Content Journeys

Product Content Management

Especially in marketing processes, there is room for optimization in most companies and thus a lot of untapped efficiency potential. That’s why it’s worth taking a look at the individual workflows – the content journeys.

It is well known how much product and brand communication has changed in recent years. However, the way in which companies should deal with the diversification of their customer approach and the re-use and recycling of their product content is something they themselves often do not really know in detail. This is not surprising, because the expectations of customers, the requirements of management and the wishes of sales present marketing managers with enormous challenges. As a result, marketers are constantly in firefighter mode and don’t have the leisure or time to develop strategies to proactively address these challenges and respond with effective measures. This results in fragmented content silos everywhere, some with elaborate and high-quality content that simply disappears into oblivion again instead of being used cleverly.

In addition, many of the workflows in the creation, management, maintenance and playout of product content are manual and thus also consume a lot of resources. So it’s not uncommon for employees to spend hours going through footage from shoots, tagging and categorizing, creating clippings and different derivatives for the various channels.

For many product managers, customizing product information is similarly tedious. New output channels, trading platforms and partner companies usually also place new demands on the product information supplied. Another example is additional languages that need to be considered to address new markets. To make such supplements for thousands of products – manually a big effort.

The role and tasks of marketing managers have changed fundamentally. Marketing has long been strategically vital, and KPIs such as conversion and retention rates are considered key indicators of overall business success. The range of technologies that promise support here is correspondingly large – be it for the creation of product content in the PIM and DAM, the output via channel management, the optimization of processes in workflow management or many other areas from marketing automation to content syndication. In addition to the right technology, however, it is first necessary to analyze exactly what the processes and workflows in product management, marketing and sales look like in the first place, who is involved in them and which individual workflow steps are run through.

Application areas for AI in marketing

In addition to the automated tagging of images – so-called AI Tagging – there is a whole range of other AI services that make the daily work of graphic designers and marketing managers easier. Images can also be automatically edited and, for example, cropped, retouched, flipped, rotated or cropped. Automatic translations of product information into any target language support new go-to-market strategies while saving the high translation costs of professional language services. In the meantime, even entire text sections can be created automatically – with the help of NLG (Natural Language Generation) applications. Product texts are generated fully automatically from granular product information at the push of a button. These texts are already SEO-optimized and thus increase the reach of the web store without the intervention of communication managers. The automation of layout creation goes even further – this is a service that creates context-dependent product-based advertising materials completely automatically. This applies to mailings as well as catalogs or brochures.

The AI can even select the individually suitable layout for each customer and use it for a targeted approach. And at a speed that the marketing team itself cannot even achieve.

Of course, not every AI service is equally well suited for every business. In order to understand which measures can lead to actual efficiency improvements in each case, it is absolutely necessary to familiarize oneself intensively with the organizational processes and to outline the individual content journeys. If, for example, it turns out that several teams across the company spend several hours a month cropping images according to specific rules, a corresponding AI service can have a major cumulative effect on internal costs. So, as is so often the case, technology only brings benefits if it is clear how it can and should be used and what specific goals the company wants to achieve with it.