What does it take to create a strong PIM strategy that drives your sales?

Product data has become one of the most critical assets in modern businesses. Each product carries important content – from detailed descriptions and high-quality images to technical specifications and language translations. Your goal is to keep this data complete, current, and easily available. A strong PIM strategy is the key to making that happen.

What should be included in your strategy? In this article, we’ll show you how to build a PIM strategy that transforms scattered product information into organized, high-value content that supports your competitive edge.

Why should you base your work on a well-defined PIM strategy?

Because it helps you avoid mistakes and eliminate inefficiencies at every point when managing product data.

It offers not just a vision of success but a concrete, step-by-step plan to get there. It takes into account key elements like system integration, implementation, and process design to ensure smooth operations.

Think about the issues that might be affecting your business right now:

a) Are you preparing for expansion or enhancing your product portfolio?

Without structured product data, tasks like adding new products, translating content, or adapting for local markets can become complex. A PIM strategy allows you to take control, align your efforts, and plan ahead effectively.

b) Is product data being generated in different departments?

When product information is spread across teams, it’s easy to lose clarity. A defined strategy assigns responsibilities (ownership) and organizes how data flows across your company.

c) Is it important for you to deliver personalized offers based on customer interests?

Effective personalization needs clean, organized product data. Intuition alone won’t get you there. With proper attributes and tags, your systems can accurately match offers to customer needs. That’s exactly what a PIM strategy is designed to handle.

d) Do you already have systems like e-commerce, ERP, and others running?

A PIM system should be able to integrate effectively with each one. These connections are essential for your strategic development.

e) Are you currently handling product data using Excel or several disconnected systems?

This method increases the chance of mistakes and puts pressure on your team. Creating a PIM strategy helps simplify operations and positions your company to meet future demands. Without a strategy, it’s easy to lose direction in a complex implementation process.

What are the pillars of a PIM strategy?

Here are the critical building blocks without which a PIM strategy will not work:

1. Clarity on business goals and KPIs

Before focusing on software, it’s vital to analyze your current practices and set clear, measurable business goals. This insight shapes your entire approach to PIM.

To get started, let’s take a closer look at your current situation. Consider these important questions:

• How do you handle product data right now? Are you keeping everything in spreadsheets? Or using a mix of systems? Outline each step of your current process.
• What are the bottlenecks? Which parts frustrate you the most? Are you spending too much time on manual data entry? Are there frequent mistakes in your online product details? Is adding new products slow or complicated?
• Who is involved in managing product data in your organization? Who writes and maintains product descriptions? Who adds visuals? Identify every team or individual involved in the process.

Next, let’s take a moment to clarify your business goals. Think about how a PIM solution can help you grow your business. Are you primarily focused on:

• Driving sales? Maybe more complete product content will help convince customers to buy. Or maybe being faster at launching products will keep you ahead of the competition.
• Enhancing operational efficiency? Do you want to free up staff from manual data entry across platforms? Are you looking to automate repetitive tasks?
• Lowering costs? Are product data errors costing you money through issues like returns? Could streamlining your operations help you save?
• Boosting customer experience? Do you want product data to be uniform, precise, and available across all selling channels? Is a lower bounce rate one of your success indicators?
• Entering new markets? Could PIM assist with translating content and aligning your product range with local market standards?

The next important task is to identify the key users within your organization. These are individuals who will either actively use the PIM system or whose responsibilities will be shaped by its implementation. Consider their individual needs and expectations:

• E-commerce director: Likely focused on sales performance, conversion improvement, and advanced product data analysis.
• IT director: Concerned with how well the system integrates with current infrastructure, its data security measures, and its capacity to scale.
• Chief operating officer: Will focus on optimizing processes, reducing mistakes, and saving operational time.
• Marketing manager: Will rely on tools to craft attractive product descriptions, manage visuals, and publish content to various platforms.
• E-commerce project manager: In charge of ensuring seamless system implementation and integration.

