When Product Content Is Slowing Down Your eCommerce Growth with Lynn Herman

This episode is sponsored by B2Bware, the platform that turns your ERP into a self service ordering engine for your B2B customers. No more manual entry, no more email orders, no more data chaos. But the first and foremost is if you have wrong product information up on your site or an Amazon site, that can have penalties, it can be suppressed, it could be taken down, return rates can go up because it was wrong information, whether that be an asset that was outdated and it no longer looks like that. If it's a material you no longer use because it's hard to source that, there's a variety of reasons why things change. So you need to be able to have a single source of truth that can keep all of that information together. Hello and welcome to the E Commerce Podcast. I believe that there is more than enough content focused on e commerce marketing and not enough content celebrating the real heroes of e commerce, those running the operation. Each week we find and interview an e commerce operations expert to share the secrets behind how some of this industry's most exciting business businesses are run. I'm your host, Norbert Strapler, the CEO of SyncSpyr. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecomops podcast. Today's guest understands a problem most growing e commerce brands don't see coming until it slows everything down. Lynn, welcome to the podcast. She is an ABM Marketing Manager at Canto, a leader in digital asset management. With over a decade of experience at companies like HubSpot and Insight Square, Lynn specializes in solving what she calls the coordination nightmare of managing product content at scale. Oh yeah, this is really a bammer. Absolutely. Extremely topic for e commerce because this is a problem that everyone else has that is growing in E commerce too. Coordinate the nightmare of products of content and all these kind of things. Welcome to the show. Lyn. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. Appreciate it. Tell us a bit more about yourself before we dive in. It's always nice to know who we are talking to. Yeah. Thank you. So my name is Lynn Herman. I'm located in Massachusetts, a town called Andover, about 30 minutes north of Boston. And I have been, like you said, in the software business for quite some time now. I'll refrain from how many years I've been and you said it, but it's a little bit more than that. But I've worked at companies both doing data management, asset organization as well as digital asset management product information. Before Canto, I actually worked at a company called Image Relay, which was one of the first companies to really think about product information and digital assets as one. And we were grateful enough to be acquired by Canto. And I have been working at Canto ever since. So, really excited to be at such a great company that really thinks about helping brands of all kind really manage their business and content operations. Thank you, Lyn. Let's dive directly in. When brands scale. Yeah, when they scale. Why does product content become such a big operational problem? Product launches are difficult enough as it is, right? And the place we're at today where you have to be everywhere and anywhere all at once. When you're launching a new product, you have to think about everything that goes along with that. The digital assets, the campaigns, but then the product information, the skews, the dimension, things that are really important to the product itself. And to create a atmosphere for your customers and for internal and external partners, you have to think about all of this as one cohesive unit. So when you're launching a product, you really need to think about everything from the specs, ingredients, materials, to the lifestyle campaigns and the shoots and even the user generated content that you're thinking about. There's so many different places that we have to launch products. So when you are doing something like launching a new product and having a new campaign, you really have to think about all the things that are involved, both from the digital assets and product information, but all of the people that are passing hands while you're doing this as well. And what point does managing content for one storefront turn into a serious multi channel headache? So when people really start out first, they're usually managing if they're launching a product on their own website, but then it comes to a place where they want to expand. And whether that's on Amazon, Walmart, Target, or other retailers like Nordstrom, whatever you're selling at, when you first start out and you're just selling on your own storefront, you create the naming conventions, you create all of the information that you need to upload. But websites like Amazon and Nordstrom and Walmart, they have their own specifications. So what ends up happening is that for every different channel, you have to create a system that follows their rules and their naming conventions. So as you can see, it can be a domino effect of having to create multiple spreadsheets and multiple files, multiple dimensions and assets for the specific channel that you are doing that. So you end up with what you used to have as one product with one couple assets going to one storefront is now multiplied, but with all slightly different tweaks and specifications. Yeah, I know that by heart. We have a lot of those topics in Syncspoter. People want to start selling on Amazon, and they are used to have a Woocommerce or a Shopify or a Magento and they can do whatever they want to do there. But then you go to Amazon and first of all, does the product exist there? Are you a reseller? Would you like just to add it to your cart and add to your listing and put some other price on it with a different stock? Or do you need to create that product? And if you need to create that product, that's the nightmare, then because the attributes are different, the images need to be most likely different because there are specifications, and store owners never had a specification for this image. Needs to be this. With this hate, a square white background and all this kind of stuff. And I think for those who tried it and got, I don't know, headache to do this and stopped it, how could they have maybe solved this battle? What's the missing gap that people need to know that it is, of course, work, but it is doable and manageable, definitely. So what we've done at Canto and what we recommend is you need a single source of truth, and you need a single source of truth that puts your product first, because that's the most important thing. You're selling your product. You have all of the specifications that go into it. There's a couple different avenues that'll go down here, but the first and foremost is if you have wrong product information up on your site or an Amazon site, that can have