NOW Earns an Immediate Win in Product Content Performance

When you make and sell products for health-conscious consumers, every detail matters. That’s why NOW, a leading provider of natural foods, supplements and vitamins, keeps a focus on putting the most comprehensive, quality product information possible.

Previously, the CPG brand relied on a data management and delivery solution that was inadequate for NOW’s ambitious and competitive plans for its product content. But upon partnering with Syndigo, it has been able to unleash the full potential of its product data and assets, achieving remarkable results:

• Successfully transferred six years of product content to a new user-friendly data management system
• Easily found optimized connections to its most important retail recipients and quickly began sending them custom product content
• Saved hundreds of hours per year spent on manual data management, uploading and delivery tasks

NOW offers the most comprehensive selection in the natural products industry, with over 1,400 items in dietary supplements, sports nutrition, clean health & beauty formulas, essential oils, organic and non-GMO foods, pet health and more.

Adapting to a New E-Commerce Reality, One Retailer At a Time

NOW operates in highly saturated and competitive verticals across a long list of retailers and e-commerce stores. In order to make its products stand out, it needs to take full advantage of their unique features and fully express what they can offer to shoppers, which means tailoring information, positioning and creative for a digital environment.

Customizing product content for e-commerce was just the start for NOW. As e-commerce has evolved and matured, leaders at the brand determined a need to shift their product content strategy for a new reality, adjusting their messaging and content not just for online commerce but even customizing it for each particular endpoint.

“When I began the role, our main goal was to maintain content and just make sure that our content was distributed across all retailers,” said Larson. “Now we’re moving into how do we optimize that content for the e-commerce space and even more specifically, per retailer, how do we improve that content?”

NOW recognized that as the portion of total sales on e-commerce has grown, various online retail stores and marketplaces have started adjusting and optimizing their sites to differentiate themselves from competition and create a distinct, familiar customer experience that matches their brand.

Thanks to Syndigo’s world’s-largest network of over 1750 data recipients, NOW can easily deliver product content for its entire catalog to all of its most important retail partners from a single interface. Data arrives to each retailer customized and transformed for its specific data requirements and preferences so it gets published quickly and tailored to get results in that environment.

“We’re now in a much better position to be connected with retailers than we were before,” Larson shared. “It allows us to ensure that the content we’re sending out is reaching those retailers and it’s in the exact form what they want. You have all your retailers and these clear, concise attributes and you’re already working with them in the background. Say someone like Amazon or Walmart; Syndigo is working with them in the background to make sure you know exactly what they want, and you’re providing that to us as well—’this is what Amazon needs or this is what Walmart needs.’”

Larson found the two-sided nature of Syndigo’s retail network to be especially empowering. With Syndigo, data Syndication isn’t a one-way street—retailers and recipients can also send feedback back to manufacturers like NOW with receipt confirmations, error notifications, feedback and suggestions that empower the brand to make updates that improve the user experience and grow sales at that retailer.

“It’s just been amazing to not only enter our information incorrectly, we also then get feedback from those retailers if something is done incorrectly,” he explained. “It has provided this extra benefit to us that we didn’t even see coming where we now have a secondary check on our data. So now we can depend on Syndigo as another as another set of eyes to our data to make sure that we are sending the correct thing to these retailers.”

Supplementing with Syndigo: A Healthy Balance of Efficiency and Power

Like many of its products, NOW’s marketing team is potent but light on fluff. That makes it especially important to minimize manual tasks and ensure the team is getting the most impact for its efforts.

NOW competes with many large brands with lots of resources, so it needs every edge it can get. Transitioning to Syndigo has unlocked tremendous time savings and amplified the contributions of the marketing team, empowering NOW to do more with less. Larson compared the experience shifting to with Syndigo to with upgrading from a complex, manual and code-intensive operating system to one that just ‘works.’

“The best way I can explain it is our previous provider was more like a Linux system where you have all these tools, but you have to create the code, you have to manipulate the software to do exactly what you wanted to do…and you’re not exactly sure if what you’ve done is correct, or if the retailer is going to receive the content in the way you meant it to be received,” he explained. “When we’re looking at Linux on the other side, Syndigo is more like a Mac OS system. You have all your retailers and these clear, concise attributes and you’re already working with them in the background.”

Syndigo’s easy to use, intuitive technology has delivered so much efficiency, it has practically added a new member to the team! NOW was able to quickly transfer six years of accumulated product information, imagery, and other data from its previous solution into a new user-friendly interface that saves the brand precious time.

“The biggest thing we saw when looking at Syndigo versus our previous provider was we an increase in efficiency through both Core Content and the Analytical Suite offerings on the content side,” Larson shared. “We saw the potential to save not five hours, not 10 hours, but actually hundreds of hours over the course of a year.”