How to establish a product content workflow for the holiday season

Have you established processes to improve and/or create product content before the holiday season starts?

The Takeaway: You need to streamline your product content workflow to ensure your product information is accurate, consistent and up-to-date when it's in front of holiday shoppers this November and December.

How do you plan on getting your product content on each and every ecommerce channel before Black Friday comes around?

Answering that question is likely more important than you think, but you've probably never even considered it before now. After all, prior to assembling your product content team, you never had to coordinate the flow of product content from the design stages of items to the launch of them on ecommerce sites.

But, this year, everything must change. Shoppers are researching their products online like never before - 90 percent of shopping happens digitally today and 88 percent of consumers said product content plays a very or extremely important role when making a purchase decision.

You can capitalize on that demand for product information by streamlining your product content workflow. That entails centralizing your product content and establishing a process for creating content for new products as well as updating the product information for older items.

New product launches
If you have a new item releasing before Black Friday, now is the perfect time to establish guidelines and timelines for collecting, inspecting and delivering product content elements. Every brand is different, obviously, but Rob Gonzalez, co-founder and VP of business development at Salsify, recommended that all companies "look for friction" in their existing processes and zero in on those issues in order to overcome them.

To further smooth out product content workflows when launching a new product, you should use product information management software to collate product attributes, images and more in a single location. That product content platform will act as a central source of truth about your brand's items.

Download "9 ways to maximize your product sales this holiday season" to learn more about product content management and optimization.

As as important note: Don't forget to collect extended product attributes, such as the technical and category-specific details that allow shoppers to compare your items to competitors' products.

Updating existing product content
If you aren't launching a product before Black Friday (or even if you are), you need to focus your efforts on revising your current products' information.

Check out your existing product pages on major etailer sites and audit the content on those pages with SEO and customer experience in mind. Then, start updating product imagery, copy and other content, putting the new information in your central source of product truth. That way, you can easily disseminate that product content to ecommerce sites, as well as share it with the sales team and internal stakeholders.

Don't stop here! You still have some work to do to get your product content up to snuff before Black Friday if you want to maximize your sales this holiday season. For some additional advice and recommendations, be sure to download our latest ebook.