What Is a PIM in CMS?

Effective marketing and sales are rooted in accurate information. Whether you as a marketer are telling an elaborate story or simply answering a buyer’s question, the information being drawn upon must be accurate, relevant, competently prepared, and up to date.

This can be harder than it sounds, as anyone who worked in the era of index cards, paper files, and spreadsheets can attest. Digitizing information isn’t a magic wand, particularly if the information is inconsistent, out of date, or spread over a variety of locations both online and off. In today’s digital economy, data is plentiful, but not all of it is structured in a way that makes it useful to an organization.

As a result, the most difficult element of product management is managing and storing the information in a way that makes usable. The latest information must be immediately available to be used to customize marketing campaigns, advertising, sales presentations and more. Customers expect marketers to be able to tell them relevant stories when, how, and where they want them, and effective marketing and sales needs to be ready to tell the kinds of stories customers are seeking.

What Does PIM Stand For?

Technology can help organize the information needed to answer questions, inspire enthusiasm and tell stories. Today, many companies turn to Product Information Management (PIM) solutions to store, analyze and render useful all the types of product information that’s needed to market, sell and service products. To begin, PIM requires the creation of a centralized database for information: product information that is siloed, or stored in a variety of different places with little to no integration between them, will be difficult to use, prone to error, and time-consuming to manage. 

Product information management centralizes all product information in a single location so it can be effectively managed and accessed by multiple people inside and outside the organization as needed, eliminating confusion and errors and leaving employees to engage in more valuable tasks.

What Does a PIM Tool Do?

To help companies create an up-to-date central repository for product information, a PIM solution creates a centralized database for all relevant product data. This information might include product descriptions; SKU numbers; pricing; product features and benefits; descriptions such as colors, materials, and dimensions; customer testimonies; and relevant information about the product’s functionality. In addition, PIM solutions can also contain relevant digital marketing assets such as product photos and company logos, how-to videos, owner's manuals, reviews spec sheets, and in-depth product maintenance information.

Any growing company will make regular changes or updates to their product information, and this is one area where a PIM system with a built-in digital asset management (DAM) function can help immensely. Multiple authorized users can log into the solution and make changes in real time, ensuring that anyone referencing the PIM can access the latest information. Users can quickly add product data in a matter of minutes, improving speed-to-market without the need to involve the IT department (which also saves time, money, and aggravation). Essentially, this creates a “single source of truth” for product information, allowing employees to do their jobs more confidently and competently.

Even if sales, marketing, and other employees are not located in the same physical space, they are working from the same source of information, which boosts collaboration, efficiency, and creativity.

What Is a PIM in CMS?

Product Information Management solutions centralize product data and digital assets, which can be used across a wide variety of online and print product experiences, including product catalogs, websites, sales materials, advertising, conferences and events, product packaging, and more. In conjunction with a well-designed Content Management System (CMS), users of the PIM software can easily create, edit, and publish online content. CMS software is a solution used to store, create, and edit digital content. The PIM software acts as the front end of the CMS, rendering the information useful and relevant.

What Is the Best PIM Software?

There are a variety of PIM solutions available on the market today. These include Plytix, Pimcore, Salsify PIM, Inriver PIM, Akeneo PIM, Catsy, Acquia PIM, Lumavate, and more. Most of these solutions have a similar goal: providing companies with the ability to easily centralize the management of all their product data. How these PIM software companies accomplish this can vary from solutions provider to solutions provider. For example, not all PIM solutions providers offer a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool as well as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP), both of which are designed to optimize the ease of use and effectiveness of a product information management solution. It is important that you effectively evaluate your organization’s needs before you choose a solution.

Lumavate offers a leading PIM solution that includes robust functionality and back-end support. At its core, it is a product information management solution, but it also offers built-in digital asset management and a digital experience platform (DXP), a solution that allows companies to manage their customer and employee experiences across a broad range of multichannel digital touchpoints.

Lumavate’s subscription-based Product Experience Management (PXM) platform provides marketers at manufacturing companies with all the functionality they require to centralize their product data, manage their digital assets, and create branded digital product experiences, resulting in one of the best PIM tools in market today. Manufacturing companies can gain the ability to create digital experiences that are tied to real-time product data, integrate their existing tech stack and provide employees with messaging functionality.

The solution is available at different subscription levels and is fully customizable, allowing companies to implement the product information solution that works best for their operations and best meets their budgets.