penalties, it can be suppressed, it could be taken down, return rates can go up because it was wrong information, whether that be an asset that was outdated and it no longer looks like that, if it's a material you no longer use because it's hard to source that. There's a variety of reasons why things change. So you need to be able to have a single source of truth that can keep all of that information together and then allow yourself to create different channels so you can automate. Okay, Amazon, we have a new product. We're launching this. We want to get it up and running. We know this. Okay, we have a channel for it. Boom. We can send it there. We can upload it on our Shopify storefront. Okay, great. Nordstrom wants it. You know, the sporting goods store wants it, whatever it might be. You have that single source of truth and you have these channels set up so that when there is a tweak or you do need to update Something, you're not having to change that in five different places or perhaps more. You only have to do it once. And that's, I think, a very important thing. So listing on different marketplaces or balancing between multiple marketplaces is simply not really possible without automation. Would you agree anything's possible, right? You can, yeah. With a lot of resources, of course, everything is possible. Sure. But it's whether or not there's. You want to take the. I don't want to say risk too harshly, but there is the opportunity. When you're passing hands, I always said it's like a game of telephone, right. When you're a kid, you play that game where you whisper into someone's ear and it goes around and it's a completely different phrase from when you started. When it passes hands and there's no one team that's responsible for each and every aspect of the product product, it has to change hands. So if you have a single source of truth that can be that epicenter of everything that allows you to feel more comfortable for the people that are doing their jobs and then let the automation take away the stress and anxiety of needing to update that on any different multiple platforms. So I would say when people are starting out realistically, maybe they don't have the, the budget to implement something like that. But as you grow, it's really important to think about your infrastructure first. But. So you can scale and you can grow as quickly as you want to and have the trusted relationship with the retailer. Because it's so important when you're working with a retailer who is going to be selling your product, you want to have a strong relationship that's built in trust and efficiency. Got it. What's, in your opinion, the most common mistake E commerce brands make when it comes to content? Let's see, the most common mistake, I think that it's potentially when we think about content, I think it's mostly thought of as a resource instead of actually like a operational system. Because when we're creating content, it's really important to have great photography, great campaigns and have all of these assets associated with it. And they. I think it can be thought of as well it's a need to have, but it's an additional resource. But let's think about this. I think you really need to think about it as a infrastructure and something that you can manage at scale because you want consistency, you want authenticity, but you want to be able to manage that and make sure it's within your guidelines and it's something that fits with the brand. So I think it's really important to treat content as a creative output instead of an operational system. Yeah, yeah, it is. Content is actually creativity and creative output, but in my opinion, it's still operational because it's a must to have. Did you see actually listings going down because of bad content or bad listing behavior in terms of attributes or returns or something? There's definitely listings that have been taken down or suppressed because of inaccurate information. That's just a fact and something that we hopefully can stay away from. And the best way to do that is to just have a system in place that is a single source of truth. So there is definitely that risk when you have outdated content or the wrong dimensions or background or anything like that, that it could get taken down or suppressed. That's a big risk and something that we've definitely heard a lot of people coming to us because they have had this situation. And in a place where speed, efficiency and trust is key, that is something that they can't ever have happen again. Yeah. Now in the world and time of AI, I think a lot of people tend to manipulate the content. Yesterday I've seen a video from, from a very famous ERP softw, at least in Europe, that they implemented AI with. They had a product image and right within the ERP they described. Okay, I need a couple of other images around that product with other backgrounds and people in front of and whatever. And the AI did. All of that looks amazing. For me as a user, as someone watching those pictures, that really looks great and maybe well enough. But what is the trend there? What is what we really should do with products, product pictures? Because it's the most important selling point of a product, in my opinion, is the picture. It's not the text. I hate reading. I know we need the text, but we actually watch the picture and say, this is a great product or this is not. So what is your feeling around this entire new world? AI is so powerful and I don't think that the AI conversation is going to be stopping anytime soon. And I've recently hosted our webinar, the Future of Digital Content. And we talked a lot about AI and one of the things that we had found. So Canto does a study every year called the State of Digital. We interview over 400 marketing and creatives about some of the trends that they're seeing. And what we've noticed is really interesting, is that a lot of people are still using AI to create content. Like you said, that whether it's the images and finding and retuning it but what we're seeing a lot of is actually the transition from AI being a creative output to being more of a operational output. So we think of AI and you're uploading, you have a lifestyle shoot, you have a new campaign, you upload a whole slew of images, right? You have to now add tags, add descriptions, add information so that you can actually use these images and have people search for them. That's a lot of time and effort to do that. But if you use AI to analyze it and use what we call smart tags, or if you're searching for an asset that you have just typing in natural language, I want to see woman with red umbrella standing in the rain. Because you need that for a campaign, you can do that and search for that. So I think we're seeing a lot of using AI to both analyze the images so you can automatically tag them so that they're stored properly, but at the same time, speed and efficiency for