A picture might tell a thousand words, but it is about to offer a thousand advertising opportunities as well? The rise of image search is about to rival that of the keyword, and marketers are best advised to prepare for the revolution, writes Kazu Takiguchi, CEO and Founder of Creadits.
Take your mind back to simpler times: The turn of the Millenium. The internet was at its infancy, with social media far on the horizon and video hosting but a dream. In those early days, a company like Google made the impossible possible by using text terms to comb through the annals of the world wide web and return relevant pages. These searches opened up countless opportunities for marketers to foreground products and spread messaging like never before. And now – two decades later – another internet search revolution is about to take place.
Image search is getting smarter, understanding objects and extracting semantic information faster than ever before. The advancing technology is unlocking advertising potential for images that marketers have the perfect chance to take advantage of. Now is the time for advertisers to prepare their websites for the browsing realities of tomorrow. A picture might tell a thousand words, but it is about to offer a thousand advertising opportunities as well.
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Why the image hype
Image search is a simple yet notoriously difficult concept to implement. At its core, searching online for visuals allows the use of an image as an input to receive another related image as an output. For example, an image of a chair could be recognized and returned with related pictures of rugs to accompany the style of the chair.
Humans are naturally visual creatures: The brain can identify any given image within 13 milliseconds. However, this feat is not so easy for a motherboard. The difficulty thus far has been the semantic understanding of objects and enabling machine minds to unpack the meaning behind any given image. Nonetheless, better processes and stronger computers mean the possibilities of image search are now starting to be realized.
It is a huge potential market. Images are returned for 19% of search queries on Google and, according to eMarketer, 75 percent of U.S. internet users regularly or always search for visual content before making a purchase. Further, 62% of millennials want the ability to visually search over any other new technology, and the likes of Google, Amazon, Pinterest and Bing have already developed significant capabilities in this area.
There are more than 600 million visual searches on Pinterest each month, with image-based ads on the platform enjoying an 8.5 percent conversion rate. At this rate, Pinterest is projected to achieve $1 billion a year in ad revenue by 2020. Such success prompted Pinterest’s Chief Executive Officer Ben Silbermann to predict that “the future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords.”
Why marketers should care
Impressive image search results are already seeing the digital big players take note and, in turn, further develop the technology to new heights. For example, the image search market is expected to grow to more than $25 billion by 2019, and early adopter brands which redesign their websites to support visual and voice search are predicted to increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.
The continued rise of image search is expected to prompt three major focuses for advertisers. First, increased company investment will beget more intuitive visual search features and technologies in the space. Second, smartphone integration will become central for users to capture and lodge image searches. Integration in smartphone cameras and applications will only accelerate adoption further. Third, content optimization will need to transcend text. The coming image revolution will mean that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is approached in a way that is has not been before.
The truth is that now is the perfect time for advertisers to prepare their content — or risk being left behind.
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Advertising ahead of the curve
The march towards visual search domination will be gradual, and so too must businesses gradually update their websites and back-end operations to advertise ahead of the curve.
Currently, only 8% of retailers have built image search into their web inventory. The leader in this field, Pinterest, sets the standard of where marketers should aim their efforts. For example, the platform’s recent deal with Target brings visual search technology to the retail giant’s apps and website, resulting in a seamless visual search experience which demonstrates the success that small and big businesses can find together.
The good news is that there are a slew of other actions marketers can take today to ensure success tomorrow, with tech being the first element to tackle. Companies can start to review content in their management systems with the potential to connect to experiences beyond websites. Marketers also have the opportunity to get a head start on appropriately tagging images for SEO purposes, something that has been lacking up until now. Brands can also get started on image optimization for Google and Bing searches, as well as determining additional frameworks like Pinterest and Amazon that can be optimized.
Once the tech is sorted, companies are best advised to start researching audience needs and desires for image search. This can range from understanding the target audience’s mobility choices and behaviors in preparing for integrated mobile technologies, to recognizing moments of user intent along the customer journey where visual search could help the brand. And, obviously, humans want ads that look good to the eye: so marketers are best advised to further optimize their adverts to be visually appealing.
In short, today is the day – so do not delay. Marketers should really have no excuses to getting their systems and processes up to speed for the coming visual search revolution. It is small preparations like these that can make a big difference to brand and business in the long run.