5 Reasons Why Marketers Need Image Recognition

If your customers are seeking visual data via image recognition, it’s important to understand why. If marketers are not utilizing image recognition technology, they are missing out on a lot of valuable data. Over 85% of logos within images posted to social media don’t contain any tag or text brand mention. Without this data brands can’t be sure they are generating enough insights to make important brand decisions. The future of digital marketing is all about visual data. Understanding this is key, as looking forward and knowing what is coming next in the digital age is how marketers can succeed.

So how exactly can image recognition help them achieve digital marketing success? By integrating an image recognition API (Application Programming Interface) to their current text based analytics platforms, companies can quickly start to offer visual insights without the need for labor intensive product creation. Integrating an image recognition API is a quick and stress-free way to give your customers the best solution to their problems. Here are 5 benefits of integrating API for image recognition to help optimize your customers’ marketing strategies…

1. Image recognition gives them a competitive advantage:

Visual analytics and visual listening are so important when it comes to social media monitoring. But what exactly is visual analytics? Put simply, it is a form of analytics that displays visual data that has been extracted from images and video. But what can that do for marketers? And how can visual listening help them market their brand? It allows them to monitor trends in real-time in order to have competitive advantages. What this means is that not only can they see what people are saying about their brand, but they can also see what people are saying about their competitors‘ brands. This gives them a distinct advantage as they can identify their competitors’ customers’ concerns in real-time and indirectly address them throughout their marketing campaigns and strategies.

2. It supplies them with brand insights:

Text-based insights just aren’t enough anymore. With over 3.2 billion photos uploaded to the internet every day and visual content being 40 times more likely to be shared than other forms of content, it’s a no-brainer that visual listening is the way forward for brands. Images and videos are replacing text and at a rapid rate. If your customers’ marketing team want to fully understand their audience and potential and existing customers then they will need to be analyzing all of their brand insights. And, of course, this includes insights generated from image-based and video-based posts.

With image recognition API, marketers can also prioritize the insights they analyze, making targeted advertising much more effective when it comes to marketing their brand. Psychographic information can be particularly useful for marketers as it shows what kind of person they are, while demographic information tells us who they are. More importantly, it tells marketers why they are buying certain products based on the type of person they are. This data is a lot more in depth than demographics, and image recognition can help marketers gather this data. Insights like a customer’s psychographics or geolocation, or demographics such as their gender or age are really useful for marketers as it allows them to tailor their marketing content to suit their particular audience.

3. They can monitor sponsorship ROI and implement brand protection:

Marketers can track how well a sponsorship is doing with image recognition which makes it much easier to figure out how much revenue they will return. They can also find out who would be a suitable social media influencer to sponsor in the future based on whether or not they mention their product already without any prior brand deal or sponsorship. According to a study carried out by Deloitte in 2015, when it comes to buying decisions, 47% of millennials are influenced by what is said on social media. So if a particular influencer references your customers’ brand in the form of an image, without mentioning the brand in the accompanying text, marketers can now understand what the customer is saying and how many people they are influencing, by looking within the image.

Image recognition is also extremely important if a particular brand suffers in relation to counterfeit or fraudulent brand logos. eBay, for example, requires image recognition in order to find counterfeit brands that are being sold on their website and with image recognition API, your customers too can determine whether or not their brand is being sold under a counterfeit logo.

4. It helps with strengthening their CRM and lead nurturing strategies:

By gaining all of these valuable insights about their brand, marketers can greatly improve their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and lead nurturing strategies. Once they are analyzing the data and insights generated from visual listening, they can then fully understand their audience and their audience’s needs. This will help enormously when it comes to nurturing both leads and existing customers because if marketers are able to identify what their interests and needs are, they can tailor their strategies to appeal to those needs. According to the Adestra and Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census, 46% of email marketers believed disconnected technologies to be the biggest obstacle when it came to effective email marketing. With image recognition, marketers can avoid this obstacle by integrating it into their own systems, making CRM much more effective.

5. They will ultimately achieve improved customer engagement:

If your customers’ CRM and lead nurturing strategies have improved and they continue to increase the amount of loyal customers they have through using image recognition, it should be no surprise that their customer engagement will have improved too. User Generated Content (UGC) is also a great way for companies to cheaply promote their brand and with an image recognition API integration, marketers can monitor just how great it is.

According to eMarketer, 86% of millennials believe UGC to be a good indicator in determining the quality of a brand. And if the majority of online posts contain images, image recognition is vital in order to analyze that visual data. Engagement on social media is so important when it comes to digital marketing as it is the best way to maintain a loyal buyer-seller relationship. By analyzing the insights gathered from visual analytics, marketers can ensure their social media content is customized and their customer engagement is suited to each stage of the consumer journey.

To sum up…

Image recognition is great for marketers in order to optimize all of their marketing strategies. By implementing visual listening, they can gain much clearer brand insights, data, and metrics that they wouldn’t have if they weren’t using image recognition technology. Your customers can strengthen their CRM and better their lead nurturing strategy in order to improve customer engagement throughout all stages of the consumer journey. For marketers, the future of marketing is digital, and the future of digital is visual. The time is now to integrate and innovate for the best insights and to deliver the future today.

Originally published at blog.logograb.com on November 25, 2016.