News and Analysis
The Growth of Visual Search
Claire Carlile, in a recent post on visual search that contains useful tips for local businesses, shows us that Google is now making it possible to conduct a search that starts and ends with images. Her example search is conducted using Google Lens, where an image of a Sony headphones package is the “query” that produces a local pack result replete with its own images. This may or may not be the future of search, but it’s highly representative of the visual-first orientation that Google is embracing to a growing degree.
Report: Online Shopping Experiences Disrupted by Last-Mile Delivery Delays
Online grocery sales reached nearly $98 billion in the U.S. last year. Restaurants and home essentials sellers also saw incredible growth. While demand for the local delivery of goods purchased online continues to skyrocket, a new report finds that persistent delivery disruptions in the last mile threaten to impact customer retention and blunt long-term industry growth.
Unstructured Data Becomes an Untapped Opportunity for Brands
Unstructured data now represents 80% to 90% of all new enterprise data, according to Gartner, but just 18% of organizations are taking advantage. Unstructured data, like product images, customer audio files, and comments from social media, represents an untapped opportunity for marketers.
Commentary
Turning a Unique Vanity Phone Number into Many
Just over half of Americans now use their personal mobile phone numbers as their only phone numbers. A majority of Americans also no longer have landline phones in their homes, and that’s convenient because anyone, anywhere in the world, can now reach you with just that one number. But the opposite is true in the business world, where brands can leverage new technologies to create multiple vanity numbers in order to engage their customers across local, regional, and national marketing campaigns.
That statistic I cited above isn’t just an interesting bit of trivia. It highlights how the phone, an ancient communications medium compared to social media platforms, chatbots, messaging apps, and email, remains important to a brand’s marketing efforts.
Will Images Drive a New Local Search Paradigm?
Blumenthal to Mihm: Obviously AI/ML vis-à-vis image recognition is going to play a huge role going forward in terms of discovery and conversion. But I would have to add that it is also critically important to Google as a way to engage the user in “immersive search” behaviors. That is, drawing the user deeper and deeper into Google so that they never feel the need or desire to go someplace else. This will further seal off the walled garden of local discovery search.
You can see this in the new search by photos feature where the user is led into a grid of visual business choices and ultimately served up the Local Finder via the View list link or, if they click on an image, a business profile. But to get to the phone number, the user had to totally commit to diving deeper into Google.
Using Location Intelligence as Marketing Pixels for the Real World
Without pixels, marketing in the digital world would be a guessing game. However, with 90% of all commerce still taking place in the physical world, oftentimes marketers find themselves in the dark, not knowing how their customers are interacting with their brands offline. Enter location intelligence, or as we like to call it, pixels for the real world.
Take a moment to reflect on the past few weeks. Did you stop at a coffee shop on the way to work? Did you work out on specific days of the week at a nearby gym? Are there restaurants you frequent when you are too lazy to cook at home? In a study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers found that people frequent up to 25 places at any given time period. Similar to marketing pixels placed on websites, the ability to understand physical, real-world behavior such as path-to-purchase, visitation patterns, day-of-week preferences, and daily activities fuels more strategic decision making.
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#SFSNYC: GroundTruth Turns On-the-Ground Data Into IRL Transactions
When consumers visit physical stores, the likelihood that they will complete a purchase shoots up, especially in comparison to the likelihood they will make a purchase after visiting a digital site. “Visits lead to sales,” was the message of Hongzhe Sun of GroundTruth, one of the sponsors of Street Fight Summit in New York Wednesday.
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