In conclusion, we need to accurately specify the types of products you offer and understand their unique characteristics. Are you selling consumer goods, industrial items, apparel, or food products? Each category requires a tailored approach to product data:

• Manufacturers of consumer goods may require comprehensive descriptions, attractive lifestyle photography, ingredient lists, and product manuals.
• Industrial (B2B) manufacturers typically need precise technical data, measurements, material specifications, CAD files, and certification documentation.
• For fashion products, you should include detailed information like size options, available colors, fabric types, care instructions, and high-quality photos from different angles.
• If your product belongs to the food category, be sure to list ingredients, nutritional values, allergen warnings, and shelf life details.

2. Product data governance and role clarity

Why is this essential?

Define clearly who accesses product data, how they use it, and at what stages. These practices help maintain a high standard of data quality across the board.

What does this topic cover?

✅ Identifying major roles: Typically, companies assign a PIM system administrator to supervise its technical operations, while product data owners focus on ensuring the quality and completeness of information for each product category.

✅ Approval and publishing workflows: What is the complete process that product information undergoes, from initial entry to publication on the store's website? Should each change be validated by an authorized person? Clear and well-defined workflows within PIM support quality assurance and help prevent data errors. For example, the marketing manager might be required to approve all new product descriptions. External vendors could be granted restricted access only to their product details.

✅ Defining ownership: It's crucial to clarify who is in charge of which parts of the product data. Each team often has a distinct area of ownership – for example, marketing takes care of visual content and descriptions, the product team manages technical specifications, compliance handles certificates, and the sales team provides ​​base pricing and unique selling points.

✅ Data standards: A key part of this process is setting the standards that define data quality in your company. Do all product descriptions need to follow a specific length? Are images expected to meet a certain resolution? Should every product be assigned a consistent set of attributes? Having a well-defined structure, category system, and standardization rules helps ensure reliable data and smooth collaboration.

✅ Practical recommendation: Set up a basic table where each role is matched with its data responsibilities. In addition, define a set of required attributes for each product category you manage.

3. Technology architecture and integration capabilities

Why is this essential?

Having the intention to organize your product data is just the start. A strong PIM solution, paired with reliable integrations, allows your data to circulate freely and effectively within the entire organization.

What does this topic cover?

✅ PIM selection: From tools like Akeneo, Pimcore, and Ergonode, the right choice will depend on your business conditions and technical resources. Pay attention to factors such as the scale of your company, how many products you manage, the structure of your data, your budget, and any special operational requirements.

✅ Integration architecture: A PIM system must be part of a broader ecosystem – it has to be integrated with your sales platform, CMS (used to manage website content), ERP (used for enterprise-level resource management), and CRM (used to manage customer interactions). These systems working together enable consistent product data. Make sure you design a strategy for their data exchange. Analyze the available APIs and assess how they can be adjusted to suit your business’s unique processes.

Examples:

• Integration with your ERP system means that changes in price and availability are automatically updated in the PIM (learn how ERP and PIM serve different purposes).
• When linked to an eCommerce platform, your product information is displayed immediately on your website.

✅ Future integrations: Are there plans to adopt new AI-supported tools for marketing or process automation? It is important to have your PIM strategy built with the flexibility to integrate these systems in the future.

✅ Practical recommendation: Think ahead by preparing a clear list of non-negotiable features and system integrations before selecting a PIM platform. A diagram of how data flows between your tools and systems can add valuable perspective.

4. Future readiness: scalability for markets, products, and teams

Why is this essential?

Your PIM should enable your company’s growth by supporting the addition of new markets, expanding product lines, and scaling teams, without needing to rebuild the entire system. Failing to plan for this is among the most common mistakes in PIM implementations. Prepare your organization by learning from the 6 most frequent errors.

What does this topic cover?

✅ Multilingual and currency versatility: For international growth, your PIM needs to enable language variants, local compliance for products, and flexible pricing in multiple currencies.

✅ Handling expanding teams: As your business grows, more team members will interact with your PIM. It’s crucial to ensure the system supports an increasing user base and properly managed access levels.