searching. Because if I'm an end user and I'm coming in to share an image out, but I didn't wasn't the one that uploaded or created it, I'm not going to have any idea of what it was named or perhaps the SKU number or anything like that. So I want to be able to just search in how I would search in my own brain and have the results be what I expect. So that's where we're seeing AI really be a really dramatic improvement for folks in terms of speed and efficiency is searchability in organization. Yeah, absolutely. So there is still no end to. To become a good photographer and take the pictures of products, because it's still needed. It's not just that you toss the AI. Here is my smartphone picture, make something great out of it. I personally feel like we've. I don't know, it's just something that I'm hearing where a lot of people are staying away from that because we can really tell what's AI or not. And I think when you're thinking about your product, it's really important to showcase it authentically. And while it's important you can use AI and manipulate a background or ever like that. But I do think that creative teams, you need the human element and you can really see what your product is meant to be, who it's for, how it's used in an authentic way. So I'm more partial to having it be a creative experience and I think a lot of creatives feel that way too. But there's a time and a place for everything. But I Think moving forward, the teams that are going to quote unquote, win with AI are going to use it in an operational fashion. Instead of trying to create a bunch of new images, they're going to think about a better way to organize it. Yeah, got it. Is there any new trend in terms of product content that you see frequently and that is getting more and more important to have? I think it's fairly, I would say like user generated content is something that we see a lot. We see people whether whether it's a they're at home, they have brand ambassadors or it's people in the wild then tagging it. I do think that the user generated content is something that isn't going to go away. I think a lot of people are really savvy and they do their research on a product way before they're going to buy it and they're going to places like Instagram and TikTok and search engines, they're going directly for the answer. So they want to hear from the brand, but they also want to hear on behalf of the people like them that are using it. So I and a lot of brands are harnessing that user generated content for their own marketing like they should. So brands need to keep up with the fact that people are going to be online telling their brand story. So if they want to continue that, they need to have some ownership in how that's happening. So I do think it's important for brands to have a place where their ambassadors or users, their customers can understand them a little bit more and have guidelines around if they're using a brand ambassador or if it's a someone that is promoting their content, whatever it might be. They need to have a system in place so while it seems authentic, they're still allowed to have the right imagery and assets along with it. Yeah, I need to agree to that. That's absolutely true. There. See it the same. Yeah. Let's come to one of my favorite questions. Who has told you the most about E commerce in your career? Oh, honestly probably just my team at Canto. I mean we worked at a company called Image Relay before it was acquired by Kanto and we were really thinking about the customer. So I would say the customers that I've worked with have taught me the most because I'm hearing exactly what their pain points are and so from there I can adapt to what is going to be the best fit for them. I don't think. I personally don't sell a product, so I need to know from someone who does. And just listening to our customers about what their pain points are, what they're experiencing, how hard it is to launch a new product, how hard it is to gain trust. That's where I would say I've learned the most about E commerce. Thank you so much. And before we wrap up, there is one question passed down from our last guest, Aaron, the GM of Shopify at Cloudinary. Over the last 24 to 36 months, where have you invested time in and why that you would recommend to the listeners of the podcast? Okay, 24 to 36 months, that seems like an eternity of time. So I'd say over the past two. I have a two year old, so I think that maybe that's why it's felt like an attorney of time. But I would say, like with the AI conversation, I've tried to get really savvy on the right prompts because I know that's going to get me the best, best output. So I've been listening to my teammates who, you know, we have a Slack channel about how people have used AI and how it's helped their work and be more efficient. But I'm trying to get really savvy in the prompts that I ask it so I don't have to find the question four or five times. I can really just get it on the right answer. So I would definitely recommend reaching out to people who are savvy and can get the right prompts so you can get that in return. Love that answer. Really great one. Now it's your turn. What's the question? The one question you'd love to ask our next guest. Okay, I think that in the sake of trying to. Sometimes I can be a control freak. So I like that this is potentially something that they can resonate with. So what's a manual task that you're currently doing that you know that you should automate, but you are attached to it and terrified to let it go? This is a great one. I love that. Really? Really. This resonates with ThinkSpider, with automation. It's the perfect question for this podcast. I love that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, Lyn. This was a powerful reminder that scaling E commerce is not only about more traffic or more SKUs, but it's about control. It's product content may not feel glamorous, it's important, but when it's messy, everything slows down. And when it's organized, launches get faster, returns drop, and I think the team can breathe easier. So thank you for breaking down a topic that affects every growing brand, even if they don't realize it. And to everyone listening, if your team is spending more time searching for files then selling products, it might be time to rethink the content operations. So thank you so much watching this episode. We'll see you next time on the EcomOps Podcast. And that's it for this episode of the EcomOps Podcast. If you enjoyed listening and would like us find and interview more e Commerce operations experts, Please search for EcoMouse podcasts in your favorite podcast listening app and then subscribe, rate and review. Until next time, this episode is sponsored by B2Bware, the B2B commerce platform that replaces your email orders, your manual data entry, and your integration. Mess with one system that runs on your ERP. Check them out@b2bware.com.