Content and data are the top challenges that marketers, merchants, and commerce professionals face today. This isn’t surprising, considering the massive amounts of data and content these professionals today need to make sense of and manage.
Because of this, there’s a lot of hype in the market today around solutions to help manage the data and content influx. You’ve probably seen an array of confusing acronyms and many solutions promising to solve your issues. The two most common solutions out there are product information management (PIM) and digital asset management (DAM).
What is a PIM?
PIM solutions are robust platforms that help marketers, merchants, commerce, and IT teams (among others) leverage critical data from solutions like ERP, product lifecycle management (PLM), and master data management (MDM). PIM allows these teams to aggregate, structure, transform, and syndicate that data so it’s “market-ready.”
What is a DAM?
DAM solutions are robust platforms that help marketers, commerce, digital, and creative teams (among others) create, enrich, manage, and share their customer-facing content. This includes product-related content but also can include non-product-related content like campaign collateral or disclaimers. DAM helps make and manage the “market ready” content.
Do You Need Both PIM and DAM?
There are a lot of vendors who promise to solve all your problems in one. Sound too good to be true? That’s because it usually is.
Unless you have very light content needs or very light product data needs, it’s most likely you will need both solutions. This is rare – most enterprise manufacturing, consumer product goods, distribution, and retail have extensive data and content needs. Leading analyst firm Gartner validates this: “the majority of organizations that interact with Gartner choose best-of-breed PIM and DAM providers over integrated suites.”1
DAM and PIM solutions also complement each other – outside of the ability to do basic management of product assets, DAM and PIM have complementary capabilities.
At Aprimo, we recognize that most enterprises require an integrated best-of-breed DAM and PIM and proudly partner with a leading vendor, inRiver. Our connector allows marketers, merchants, digital, and commerce professionals to easily bridge their data and content needs. Find out more information here.
How are you managing your product data and content needs? We’d love to hear more if you want to engage with us on social media.
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