Until recently, the growing popularity of images on social media and in consumer communication has been widening a gap in marketers’ capability to analyze consumer sentiment and preferences.
Now this gap is soon to close as image analysis technology finally gives digital platforms the gift of sight, enabling marketers to monitor not only consumer chatter, but also huge volumes of visual intelligence that was largely hidden from the analytical radar.
In this article, you’ll find a handful of suggestions on incorporating image analysis into your marketing activity, once you have integrated the appropriate software into your marketing, ecommerce, CRM, or ERP solutions.
Hear the Unspoken Sentiments
As you read this article, there is a cacophony of chatter taking place, all about your brand and products. The problem is, no matter how much effort you put into social media listening, you are only capturing a fraction of the sentiment expressed by your existing and future customers.
That’s because people are visually sharing their interactions with your products through the pictures they post on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other high-profile platforms. The text accompanying these images often contains no mention of the brand or product. In fact, according to Brandwatch, this is true in 80% of cases. Instead, the valuable information hides in the image itself, invisible to conventional consumer research technology.
Thanks to image analysis, you can listen to social media chatter visually. That may sound rather sci-fi, but it’s true. People use images to communicate on social media and if you’re able to monitor and analyze those images, you’re listening with computer vision.
This way you will have access to all the spoken and unspoken sentiments expressed by users of your products or services. For example, any time a customer posts a picture of one of your products, accompanied by a positive or negative sentiment, you will know about it even if the customer doesn’t mention your brand or product name ”and really, why would she, when she knows that the image alone is adequate to tell her story?
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors ¦ Literally
If you can listen to chatter about your own products, you can also learn about those of your competitors. You can use image analysis to find out where and when your competitors are sponsored, to learn about their advertising and marketing strategies, and to understand what buyers are saying about their brands and products.
You can use this technology in your own marketing strategy, to emulate what your competitors are doing well and, conversely, to capitalize on their errors.
Build Customer Affinity with Your Campaigns
Image analysis software can help you gather visual data about how your products are used in the real world. By monitoring social media feeds, visual data analytics applications can isolate, sort, and categorise online images that contain your products, even if your brand is not mentioned in any accompanying text.
You can use this technology to see how people are using your products, and from there gain inspiration for future marketing campaigns. This will help your marketing reflect real-world interaction between people and your brand and thus create a sense of affinity as customers will feel that the way they use your products is aligned with what you, as the brand owner, intended.
Make Product Search More Intuitive
Image analysis software is not just about knowing your customers and revealing sentiment. It can also be used to help your customers find the perfect purchase among your product range. The larger your range, the more value you and your customers will receive from the use of image recognition and analysis. Such visual product discovery tools can help you eliminate the need to add metadata to all your product images.
For example, if a customer sees a product of interest and wants to view related items in different categories, she can perform a visual search, tasking your ecommerce software with finding products visually similar to that which piqued her interest.
This type of search technology will surface related products more accurately than conventional search engines, potentially boosting your success with upselling and cross-selling. It will also save your enterprise much of the labor involved in maintaining metadata and tags for what might be thousands of images.
Cash in on User-generated Content
When you’re able to track down every image that is relevant to your brand or products and posted by its users, you gain access to a huge source of marketing media in the form of user-generated content (UGC). Not only can you see who is publicizing your brand, what they are saying about it, and how they are using your products, but you can even approach them about using their images in your marketing campaigns.
Brands like Starbucks, Apple, and GoPro have been conducting UGC marketing campaigns for years and enjoying great success, especially with millennials who, according to the study results reported in Business 2 Community, trust user-generated content 50% more than professional marketing or other brand-endorsed media.
Using image analytics, your brand too can capitalize on the public appetite for user-generated content. You can hunt down inspirational images or footage and seek rights to use them in your ads or campaign activities.
The beauty of this marketing form is that you can do it on a relatively low budget, since you don’t have to invest in resources for photo or video shoots. Instead, you can simply engage your audience of ready-made brand ambassadors ”the ones who are already showing you off on social media.
The Future May Be Emotional
Image analysis software may currently be delivering but a fraction of its total potential, both in the marketing world and other fields, and it does present some challenges and limitations. For example, it yet has a way to go before it understands images in the way that we as humans do intuitively.
However, the enthusiastic and dedicated community of computer vision consultants, data scientists, developers, and other specialists never rests in its search for new breakthroughs and keeps driving improvements in image analysis technology.
It’s really a question of when, rather than if, these breakthroughs will materialize, so even if you decide not to invest in image analysis right now, it would be a mistake not to keep an eye on the technology. After all ”to end on a slightly Orwellian note ”it’s surely keeping an eye on you.
