Managing complex product data can be a constant struggle for product marketers in the chemical and ingredient industries. Between ensuring technical accuracy, staying compliant with regulations and launching products across multiple channels, marketing teams often find themselves bogged down by inefficiencies.
This is where Product Data Management (PDM) systems come in. By centralizing product data, a PDM streamlines workflows, reduces errors and frees up time for more strategic initiatives — ultimately helping you connect your efforts to ROI.
Let’s explore how a PDM system can address marketing teams’ specific pain points in the chemical industry.
What Is a PDM System, and Why Do Marketers in Chemical and Ingredient Companies Need One?
In industries like chemicals and ingredients, product data is anything but simple. Each product often has a long list of technical specifications, safety data sheets (SDS), regulatory compliance information, and sometimes, different formulations for different markets. Managing all this data across various teams and platforms can be a logistical nightmare.
A PDM system centralizes this data into one place, eliminating fragmented spreadsheets, conflicting versions and the risk of human error. For marketing teams, this means:
Compliance Made Easy: Regulations regarding chemicals and ingredients are constantly evolving. With a PDM, you can ensure that product data, including SDSs, hazard classifications and regulatory information, are always current and compliant.
Accurate Technical Data: A PDM system built specifically for the chemical and ingredients industry guarantees that technical specs customers need, from CAS numbers to molecular weights, are correct and readily accessible.
Cross-Team Consistency: Whether it’s R&D, regulatory or marketing, everyone can access the same product data. This eliminates confusion and ensures that your marketing materials are built on accurate information.
How to Reduce Time-Consuming, Manual Processes
One of the biggest challenges marketers in this space face is the sheer amount of time spent manually managing product data. Whether it’s pulling information for a technical brochure or updating safety data sheets, marketing teams often find themselves bogged down with repetitive tasks.
A PDM helps eliminate these manual processes, allowing marketers to focus on higher-value activities like product positioning and campaign development.
Eliminate Manual Data Entry: For every product, there are countless specs to manage — chemical compositions, ingredient sourcing information, certifications and more. A PDM allows you to update everything from one platform, reducing the risk of errors and speeding up the process.
Faster Content Creation: Marketers can pull the most accurate data for product catalogs, technical datasheets and regulatory documentation from the PDM, ensuring consistency across channels and materials. This also frees up time to craft messaging that resonates with the target audience, rather than focusing on data validation.
Quicker Product Launches: When launching new products, you can instantly distribute updated technical data across all channels — whether it’s your website, digital marketing or sales enablement platforms.
Managing Complex Product Data Across Channels
In the chemical and ingredient industries, product data isn’t just complex — it also needs to be consistent across multiple platforms, from your website to your sales team’s CRM to industry-specific databases. Without a centralized system, this becomes an overwhelming task, often resulting in inconsistencies or outdated information.
How PDM Helps:
Consistent, Compliant Data: A PDM ensures that your product specs, certifications and regulatory data are automatically updated across all channels. This not only improves efficiency but also helps your brand maintain compliance with local and international regulations.
Seamless Website Integration: By integrating your PDM with your website, you can ensure that all product pages are automatically updated whenever there’s a change — whether it’s a formulation update, a new certification, or an SDS revision.
Improved User Experience: Accurate product data helps build trust with your customers, particularly in industries like chemicals and ingredients, where purchasing decisions hinge on detailed, reliable information. A PDM guarantees that the technical and safety data displayed is up-to-date, giving customers the confidence to move forward.
This level of accuracy is especially important when dealing with sensitive information like chemical compositions or ingredient origins, where any error could lead to lost sales — or worse, regulatory fines.
Tracking Customer Engagement Across the Journey
It’s not always easy for marketers to gauge where a customer is in their buying journey. Customers often spend time reviewing detailed product data, comparing formulations or downloading technical documents. Understanding these interactions is critical for converting interest into sales.
Integrating your PDM with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system lets you track how customers interact with your product data and use these insights to refine your marketing strategy.
Here’s How It Works:
Identify High-Intent Actions: When a customer downloads a safety data sheet, reviews a technical spec sheet or interacts with specific product formulations, you can assume high buying intent. Integrating PDM data into your CRM allows sales teams to follow up on these leads with the right level of detail.
Personalized Campaigns: With PDM data feeding into your CRM, you can segment customers based on their behavior and tailor campaigns accordingly. For example, you can create targeted email sequences for customers who have shown interest in specific product lines or applications.
Tracking the Customer Journey: By analyzing how customers engage with technical data, certifications or product comparisons, you can better understand their decision-making process. This allows marketing and sales teams to nurture leads with more relevant content.
Connecting PDM to ROI
Marketers in the chemical and ingredient industries often struggle with proving ROI. A PDM system not only streamlines workflows but also provides the kind of insights that allow teams to connect their activities directly to financial outcomes.
How PDM Impacts ROI:
Faster Time-to-Market: Chemical and ingredient companies often need to launch products quickly in response to changing regulations or market demands. A PDM helps speed up these launches by centralizing product data, allowing for quicker execution of campaigns.
Higher Conversion Rates: Providing accurate, detailed product information builds trust with customers, especially when it comes to technical products. PDM ensures that customers get the data they need, improving conversions.
Lower Acquisition Costs: Streamlined processes reduce the time and resources spent managing product data. By focusing marketing efforts on high-intent customers, acquisition costs drop while conversion rates improve.
A leading global adhesives manufacturer with over $3 billion in annual revenue faced significant challenges with their website’s user experience. Their product information was scattered across different systems, making it hard for customers to find what they needed. Additionally, the company offered tens of thousands of products, but their online catalog reflected only a small fraction of their total offerings. As a result, customers struggled to access documents, browse products, and engage with the brand.
By implementing Knowde’s Master Data Management Platform, they centralized all product data and created a seamless digital experience for their customers. The upgrade allowed customers to search for products, filter by specific attributes and easily download product documentation. Within six months, the company saw an 11% increase in website users and a 22% increase in the time customers spent on the site. Even more impressively, their visitor-to-lead conversion rate rose to 6.87%, and the lead-to-qualified-lead conversion rate climbed to 62%, resulting in increased sales and a greater ROI.
Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy with PDM
Managing complex, technical product data doesn’t have to be a burden for product marketers in the chemical and ingredient sectors. A PDM system streamlines workflows, ensures data accuracy and provides the insights you need to connect your marketing efforts to actual ROI.
Want to learn more about how Knowde’s PDM solutions can help you simplify your product data management and boost your marketing results? Explore our platform and see the difference centralized product data can make.
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