• Improved search and guided selling
• Improved accessory cross-referencing to correct product families
• Enriched value propositions for products markets
• Improved product data and tables for easy selection
• Faster quote times by integrating Request for Quote (RFQ) with Salesforce

All of which lead to more efficiency, more leads, and more sales.

If your business is looking for ways to increase productivity, demonstrate  ROI, and increase sales, we’d love to learn about your goals and help you implement solutions that will serve you and your customers for years to come.

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