Beyond Spreadsheets: Modernizing Product Data Management for Industrial Marketing
Industrial and manufacturing marketers need a more effective way to keep up with rapidly changing information about the many products they promote.
In 1979, when VisiCalc debuted on the Apple II PC, financial modeling and data handling were changed forever. Detailed records no longer had to be kept on paper; digital spreadsheets could provide detailed summaries and projections at a single mouse click. Overnight, many professionals began using spreadsheets for just about anything that featured numbers, and some things that did not.
The problems with this approach have only multiplied over the decades. As industrial manufacturers’ product catalogs, inventory complexity, and channel diversity grew, spreadsheets became a liability. CMOs and directors of marketing, advertising, and IT struggle with data version control, manual errors, lack of real-time updates, and limited scalability.
What digital tools are more effective than spreadsheets for handling a company’s product information?
Break Free from Manual Data Updates
Spreadsheets have limited value for today’s marketing professional. Yes, they are databases that are visually arranged by records (rows) and field types (columns). Each cell is a data point. Spreadsheets can even be connected, using a common field type, like a product’s SKU number. However, even if the data are entered correctly, which is often not the case, such an approach has a fatal flaw. Spreadsheets require constant manual upkeep.
Think about all the potential cascading expenses to an industrial manufacturer if product data is out of date or entered incorrectly, and if that data makes its way to a multichannel product catalog:
- Basic labor costs – New products, or new versions of existing products, involve multiple data points. The cost of entering and maintaining all that information, manually and in a standalone database, adds up quickly.
- Human error costs – Promotional errors can result in product returns, refunds, operational inefficiencies, and damage to the company’s reputation.
- Legal liability – Incorrect or outdated product information can expose the company to costly liability for safety and environmental issues.
Centralize Your Product Content
Spreadsheets are not the only problem. Standalone databases, even those hosted in the cloud, can incur huge costs when their data is manually entered, error-prone, and disconnected from other data sources.
What is the best data model for handling all the complex information in a catalog?
The answer is to employ a single source of truth (SSOT) model for all the complex information needed to produce a print and digital catalog. With centralized systems like Comosoft’s LAGO, every data element is “mastered,” with all aspects linked and easily updateable.
Importantly, for CMOs and for marketing, advertising, and IT directors, LAGO’s collaborative workflow approach vastly reduces labor and costly errors. In the LAGO catalog design process, all product information and digital assets are live and automatically updated right up to the moment a catalog or a specialized catalog version is printed. If the data changes in the system, it is updated automatically at any point in the production process.
Centralized, automatically updateable product information becomes even more critical for digital versions of a manufacturer’s catalog. All the information used to create complex print catalogs can be easily exported to any online or mobile application using LAGO’s digital publishing software. New or modified data or assets, such as how-to-use PDFs or videos, can easily be added to a product’s information, giving the reseller an added incentive to purchase it and trust the manufacturer.
Scale Smarter, Not Harder
In our data-saturated world, marketing and advertising directors and their teams struggle to keep up. There are not enough hours (or a large enough labor budget) to enter and maintain the accuracy of product information and digital assets. The more products a company has, the harder it is to maintain spreadsheets or other isolated, siloed databases.
To grow and remain competitive, companies must adopt a simpler data marketing approach. Manufacturing and industrial supply companies face the proliferation of digital channels and the growing demand for localization and personalization.
How can manufacturing and industrial supply companies scale their marketing?
Only a scalable data infrastructure, coupled with an automated production system, will enable them to thrive. The time for spreadsheets and other disconnected data systems is over.
A modern PIM system like Comosoft LAGO can offer a scalable, centralized solution for organizing and distributing product content. Integration with other data and production automation systems will help industrial marketing teams streamline workflows, boost campaign accuracy, and reduce reliance on error-prone manual processes. It will also make life easier for the company’s resellers, giving them good reasons to choose you over your competitors.
Are you ready to leave cumbersome spreadsheets behind? Book a LAGO demo to find out how to simplify your product data management.
