Product Communication Excels With Datasheets
Product sheets or datasheets are essential for many brands or manufacturers.
A product datasheet (in PDF or print format), summarizes the performance, advantages and technical characteristics of your products, material or services. These can be market-specific or client-specific and are crucial to conveying the quality and advantages of your products. It’s also an ideal way of increasing engagement and improving the overall buying experience.
A product datasheet provides a concise overview of product variants. Think about the specifications like color, size, style, materials, weight, washing instructions, packaging, and country of origin. In other words, you can provide your customers with all of the information they need to make an informed buying decision!
As part of a comprehensive communication strategy, product datasheets offer great value.
5 Key Reasons to Use Product Datasheets:
- Increase product sales
- Reduce risks
- Share essential product data and information
- Provide consistent information
- Compare differences between products
How to Prepare Product Datasheets – The Traditional Way
Using a traditional method, preparing product datasheets can often be very complex and time consuming.
First, a creative studio will be needed to prepare the initial creation of the datasheet. This should be in line with your brand look & feel and also be eye-catching enough so that your product datasheet grabs the attention of your customers.
Next, specific product data will need to be gathered, likely from multiple sources:
- Product descriptions and other sales related information from your PIM
- Prices, and other information from your ERP
- Images from your DAM or your studio team
This information will then be sent to a layout artist to paginate the gathered information in a DTP (Desktop Publishing) application, such as Adobe InDesign.
Next, preparation of a first draft of the datasheet is developed and shared in PDF or print format for review by the product team and all stakeholders.
Following this, will often include one or two validation phases, between the product team and the creative studio. This step can result in many back and forth exchanges and require a substantial amount of time and effort.
Lastly, a final layout and content is agreed upon, resulting in the generation of the final PDF of the product datasheet, which may then be used digitally as a PDF or tangibly printed on paper for distribution. In all, the traditional process for creating product datasheets is typically very cumbersome.
Always Remember, A Quality Product Datasheet Should Include:
- Product name
- A description of your product
- One or more images of your product
- Product specifications
- A call to action to the customer
Priint Datasheet Automation
Based on the priint Group's experience of helping our customers with print and marketing automation projects for many years, we knew there was a better way for our customers to produce high-quality product datasheets with ease. Of course, the print:suite is capable of producing product datasheets as well a variety of marketing materials. However, we are also aware that some brands and manufacturers are interested in only producing product datasheets, without going into a complete print project.
The priint Group saw the need for a simple solution. With our experience working with many PIM and content partner vendors, we saw the opportunity to trigger the generation of product datasheets directly from Content Management Systems such as a PIM, CMS, CRM and others, without having to go through the many steps related to manual creations. What better way to produce product datasheets than from the source where this product data resides?
priint Datasheet Services in the Cloud
The priint Group is thrilled to announce the launch of the first cloud-based product datasheet service integrated with the Akeneo PIM.
Based on our new and powerful priint:cloud technology, the priint datasheet service for Akeneo is fully integrated into the host PIM. It is extremely fast and simple to use.
To trigger the creation of a new product datasheet, the user simply needs to change the value of a single attribute in their PIM. The cloud-based priint datasheet service for Akeneo produces a PDF datasheet and then saves the generated PDF file back into their PIM as a new file. The PDF is automatically linked to the product in the PIM.
With the priint datasheet service, all system complexity and hard work is done directly in the cloud on the powerful priint:cloud server. It is totally transparent to users.
With one simple click, a new product datasheet is created and ready to be used and shared with customers / prospects within minutes.
Fast, efficient and simple.
The Future
This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for announcements in the coming months about capability with our other PIM vendors, as well as CMS, CRM, and new e-commerce solutions. At the priint Group, we are fully committed at modernizing and automating print processes and to help our customers reduce the amount of work required to produce marketing materials, such as product datasheets. The future is bright with priint!