Why you need to optimize your brand for AI-powered digital search

A picture expresses a thousand words. So are the screenshots, especially as shoppers stare at the latest basketball shoes to grace the feet of their favorite influencers.

This is a simplified premise of visual search, which some see as an evolution of traditional keyword search. Because this makes the world instantly searchable and endlessly shoppable, from the jewelry on a celebrity’s finger to the couch on a TV chat set. show.

Words may be awkward, misspelled, or sometimes users don’t even know how to describe what they’re looking for. However, when searching visually, all of these limitations are lifted. Simply take a photo and enter it into a visual search engine and it will direct you to online retailers where you can get your product at the best price in the shortest time.

How visual search works

The technology works using a combination of computer vision, allowing you to “see” on your phone, tablet, or laptop (similar to Face ID or QR code scanning). And image recognition allows the digital eye to “understand” and categorize what it sees. As with all machine learning, understanding comes from training.

To find that basketball shoe in your camera roll, engineers trained an image search engine with hundreds of thousands of images of basketball shoes of different styles, sizes, and colors. The AI ​​engine studies and learns from every pixel in every image, allowing it to refine and expand its understanding over time.

“Effectively leveraging visual search requires a combination of technology integration, user experience design, and strategic marketing,” says author Blake Morgan. future customer.

“This is a threat to retailers who don’t consider how visual today’s customers are. Research shows that 62% of Millennials prefer visual search capabilities, so visual search If you don’t build a customer experience for them, they’ll be left behind. They’re visual learners, and that’s how they like to shop.”

Visual search opportunity

According to Katarzyna Dorsey, Founder and CEO of Yosh.AI, one of the biggest opportunities in visual search is for “brands to respond to the way people shop in creative and impactful ways, resulting in significantly higher conversion rates. It is possible to achieve this.”

Consider the type of shopper classified as a spearfisher. Because they are focused on buying specific products.

“Visual search can be very appealing to this group because it reduces friction. No typing, no scrolling, just the push of a button to get an item,” Dorsey explains. To do.

Similarly, visual search engines may direct online users to a product’s website even if the product is not available. Especially if he website is sophisticated enough, its users may be tempted to purchase alternatives. Instantly join a recommendation carousel to see similar and related items.

technology For example, you could use an image of basketball shoes as inspiration and return an image of the entire outfit. This may lead the user to purchase more items than originally planned.

For example, some products, such as basketball shoes, already have logos on them, leaving little room for error for well-trained visual search engines. However, products with more generic or less distinctive features are more open to interpretation by AI, and users’ visual searches may bypass products with those features as similar products.

The difficulty of visual search

A visual search for sofas may show several nearly identical sofas at different prices. When viewed through an e-commerce lens, they look nearly identical, drawing the buyer’s attention away from the original and toward one of the alternatives.

While this can be an issue for retailers that rely on more traditional brand interactions, there are some steps that can be taken to increase the likelihood that a particular product will be recognized by AI. there is.

“Retailers need to have a solid understanding of how visual search delivers information,” says Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications at WIX. To identify products, AR relies on the ability to recognize “billions of entities such as logos, brand colors, landmarks, text, and named objects.” All of this needs to be visible on the product’s online display for AI-powered visual search to select the product.

“For example, if you sell teapots, make sure your online image shows the handle and spout, ideally in profile. If you have an in-store display, give high priority to your logo. Make sure that ranking is given, that text is not obscured, and that objects are well-lit and well-staged. Don’t have a busy background.”

Where retailers can struggle is imagining use cases that leverage visual search to bring people into the store. After all, how can you take advantage of technology when you’re already surrounded by shelves packed with physical products? The answer might be to intentionally empty those shelves. yeah.

Introducing visual search in-store

This is what shoe brand Eobuwie did when they wanted to create a unique in-store experience. We hid all our products in a stock room filled with over 110,000 pairs of shoes, leaving a clean, future-proof retail space with just a table and a tablet. A place where customers can find the shoes they want. Selected shoes are sent from the inventory room to a rack and placed behind the register, creating a retail theater that customers can’t find online.

Visual search can expand on this concept and encourage customers to walk in from the street and find a match in-store. Not only this, Attracting young consumers It will appeal not only to consumers who normally shop online, but also to those looking for a more traditional retail experience.If the product is not in stock, the customer Already in the store, there is a possibility of an alternative purchase.

What is clear is that whether you view visual search as a threat or an opportunity, your reaction to technology must be equally proactive. This may be the next step in digital Darwinism that retailers need to proactively prepare for and optimize for.