How Ecommerce Brands Can Improve Speed to Market | Salsify

Improving speed to market is crucial to winning on the digital shelf. How you enrich or add new product content within your system of record can be a big part of those improvements to quickly update existing products or bring new products to market.

While your brand may use software, such as master data management (MDM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or product information management (PIM), to keep product information organized, ensuring you have the speed to execute your business processes and accurately make the required changes within it is essential.

Learn about the challenges of traditional go-to-market (GTM) processes and learn how one brand used Salsify Workflow to improve speed to market.

Getting Products to Market Is Hard

Getting products to market requires a content review process that involves multiple stakeholders across an organization. Many brands spend months gathering the necessary information, images, and marketing materials and then getting them approved.

Consider the following scenario: With spring fast approaching, a product manager needs to kick off seasonal enrichment for a product line.

Getting to market will likely require the following steps:

• Step 1: Align your teams on the enrichment strategy. Also, ensure that leaders in your organization are equipped with tools for their respective teams. The more you can flush out before the update process begins, the better.
• Step 2: Content creation begins. A copywriter or a creative team likely writes the updated copy, but consider what supplemental content (images, specs, etc.) the writer needs to be successful. Consider what other digital assets the product line can benefit from, whether it be video, comparison charts, or varied visuals.

• Step 3: The first content readiness review occurs. The brand manager will review and approve it for tone and marketing persuasion, though this may need to happen again after further revisions. A review with the design team should also occur.
• Step 4: Collaborate further with other teams to check accuracy. Whether you have a set regulatory team or specific point people, it’s important to review content for the accuracy of its data and claims.
• Step 5: Content is checked for legality. Your legal team should review the content and approve it for claim accuracy, though your regulatory and legal teams may overlap.
• Step 6: The content receives a final readiness check. The ecommerce manager acts as the final gatekeeper before approving the content, saving the product, and scheduling the publish to retailers.

Throughout this process, changes are often stored in email, Excel, and Word documents — all outside of the system of record.

How Do You Improve Speed to Market?

To improve speed to market, you need coordination among your teams and processes.

There are powerful tools to automate and streamline much of the legwork, so your team can focus on other valuable tasks as well as quality assurance.

Consider the following to help you improve your speed to market:

• Use templates and exports (like Samsonite in this case study) to cut down on time needed for administrative tasks and data entry as well as the probability of human error;
• Find a way to track cross-collaboration from different teams to provide checks and balances and better delegate to task owners;
• Create and audit content more efficiently with updates that reach channels faster through direct connections; and
• Adjust content as needed with clear notifications about constantly changing retailer requirements.

Salsify Workflow enables you to do all of the above by streamlining common processes and automating bulk tasks. It’s is the glue of the Salsify Commerce Experience Management (CommerceXM) platform.

Using Salsify Workflow to increase your operational efficiency, whether that means catching errors that could cause big legal headaches, or giving your team and your external agencies the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate within the platform and deliver an accelerated timeline.

Why Traditional GTM Processes Hurt Brands

This process not only leaves brands vulnerable to data integrity errors and inefficiencies but requires an organized project manager or additional set of tools to maintain a coherent record of what’s been changed (and by whom), for auditors or future updates.

There's no place to store changes and facilitate a review of all this content inside a traditional PIM system. You need a tool that can model a wide set of processes, automate repetitive, low-value tasks, and maintain data integrity.

Benefits of Faster Time to Market

Improving your time to market provides a valuable competitive advantage that will be felt among your entire brand and increase market share.

The benefits of faster time to market include:

• Drastic efficiency improvements across your organization;
• The ability to expand your product catalogs and reach;
• Increased time to work on product improvement, content optimization, and customer engagement; and
• More quality-assured products can reach your customers faster, generating more revenue.

How a Personal Care Brand Reduced Time to Market by 60%

The digital shelf team of one major personal care brand relied on email communications and attachments to collaborate on new product content. Stakeholders often missed important updates, slowing communication between teams, and delaying content activation processes.

Salsify Workflow brought disconnected departments into a single platform to streamline new product content creation. Workflows allowed the team to set up automatic triggers in the content-creation process, notifying members from across multiple dispersed teams when their input was needed.

With Salsify Workflow, the team was able to streamline content collaboration and rely less on the inbox, resulting in a 60% decrease in time-to-market for new product content, moving from 115 days to 45 days.

Improve Speed Time to Market With Salsify Workflow

Salsify Workflow helps improve your speed to market by centralizing your entire content process within Salsify. It can help you efficiently tackle the common business problems associated with introducing new products and the end-to-end product enrichment process.

Request a guided demo to learn more about how Salsify Workflow can help you improve speed to market for your brand.

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