Multi, Omni and Now Metachannel: Meeting the Content Management Needs of Future Retailers
censhare is a Business Reporter client.
Life comes at you fast as a retailer. As we push toward the end of 2022, current challenges range from a dip in consumer confidence and ongoing supply chain issues to a talent shortage, price pressures and heightened expectations of service both online and in person.
These conditions make heavy demands on organizations that have not traditionally been designed to be agile and reactive. Despite our allegedly digitally transformed world, many enterprises are still operating using legacy infrastructure, serving siloed teams. When traditional retailers ask how they can compete against digitally native e-commerce (and increasingly omnichannel) retailers, digital transformation is their first port of call.
Why is enhanced connectivity so critical? EY calls the future of retail the “metachannel”—being integrated everywhere. Consumers have long since stopped thinking in terms of a “physical” or “online” retailer; in fact, they tend to be surprised when one definitively excludes the other. But retail brands must be able to respond to consumer needs, wherever an interaction takes place.
In practice, this means serving useful content via social, web or messaging, which is growing as a consumer medium and will be vital to building relationships and gathering first-party data. Retailers need to be able to use data effectively across a wide range of channels and departments, and get content to the places that need it, in the required formats and in a current and relevant context.
The quality of that content and data is critical. “Added value” are the watchword for brands battling for supremacy in today’s crowded market. Inflation and the cost-of-living squeeze mean that competing on price—however initially attractive that might seem—will not cut the mustard for any length of time. Added value means delivering extra: more personalization, better-quality content, more interaction between digital and physical and an altogether more integrated experience.
When even something as fundamental as inventory management goes awry, you know that retailers are struggling to keep up, let alone innovate. Forrester research that suggests that two-thirds of retailers find inventory management somewhat or very challenging puts on paper what observers are seeing in stores every day. UK supermarket Waitrose—by royal appointment, no less—was recently criticized for its inability to keep shelves stocked and understand the needs of its well-to-do foodie audience.
Failure to integrate processes at even the simplest levels means that retailers can’t take advantage of many innovations that would allow them to compete and thrive, even in tough trading conditions.
censhare research suggests that barely a third of companies have an integrated, centralized content management hub. Nearly half say they’re working toward one (44%), but that still puts them a long way away from being able to fully execute.
Without centralized systems that can build ever-more detailed data sets and allow employees to work efficiently, retailers can’t take full advantage of automation that would help streamline their businesses; they can’t feed that data into the artificial intelligence systems that would help them gain new insights and reach new audiences to grow.
From the figures above, it might seem that retail is in a perilous state, but this isn’t doom-mongering. Rather, the message is that there is an imperative to act for retailers who have so far tended toward a conservative attitude to technology investment. And it’s also important to state that this is not a baby/bathwater situation; solutions in today’s marketing tech stack are more adaptable and composable than ever, allowing new tools to slot into existing infrastructure at relatively low cost and with little disruption.
The proof points are out there. One fashion retailer integrated its digital asset management (DAM) system with tools from a range of other vendors (interoperability between different suppliers is critical for a future-facing retailer), allowing 700 users to effortlessly manage nearly 2 million assets.
Such was the time and effort saved on standard procedures that, very shortly after this implementation, the company began exploring how it could create third-party brand relationships and open an online marketplace. Automation was also suddenly on its radar, with the process optimizations and cost savings that could bring. Automated translation is a particular highlight, as there is no such thing as a non-global business anymore.
Often, the biggest challenge in grasping the trends of modernization is knowing what to look for and when to take the leap. This could be especially tricky in the marketing tech sector, where there are some 9,000 vendors and more coming online every day.
A little knowledge is a powerful thing. To gain an understanding of how omnichannel content management builds efficiency, accuracy and cost savings in omnichannel or metachannel retailing, download the Omnichannel Marketing in Retail white paper from censhare. It contains all you need to know about terms and systems such as PIM, DAM and CMS, and explains how and why you should integrate content management into your processes and stacks.
This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.
Image: iStock id1150289909
