The majority of people have used a Duck Tape, FrogTape, or Painter’s Mate Green at some point in their lives. These are all brands of ShurTech, a subsidiary of ShurTape Technologies, an industry-leading producer of pressure-sensitive masking, duct, packaging, and specialty tape products.
ShurTech sells its product lines on many online retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and The Home Depot, and it was facing a big challenge: quickly and efficiently managing product pages across all of its channels.
Content Consistency Is Vital for Product Pages
Consumers expect a consistent brand experience, no matter where the products are sold. Imagine a shopper purchases a product on Amazon because it touts a specific benefit. Later, when he or she is shopping on Walmart.com, the shopper sees the product listed with different benefits and messaging — but not the ones that drove the sale in the first place.
The shopper is confused: Does the product actually provide this benefit? Inconsistent product experiences drive customers away.
One of the internal challenges with delivering consistent product information across distribution channels is dealing with unique retailer requirements, as these shift from retailer to retailer. Brands must create this content for every sales channel while ensuring sales teams have access to the same product information.
ShurTech Leverages the Power of PXM
This was the problem ShurTech faced: It needed a way to centralize and activate all of its product information for every channel. It also wanted to streamline product content access for sales and marketing teams, ensuring the accuracy of product information across departments. ShurTech wanted to create a streamlined, iterative, integrated process across sales, ecommerce, and marketing teams for all product content.
The ShurTech implemented the Salsify product experience management (PXM) platform to help them accomplish these goals. This process began with its U.S. consumer and craftsman business divisions. With no standard vocabulary to define products, the ShurTech team set out to outline standards for marketing and branding content. Once defined, the team built a single repository within the Salsify PXM platform to store content, making it accessible to internal teams for review and usage.
Once ShurTech successfully implemented Salsify in the U.S., it grew its usage of the platform to other business divisions like its European operations. It also worked to create digital catalogs for the industrial side of the business, ShurTape.
Activating Content for Cross-Channel Distribution
ShurTech sells its products across many sites, and every retailer has unique requirements for product information. ShurTech could have manually managed every retailer’s individual content requirements, but the Salsify PXM platform provided a better approach.
Core data management and channel-specific activation are tied together. This integration enables ShurTech to now publish directly to many different retailers without the need for additional review and approval before publication of product content. ShurTech now adds new retailers as they relate to them, ensuring brand consistency across all channels.
This activation capability includes readiness reports, which analyze content for each retailer and identify gaps and inaccuracies before the content is submitted. If discrepancies are found, tasks are then assigned to the right team members for correction through workflows. When the content is 100% ready, the content is then quickly syndicated across the selected retail partners.
ShurTech was also able to ensure the same content is also available internally for sales and marketing teams, who use it for sales enablement and marketing campaigns. With a centralized content repository, internal teams can quickly discover the content they need — with the confidence that it’s updated and accurate.
Getting to Market Faster — With the Right Content
“You need to both be able to create, generate, and optimize great content — and then deliver it to your customers in an efficient and effective way,” said Scott Sommers, former director of ecommerce strategy and now vice president of insights and innovation at ShurTech. “That’s what I feel like Salsify has done for us — it’s given us that simple point of truth. The ability to manage and measure it, optimize it, and iterate.”
The work that ShurTech did to improve how it creates, manages, and delivers the best product pages has proved itself in several ways, including faster item set up, expansion into new channels, and improved relationships with retailers.
The implementation of an improved product information process, supported by the Salsify PXM platform, also enabled ShurTech to improve its Amazon sales rank by 15% across 70 products.
With a new process to develop, manage, and share product information, including identifying gaps and issues before publishing to retailer sites, the team can now set up items faster and quickly make the modifications necessary to improve the product page performance. With the help of Salsify’s activation capabilities, ShurTech was able to connect to new channels quickly and adapt product information to support those channel requirements.
Working with many retailers and their unique requirements can be a challenge, especially if it requires manual changes to support these needs. ShurTech’s ability to automate retailer integration and resolve content issues before they are published has helped improve relationships significantly.
