Creating Data-Driven Content to Keep Brands Competitive with Synthrone

Brands needn’t look far these days to find companies that can provide them with analytics about how much they are selling and who they are selling it to. In fact, many brands find themselves in the position of having too much data rather than not enough, and struggle to manage that data and create content that can compete with category best-sellers in the e-retail marketplace.

Tools like tracking, web scraping, and analytics services can be important investments for a brand, but unless that information is easily accessible and actionable by the brand’s e-commerce agency or team, that data isn’t inherently useful. Synthrone combines the human expertise of an e-commerce agency with the tracking, web scraping, and analytics capabilities of a technology company, giving brands a streamlined option for creating meaningful, data-driven content.

We spoke with Brian Ludwicki, Head of Business Intelligence and Data Engineering with Pathfinder 23, about how Synthrone is helping brands organize and modernize their content and data.

What Does Synthrone Do?

Essentially, Synthrone synthesizes massive amounts of data that human-powered efforts can never match. It specializes in organizing data, monitoring keyword performance, tracking competitor content, recommending data-driven solutions for how brands should create content, and tracking how that content performs online.

Explaining all Synthrone’s complex capabilities in one article isn’t just impossible, it would likely soon become obsolete. Synthrone constantly builds and tests new technologies, services, and solutions based on years of expert experience and evolving client needs. Adaptability and flexibility are baked into the Synthrone ethos, and clients reap the rewards.

When asked what Synthrone function he is currently most proud of, Ludwicki had an easy answer: “Amazon API connection for live data extraction and content delivery,” he said.

“We are doing a lot of e-merchandising as an agency, so we have a big team delivering assets to various platforms and Amazon is the biggest one. We are doing tens of thousands of implementations a year, so automating delivery means our team is free to do other tasks such as consultancies and strategic work recommendations. This benefits both us and the client because we are using resources more efficiently and strategically.”

But let’s begin at the beginning. For a brand to position itself for success, the first step is often the most pressing and most overlooked: it needs to get its house in order.

Synthrone Gives Large Brands the Organizational Tools They Need

One of the biggest issues facing brands that come to Synthrone for help is disorganization. They are dealing with brand teams, content creators, graphic designers, e-commerce teams, sales teams, and more, and each of those teams operates independently. Everyone wants something different, and everyone may store content differently. The result is chaos.

“Synthrone consolidates all of a brand’s content and digital assets and puts structure to it,” Ludwicki explained. “Everything is stored in our systems. We limit the things that members of different teams can do with the content, so it can’t be modified or deleted without approval. We make sure that everything is compliant and that every digital asset is mapped: It’s named in the same way and put in the same place, and that organization limits the chaos that the clients are facing.”

Once the information is in Synthrone’s system, everything has a unique ID number so any type of asset can easily be found. This means that large-scale changes, like tweaking 5,000 product titles, can be completed with ease. Different team members never have to wonder if they are looking at the most recent piece of content, or if one person tinkering with the assets will mess up everyone else’s workflow. Editing content and pushing out changes to e-retail platforms is a controlled process.

“The publishing platform is not something where anybody can enter, make a change, save, and exit,” Ludwicki said. “When you make a change, it’s a proposal of a change, and a master approver has the final say if the change is good or not before it can be saved and sent out to a retail platform.”

For one client, Ludwicki said, Synthrone is storing more than 60,000 SKUs and delivering content to more than 250 platforms, while simultaneously monitoring content quality across most of those platforms. “This covers one of the most demanding and error-prone processes our clients are facing, and diminishes their workload significantly,” he said.

Companies with disorganized data storage systems are unable to effectively scale their e-retail efforts. With Synthrone, brands can store all their digital assets for e-retail needs in one place, easily get those assets onto any retail platform of their choosing, and then see how those assets are doing in terms of traffic and compared to competitors.

Intuitive Dashboards for Interpreting and Creating Data-Driven Content

If a brand is looking for a specific type of data, Synthrone can likely help them gather it. It has teams of data scientists working with machine learning on advanced text analysis of customer reviews, on a cloud solution for large-scope web scraping, and teams of analysts and data scientists working on data visualization. Parsing all that data can be an additional hurdle for brands, so Synthrone is streamlining that process as well.

“The dashboards give easy access to all the necessary information about your current status in e-commerce on a large number of platforms and allow you to benchmark yourself to competitors,” Ludwicki said. “Our analysts work directly with the client, checking on what they might need in their specific dashboard. What is its purpose? Who’s going to use it?”

Synthrone dashboards can be customized to fit specific company needs, to help monitor exactly what you need on the platforms you use.

The capabilities of the dashboards are broad, from tracking sales metrics like ordered units, traffic, prices, out-of-stocks, and listing scores, to more advanced brand analytics that inject live sales into the dashboard via API, with expandable tables to visually view the performance of your products.

“Our dashboards aim to concentrate all the information about your products in a single space and combine them, so we can interact between them,” Ludwicki said, “But it only serves as the basis for identifying potential problems; it doesn’t solve them, so an analyst on our side will give recommendations to the key account manager on the client side, with summary emails sent regularly to track performance. In this way, the dashboard can be used to easily identify outages, which products are underperforming and in which area exactly–in the share, listing position, conversions, and so on.”

At this point the account manager can use the information consolidated in the dashboard to create impactful, data-driven content and make necessary changes to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. When new insights are needed, the dashboards can be adjusted.

“Each dashboard is completely different, and it does completely different things,” Ludwicki said. “We do not have a single solution that does only one thing, but we can build quite a lot of things based on the briefing that our client provides.”

by: Jeff Kirby

This interview is part of a blog series highlighting the extensive e-commerce expertise and thought leadership throughout Brand New Galaxy – provided by content26.