How to Move on from Your Clunky Image Database
Trying to build quality product content with product imagery separated from the rest of your product data is like trying to paint with your eyes closed. The image might be perfectly clear in your mind, but the people deciphering what you manage to paint will be left interpreting the abstract.
Brand manufacturers don’t separate their product images from product data by choice. It’s always by necessity or because that’s “just the way it’s done.” No spreadsheet can act as a massive repository for images and video, and most brands are still using manual spreadsheets for product data. Yet, essential and enriched product data must be managed together.
Managing essential product data (the text-based stuff) separately from enriched product data (the audio-visual) creates more work to organize and optimize product data for each seller or selling channel. It doubles the opportunity for human error as data is organized, too. It restricts the free-flowing use of both types of data by marketing, sales, and customer service teams. It’s also just plain inefficient.
How you store and retrieve product information (including digital assets) affects your conversion rates in direct and indirect ways. Ultimately, consumers will focus on your product images more than any other piece of product data. An optimized image database will immediately improve operational efficiency and trickle outward to superior product content, greater conversion, and better branding all around.
The Importance of Product Imagery Today
The shopping experience is straightforward in a brick-and-mortar store. Consumers come in and decide which products they like. They touch them, they try them on. On a Saturday morning at the supermarket, they might even sample them. Buying decisions are made on the spot.
Shopping online is different. Consumers expect to get more details about the product before they buy. How often do you check the label of a shirt at the mall to see what it’s made of? Probably not often. Yet, shopping online, the material is one of the most important bullet points consumers review.
Consumers look for more information online to compensate for the feedback they can’t get digitally—this is a normal part of the psychology of product imagery and the nature of shopping online. That tactile experience is not an option, even with fancy new trends in AR and VR. So, the customer turns to product data to make a decision.
The best a consumer can get from online product listings comes from the product imagery you provide. Your images are compared to other brands’ product images, too. Did you know that 36% of consumers spend 30 minutes or more comparison shopping before buying a product online? The more expensive the product, the more time they take to compare it. Good product images are also 40% more likely to be shared on social media, making smart use of your best product imagery beneficial in an exponential way.
Access to an Optimized Image Database Equals Greater Use
You know how keeping sweets out of sight helps you eat them slower? Let’s face it… if you leave that bag of Reese’s out, it will get eaten.
It’s the same with an optimized image database.
Storing product images in a cloud repository that’s easy to access for all departments who need it (including sales, marketing, web development, and the often-forgotten customer service) is an essential business practice if you want your product images to get their full use. If the repository is connected to your catalog of product information, then:
- It's easy for a customer service rep to pull up images to answer a customer question;
- It’s organized for the web development team to know which photo of each product is the most recent;
- And it’s optimized for the marketing team to use across all product-inspired collateral.
Even for brands that sell products in brick-and-mortar stores, an optimized image database is essential for the online support of those in-store sales. Today, 81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying in-store. Product images have to be used in an organized and deliberate way to support sales online and off.
With these realities in mind, most brand manufacturers don’t need much “selling” on the idea that an optimized image database is required today. That database doesn’t refer to cloud storage on Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint, though. An optimized image database is integrated right into your product catalog data so you can manage all essential and enriched data in one place.
If your brand leadership thinks that all your product imagery can be stored anywhere in the cloud and that’s “good enough,” ask yourself (or your leadership):
- With the current image database, does every person who needs access have it?
- How many folders does someone have to click into or out of to navigate from one product family to another?
- Are there places where a different version of a photo is loaded in the database that could be mistaken for the one to use when it’s really not?
- Is the naming system of the image database 100% consistent and intuitive?
- Does that naming system automatically sort images in a logical way (e.g., release date, product family, etc.)?
- Are all your images and videos easily searchable by product attribute (even color, product class, size, etc.)?
- Do you have to undergo a manual process of downloading images in bulk and then organizing them to deliver to a seller along with product data in a spreadsheet?
There really is a better way.
The Crucial Detail: Linking Images to Essential Product Data
One solution resolves each of those questions above, and that’s to store your product imagery along with your product data in the same product information management (PIM) system.
A next-gen PIM is designed to pool, organize and optimize product data, including product images. Just link each product to its images and videos, and suddenly all the filtering and sorting, and attribute management you do for essential product data makes your images searchable by the same.
Imagine it: if you need images of products that are green for some social posts on St. Paddy’s Day, you can easily search your product catalog for that color attribute and then download the images for each product. There’s no hunting through folders, and there’s no missed opportunity.
Using a next-gen PIM, when you’re ready to prepare a new product family for multiple sellers or channels, the images are already associated with that product data in one place. No one in any department will ever wonder again which images to use for what. Even customer service will have quick, searchable, and filterable access to find product images for customer upsells or to visualize the products clients are asking about.
The Next-Gen PIM Includes Your Image Database
Instead of spreading your essential product data and images out, you can collect and store them in one optimized image database that links product imagery directly to the products it depicts.
It isn’t enough to describe a product with words. Four-fifths of consumers say that product imagery is “very” or “extremely” influential in their buying decisions. You need images because consumers require an almost-tactile experience with what they want to buy, and the best way to deliver is with product images coupled with optimized essential product data.
To build your own optimized image database, learn more about the next-gen PIM.