✅ Flexible and adaptive data structures: The system should allow rapid onboarding of new products and attributes without causing disorder in your existing dataset.

✅ Channel-specific product management: If you're expanding beyond your online store – selling via marketplaces or launching a B2B catalog – your PIM must offer the flexibility to adjust product data per channel.

✅ Practical recommendation: Look ahead to your development roadmap over the next 3 to 5 years, and ensure your chosen PIM approach supports that trajectory.

5. Structured workflows for enriching product content

Why is this essential?

Product information includes all assets that influence purchasing decisions: text, visuals, videos, and documentation. Establish a clear and efficient process for your team to create, enhance, and maintain these materials. Each step should be clearly outlined, automated where possible, and regularly tracked to ensure high-quality results.

What does this topic cover?

✅ Structuring the entire process of content creation and enrichment: Clarify how product descriptions are written, who handles visuals, and who produces videos. Decide if these responsibilities lie with your internal team or external partners. Determine how each piece of content enters your PIM and how it is linked to relevant products. Define each step clearly and allocate accountability for every task.

As an example: after a product is added to the PIM system, marketing adds the descriptions and images, the product department fills in the technical specifications, and the compliance team uploads the required certificates. The product is published to the website and social media only once all necessary data is in place.

✅ Team collaboration processes: Creating comprehensive product content usually involves multiple departments: from marketing to product to legal (particularly when the content includes regulated information like ingredients or certifications). A thoughtful PIM strategy needs to account for how this collaboration will be managed within the system to deliver consistently high-quality content – content that is precise, up-to-date, and resonates with your customers.

✅ Practical recommendation: Think about whether tasks like product content creation can be supported by artificial intelligence – for instance, by automatically generating descriptions, translating product texts, or optimizing data to boost SEO results.

6. Change management and team training

Why is this essential?

A new PIM system will affect how people work day-to-day. You need to make sure your team is ready to embrace this new way of working.

What does this topic cover?

✅ Planning for organizational change: You need a solid plan for communicating the changes that come with introducing a PIM system, clarifying the benefits for each team, and managing the transition to the new setup. Ensuring that employees are involved and their concerns are acknowledged is key to a successful rollout.

✅ Training for users: All users of the PIM system must receive proper training. Training should be role-specific and aligned with each group's tasks – for example, marketing teams learn to publish descriptions, and customer care teams learn to access the product data they need quickly to answer users’ questions. Ongoing support after the rollout is also a key success factor.

✅ Practical recommendation: Not all employees will welcome new systems right away. Acknowledge their concerns and take the time to show them how PIM can simplify their work and open new doors. Establish a clear communication strategy for the implementation process and design a training schedule for all relevant user groups. You might also consider appointing “PIM champions” in different departments to support and guide their colleagues during the transition.

Other key aspects to consider:

⭐ Data quality monitoring: Plan how data quality will be tracked within your PIM system and how to respond when problems are found. Leverage regular audits and automated validation rules to identify and resolve product data issues.

⭐ Analytics and performance tracking: Analyzing the quality, completeness, and usage of product data reveals gaps and areas for growth. Built-in analytical features help your team make well-informed decisions supported by real data.

⭐ Digital Asset Management (DAM): Integrating a DAM system with your PIM ensures smoother management of visual and media files. This integration enables your teams to access updated and consistent digital content when they need it.

Finding the right implementation partner

A PIM system implementation is a multifaceted project that requires both technical know-how and experience in managing data.

You should be ready for challenges, including integrating the system with your B2B or B2C sales platform, ERP, and other tools; configuring the system for your specific needs; migrating existing product data; and ensuring your team is properly trained for smooth adoption.

At Tandemite, we rely on transparency, an established implementation process, and trusted platforms such as Akeneo, Pimcore, and Ergonode. We understand how to configure these tools to precisely fit the requirements of various companies, whether they are manufacturers, distributors, or eCommerce enterprises.

Our team of experts is ready to explore your individual needs and help you create a PIM strategy that brings real advantages to your business. If you need more information or would like further direction, feel free to arrange an online consultation with us.