How to Boost Product Discoverability Across Channels

1. The importance of product discoverability

Product discoverability is all about finding the best channels to help your target segments interact with your brand. Because most brands, including many niche brands, tend to appeal to more than one customer segment, a strong omnichannel strategy enables you to be everywhere your customers are.

This sales approach uses cross-channel marketing, such as your own site, marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify, and social selling platforms. So, the trick is to ensure you only choose the channels that make sense for your ideal customers.

2. Product discoverability vs. site traffic

Expanding into new marketplaces has a far-reaching impact when building your customer base. Selling on marketplaces tends to be a better strategy than driving traffic to your brand’s site through advertising, as it opens more doors of opportunity.

While no one is going to choose to shop on your brand’s site out of the blue, marketplaces and social commerce are sought by users who trust this mode of online shopping. Instead of investing money in marketing and SEO, which takes longer to establish trust, you can leverage existing customer visits on suitable selling channels.

You get closer to customers by becoming visible through a trusted eCommerce destination. These are the places your customers like to hang out, so it takes less effort on their part to discover your brand.

Product discoverability is frictionless, allowing customers to shop in one familiar place without time-consuming searches.

3. Be prepared for every new channel

While discoverability is easier for customers, it can present challenges for implementation. Each marketplace and social commerce channel has its own digital asset requirements. This becomes time-consuming as you must produce original content for new sales channels. However, with consolidated product information, you can easily expand into new marketplaces where you don’t already have a presence.

A Product Information Management (PIM) enables you to create a single source of truth for your product content, so you don’t have to worry about meeting various requirements for new channels. PIM enables you to standardize your product data, ensuring it’s in a format suitable for your new channels. In other words, PIM means you don’t have to waste endless hours re-formatting your product data to suit the requirements of new sales channels.

As an example, Amazon has very specific product data requirements. Mandatory fields include: product title, URL and category, price, brand, SKU, image url, shipping costs, product description, and so on. Additionally, when it comes to images, Amazon has a litany of requirements and best practices you can access here.

Ultimately, staying compliant to a marketplace’s requirements will improve the odds of your products getting a discovered. PIM will make sure your apples and oranges are aligned.

4. Test and take action

The only way to understand what works best for you is to test different channels.

Since discoverability is all about building customers and sales, you only want to spend time and effort in the channels where you’re seeing the most success. The bottom line is that you won’t know where to set up shop until you test.

Instead, you can only successfully test with the requisite product information. Understanding what each marketplace or channel requires ensures you create a meaningful presence to avoid missed opportunities. An agile product information database to store your digital assets is crucial before you cast your net.

Consequently, a PIM is the best way to distribute your effort across the channels you test, providing:

• An exclusive experience that is channel specific to meet customer expectations
• Effective targeting strategy to sell the most relevant products for each channel
• Brand consistency across each channel
• Opportunities to draw attention to new products more quickly with faster-to-market capabilities

Although product discoverability calls for a cross-channel strategy, it doesn’t mean you have to be present on all channels to succeed. Success lies in finding the right marketplaces and social channels through testing so you know exactly where you should focus your efforts.