Ecommerce success today calls for expanding your reach and tapping into new audiences. This is where product syndication (or product data syndication) comes in!
Product syndication involves republishing and distributing product information (such as description, images, pricing, and availability) to various platforms, e-commerce channels, and marketplaces to reach a broader audience and increase sales.
However, distributing product information across various channels can be challenging. What strategies can you implement to ensure your product content syndication efforts succeed?
Effective product data syndication strategies to maximise e-commerce reach include:
- Create informative and engaging product information
- Optimise your product information for visibility
- Test before going live
- Choose the right syndication channels
- Optimise product data for the different channels
- Maintain consistency across channels
- Implement automated distribution
- Regularly monitor and analyse performance
1. Create informative and engaging product information
Before distributing product data in e-commerce channels, you need to have the data itself. Create high-quality product information that will attract and hold your target audience’s attention and get them to take the desired action (e.g., click through to your website to make a purchase).
Specific elements to consider when creating your product data are:
- Detailed product description: Add a detailed description of the product, highlighting key features, specifications, and benefits. This helps your target understand the product, making them more likely to buy.
- High-quality images and videos: Include high-quality pictures that showcase the product from different angles. This helps customers visualise the product and appreciate it more. When including videos, they should be of the highest quality and very informative.
- Accurate pricing information: Include clear and accurate pricing information. Misleading pricing information will only annoy potential customers and make them blacklist you. Make prices competitive. Consider displaying discounts or promotions that lower prices, as this can attract potential buyers.
- Authentic customer reviews and testimonials: Adding reviews and testimonials from real customers can enhance credibility. It tells your audience that people like themselves have used the product and find it satisfactory.
- Shipping and return information: Let your audience know what to expect after buying the product. When will the customer get the product, how much will shipping cost them, and can they return it if they don’t like it? This information can reduce cart abandonment, making it a critical part of your product data.
Whatever you include in your product information, the goal is to create high-quality content that stands out so that wherever it is published, it can capture people’s interest and encourage them to buy.
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2. Optimise your product information for visibility
Many seemingly perfect product listings fail because they are not optimised for visibility. Optimising product listing for visibility means ensuring that the content speaks the language of your target audience. That is, the content should contain the keywords and phrases that the target audience uses when searching for similar products.
The algorithms of online sales channels favour listings that are optimised with relevant keywords. When a potential customer searches for products on the platform, the algorithms scan listings, fetch those containing keywords used by the customer, and display these in the search results.
As a result, optimised product listings have better search engine rankings, making them easily discoverable by customers. Thus, optimising product data for visibility is an effective e-commerce content syndication strategy, especially when targeting crowded marketplaces where many similar products vie for attention.
3. Test before going live
After creating your content, don’t immediately publish it or distribute it to product content syndication platforms. Instead, send it to a test group with characteristics similar to your target audience, gather feedback from them, and use this feedback to refine the content.
One simple way people test product content before syndication is A/B testing. It’s a simple process that involves the following:
- Create two versions of a piece of content for a similar purpose (like two different product titles for the same product)
- Split the test group into two (group A and group B). Your test group could be an email mailing list for example.
- Send each group one version of the content
- Monitor which of the two versions performs better (by tracking metrics like the percentage of users that click on the product title to reach your website)
You may then use the better-performing content when publishing or syndicating your content. This saves you from officially publishing content that will not resonate with your audience and is, therefore, doomed to perform poorly in terms of lead generation and conversion.
4. Choose the right syndication channels
There are scores of e-commerce platforms to distribute your product data. These include marketplaces (like Etsy, Amazon, and eBay), social media channels (like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest), comparison shopping engines (like Google Shopping and Shopzilla), and affiliate marketers websites.
However, not all platforms are suitable for your products. Thus, choosing the right channels is important in syndicating product information.
To select the right product content syndication channel, consider the following:
- Your target audience: Understand who your target audience is and where they spend their time online. This will help you choose relevant platforms from which these people are more likely to shop.
- Product type: Some products thrive in certain channels and perform poorly in others. For example, high-end products do better on niche luxury platforms, while budget items thrive on general marketplaces.
- Channel popularity: Analyse the size of the channel’s user base and customer engagement level. This helps you choose reputable platforms that guarantee that many people will see and interact with your product. Remember that the goal when syndicating product data is expanding your reach. But that goal will be defeated if your chosen channel does not have enough traffic.
- Competitor presence: Analyse where your competitors are selling their products. This can give you insight into effective channels for your product.
Also read: 9 things to look for in a data management solution.
5. Optimise product data for the different channels
The different e-commerce channels have different characteristics and varying guidelines for product listings. For example, product titles and bullet points are important for Amazon listings, but they have no use in the sales channel Pinterest, which heavily relies on images.
So, to syndicate product content, you cannot just copy and paste it into every other channel. You need to tailor the content to each channel's unique requirements.
These requirements often go beyond content type and can be very specific. For example, some platforms may impose restrictions on title and description length.
Optimising for the multiple channels that feature your product ensures that your product data aligns with each platform’s algorithms. This improves your chances of being featured in searches or recommendations.
6. Maintain consistency across channels
While product content needs to be adapted to each channel's specific preferences and formats, the core message should be uniform across all channels.
For example, product descriptions should convey the same features, specifications, and benefits on all platforms. While image size may differ depending on the channel’s requirements, ensure customers see the same visual representations of the product. Also, ensure pricing is the same across all channels.
