In the current era of the highly competitive business world, what organizations need to stay at the forefront is ‘innovation’. Yes, it is the innovation that is the key to success for any sector and the same rule applies for the marketing realm. Beth Comstock, the former Vice-Chair of General Electric once quoted a very interesting yet important fact about the same – “Marketing is about innovation. Marketing’s job is never done. It’s always about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day”. The aforementioned quote is what every marketing leaders must understand, rely on and follow if they want to succeed in their business journey.

Marketing has now evolved into digital marketing and the sector is thriving which such advancement. However, this is also a fact that with the continuous advancement in technology, the requirements of customers and the processes of handling operations in a business are also advancing. So, the matter of fact is that the digital marketing strategies are evolving and it’s just the innovation that can help businesses to cope with this. Nowadays, innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have given wings to digital marketing techniques, making it more effective and increasing the chances of sales conversion. Markets are versatile in the current era, and AI & ML are the reasons behind it. Different AI & ML tools can be utilized effectively to generate leads and increase the chances of sales conversion. Hence, it has become imperative for digital marketing companies to align their digital marketing practices with this fast-changing business world to attain growth and sustain in the ecosystem. So, in order to help our readers with the same, in this article we will discuss one such emerging technology that holds the potential of bringing a revolution in the marketing world. Let’s learn something about ‘Image Recognition’ technology and how it can transform the digital marketing industry.

What is Image Recognition?

It is the ability of a system or software to identify objects, people, places, and actions in images. It uses machine vision technologies with AI and trained algorithms to recognize images through a camera system. Considering the growing potential of computer vision, many organizations are investing in image recognition to interpret and analyze data coming primarily from visual sources for a number of uses such as medical image analysis, identifying objects in autonomous cars, face detection for security purpose, and much more.

The global image recognition market size was valued at $ 27.3 billion in 2019 and is expected to register a CAGR of 18.8 percent from 2020 to 2027. One of the most popular applications of image identification is social media monitoring, as visual listening and visual analytics are the essential factors of digital marketing. It is also responsible for bridging the gap between content and commerce.

Image recognition and visual search has the potential to change the way we interact with the world around us

From driverless cars to household robots, AI promises us an automated future of ease. It’s also set to change how we shop, and e-Commerce retailers are paying attention. ML-powered image recognition technology has already come to the world of digital marketing with the new technology impacting visual search, product tagging and content curation.

How image recognition technology can help businesses?

Integrating the application programming interface to the text-based analytics platforms will allow organizations to offer visual insights to their customers without the expensive product creation that uses logo detection. Nowadays customers are seeking visual data via image and video recognition.

Until recently, the process of searching for images of a certain product or brand has been time consuming and incomplete. Many social media marketing tools allow marketers to capture posts that mention a brand or product, some of which may include a photo. But that process is cumbersome. A marketer still has to go through each image manually to determine relevancy and draw insights. Now, artificial intelligence and image recognition are making it easier for marketers to find visuals within social media, even when they’re not accompanied by an explicit text mention. Today, we’re seeing the evolution of social media marketing, where companies can automate the discovery and identification of images across social media and respond appropriately. Image recognition technology across digital marketing also offers big benefits to organizations when it comes to customer service activities. For instance, if an automaker has a recall for a defective, outwardly visible mechanism, image recognition technology has the power to instantaneously uncover cases through images on social. Once the photos of the defective mechanism are gathered, the marketing team has a range of options to best react to each user, one of which is to alert customer service. The technology can help businesses monitor ROI and protect their brand. Not just that but it can help brands to track how sponsorship is doing with image and logo detection. Ultimately which will help them to determine how much revenue they will get in return.

Marketers have always invested where consumers spend their time. Being able to interpret what people are doing and saying on social media through photos is no exception. Companies have responded to the surge in images on social networks by creating their own visual content. With the advent of AI and image recognition, they can go even further by listening to what people are saying through images and using those insights to deliver a better, more seamless and delightful consumer experience across all channels and touchpoints.

Conclusion

Image recognition and visual search has the potential to change the way we interact with the world around us. Though our culture is already dominated by the visual, so it seems natural that we would use an image to start a search. After all, when we shop offline, we rarely start with a text. The visual search brings that sense of visual discovery to the online world. Moreover, we often want to find a new look, outfit, or theme, rather than a single object. Visual search technology helps to tie these items together based on aesthetic links in a way text has never been able to capture. Such is the power of AI, image recognition and visual search in the digital marketing realm. Google, Amazon, Pinterest, Bing, and a host of retailers have all developed their own visual search engines powered by AI and image recognition and their collective weight will surely see the technology’s use take hold very soon. Hence, image recognition technology is playing a huge role in connecting the real world to mobile devices, and with the web and social media becoming more visual, there are tremendous opportunities for marketers to mine that massive amount of visual data and generate analytics that isn’t possible using just text search alone.