Consistency is not limited to the message. Maintaining brand consistency is also important. The logo, design elements, language, and messaging style should be the same everywhere.
Inconsistent information can lead to confusion and drive customers away. Imagine seeing a product from a seller listed at $100 on one platform and the same product from the same seller listed at $60 on another platform. Which will you buy? Probably none because such inconsistency will raise questions about the seller’s credibility.
In contrast, consistency reduces confusion and builds trust. When people encounter the same information about your product anywhere they check, they are more likely to trust you and the product.
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7. Implement automated distribution
Automated distribution can be the difference between an error-strewn, stressful product syndication process and a smooth, stress-free process.
Automated distribution means using software and technology to automatically distribute product data across the various e-commerce platforms where your products are sold. With automated distribution, there is no manual intervention. You do not go to each platform to manually enter product data.
Instead, the software does everything. You maintain a single document (called a product data feed). The product syndicating tool will draw data from this document to automatically update product content across all e-commerce platforms and sales channels.
Automatic distribution offers many advantages over the manual process, which includes:
- Efficiency: Automation eliminates the repetitive manual tasks of updating listings across multiple platforms.
- Real-time updates: Manual updates of pricing, product availability, and other details across multiple sales channels can take several days. But with automation, changes are propagated across all channels instantly, ensuring all listings are up-to-date without delays.
- Error reduction: Automation product syndication eliminates human errors associated with manual data entry, ensuring your product information is accurate and consistent across all platforms.
You may also like: What is Unified Data Management (UDM)?
8. Regularly monitor and analyse performance
Product syndication is a component of your e-commerce marketing strategy. The goal is to increase visibility for your product and potentially have more sales. So, you need to regularly analyse the performance of your syndicated products to evaluate whether they are meeting these goals.
Key metrics to track include:
- Impressions: Track the number of times your product is displayed to users across various platforms. This can help you gauge your product’s visibility.
- Click-through rates (CTR): Tracking the percentage of people who click your link. This can help you gauge how engaging your product titles and descriptions are.
- Conversion rates: Track the percentage of people who complete a purchase after viewing your product listing. This can tell you how compelling your description and CTAs are.
- Return on investment (ROI): Compare profit made against investment in product syndication. This helps you evaluate the profitability or otherwise of product syndication efforts.
Analysing performance can help you see what is working and what isn’t, empowering you to make data-driven decisions to optimise your product information for better visibility and engagement.
Benefits of product syndication for e-commerce brands
Product syndication offers e-commerce brands many benefits. These include:
Increased market reach
Product syndication involves displaying your products on multiple channels such as websites, e-commerce marketplace, social media platforms, mobile apps, and more. This helps you reach untapped segments of the market. More potential buyers will get to see your product.
Increased brand visibility
Maintaining brand consistency across the multiple platforms where your product is sold enhances your brand’s presence in people's minds. They become more familiar with your brand and are more likely to choose it when they decide to make a purchase.
Improved sales and revenue
When done right, product content syndication takes your product to more people and makes people more familiar with your brand. With more potential buyers considering the product, you’re likely to have more sales. Also, brand familiarity builds trust, making customers more likely to choose you over the competition.
Consistent product information
Product syndication is not just about distributing product data in different channels; it also ensures that the product data is the same in each channel.
So, it won’t matter whether your product is displayed on an Instagram post, an affiliate website, or the humongous Amazon marketplace; customers will see the same details, such as pricing, specifications, and benefits.
Enhanced customer experience
Product syndication makes customers' lives much easier when searching for particular products, enhancing their experience. For example, customers can find your product wherever they decide to shop, saving them the trouble of heading to a less preferred channel just to find your product.
Also, the product content consistency that syndication allows ensures customers see the same product data wherever they look. This reduces confusion for potential customers, enhancing their overall shopping experience.
Improved search engine rankings
Syndicated product content published on various platforms usually includes backlinks to your website. As people click these links and move from the different platforms to your website, it signals search engines that your website is relevant and valuable.
Relevance and value are critical factors for determining search engine rankings. So, with your website deemed relevant and valuable to users, it will have higher search engine rankings.
Cost-effective marketing
With product content syndication, you can distribute your product across multiple platforms and reach a broader audience without the high costs associated with traditional marketing methods.
When you syndicate product content, you take advantage of the large user base of syndicating platforms instead of spending heavily to build your own traffic. Also, instead of spending big to create multiple content, product syndication helps you save by leveraging existing content, only tweaking it to align with each platform’s listing guidelines.
Takeaway: Streamline product data syndication with Starhive
Product syndication is key to e-commerce success as it offers benefits like increased market reach, increased brand visibility, and improved sales. Implement the product syndication strategies outlined and get ever closer to e-commerce success.
Syndicating product data across multiple sales channels can be challenging. It’s even more so if you manage your product information across multiple systems like ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets, etc. Bringing the scattered data together is essential to getting consistency in your product information before syndication. This is where Starhive comes in!
Starhive is a platform that will boost your daily productivity. You can build no-code apps in Starhive such as ones to do Product Information Management or PIM. Bring your disparate product information together, and create central source of truth for all your product information and approval processes.
You can then use Starhive’s Channels extension to create your product data feeds for automated distribution when syndicating product data. You can even integrate Starhive with tools like Channable and ChannelFeed
Ready to streamline product syndication via efficient product information management?
