As a small business, you might be wondering how you can compete with the big cooperate giants in the industry? How you can drive traffic your way?
As the world we know is advancing technologically, so is the digital world. As new and improved tools are being created to make digital marketing more effective and easier. Nowadays, small businesses can use visual search engine tools to help clients to locate them faster and easier.
As a small business, boosting sales and expanding generically is one of the major goals. Finding the perfect way to market your products and get it across to your clients has now been made easy. More and more businesses are using visual search engine tools to stay on top of the competition.
Visual search engine is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate information about a particular image or text. All the user needs to do is just to take a snapshot of the object or a user can also find an image of what they are interested in and upload it to the visual search engine tool. The tool gives the user information about the image very quickly.
Every day, millions of people access billions of images across devices and most times much of it has to do with images of products they are interested in. Noting this, visual search engine was created. It is especially useful for eCommerce brands looking to boost sales. Various big brands like Google, Pinterest, Bing, Snapchat, Amazon and eBay have started incorporating this tool in their brands.
Benefits of Visual Search Engines
With more and more brands using visual search engines, it is important for you to get on the bandwagon and stay ahead of the competition. Some the benefits you can get as a small business or start-up are;
Builds Lasting Relationships
most times, clients tend to look for a brand they can trust and stick with it. Building an online presence and making your brand easily accessible can help to build a lasting relationship with potential clients. You can also read our post on various ways you can build lasting relationships with your customers here.
Changing the Mind of Clients
Clients generally want to engage with a brand they can trust. Seeing your products and actually getting the exact value of service advertised can help to change the mind of potential clients about your business.
Increased Sales and Profits
Marketers have noticed brands and stores who have invested in visual search engine tools have over time generated an increase in their overall revenue. Gartner predicted that “By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%”. The more engaging customers a brand acquires, the more its profits shoot up.
Get Discovered by New users
Strategically setting up your business digitally is the way forward now. As more and more transactions and activities are carried out online. Most clients these days tend to make purchases online and having a visual search tool added to your business can help these clients locate your business faster.
Businesses that appear to answer to the needs of a lot of clients definitely have high chances of getting huge returns on investments.
Let us take a look at some of the biggest brands and how they have incorporated visual search engine tool into their business.
GOOGLE (Google Lens)
The world’s biggest search platform Google launched Google Lens at GOOGLE I/O in 2017. Since then, it has become one of the biggest visual search tools used today. This app can be assessed on a mobile device by downloading it from the mobile app store. This app works by directing the camera of your mobile device to the object of interest, taking a snapshot and the app would get information about the object. The good thing about this app is that it doesn’t just work for images alone.
Google Lens can also interpret texts for example, if you take a picture of any text in foreign language, the app would interpret it for you and inform you about where it is from. It can also give users information on a restaurant menu when a picture of the restaurant is taken.
Source: Google
Google Lens is said to be one of the most accurate visual search engine app as researched by an Image Recognition Accuracy Study.
It was concluded in the final report that “Google Vision is the clear winner among the image recognition engines for both raw accuracy and consistency with how a human would describe an image”
Pinterest Lens
Also introduced in 2017, Pinterest adopted the use of visual search to create the best user experience for their customers. Pinterest boasts that this Lens is able to recognize over a billion items. With a huge customer base of over a million users per day, the lens has made finding items for users much easier.
Also read: Small Business Guide To Facebook Marketing
Being one of the biggest ecommerce platforms out there, Pinterest boasts that “it drives more traffic referrals to shopping sites than other platforms do”. With an impressive result of 41% compared to other social platforms, it was discovered that customers who shop in-store prefer to make use of the platform.
Source: Pinterest
Pinterest introduced the lens to make item search for both customers and store owners more organized and easier.
Snapchat Camera Search
Camera search, introduced in September, 2018 by Snapchat is another example of a visual search engine. Snapchat camera search enables users to search for a product on Amazon products platform.
All a user needs to do is direct the camera of their device at an object and the app does the rest.
The app generates a barcode and then displays a link to where users can locate the item on Amazon. In cases where the item cannot be located, a list of similar items is offered to the user from the Amazon store.
You can check out our post on how to get more snapchat views and followers here.
How Small Businesses Can Apply The Use Of Visual Search Engine To Their Business
For small businesses to get the benefits that comes with using visual search engine, knowing how to adopt it into the business is important. These steps can help to apply it to your business:
Follow The General Structure Data Guideline
It is imperative that you structure and organize contents on your website in such a way that search engines can get as much information as possible about your business and products. You can heck out Google’s general structure data guideline for more ideas on how to go about it.
When adding contents to your website, you should make sure that you input as much information about the product as possible. Also, making your location and business clear is important in helping search sites recognize your business.
Also read: How To Build Social Media Marketing Funnel
Name Your Files clearly
Your files should be named simply and easier to recognize. For example, renaming an image with “Blue-Turquoise-Dress” is easier to locate and recognize than naming it “IMG-20200918”. You have to put in mind what you think users search for when using search engines.
Adjust Your Image Size Appropriately
Resizing your image to fit into any platforms recommended size is important as this determines how fast your images would appear when a user search for it. Images that load slower discourages a potential customer from checking out the rest of the contents on your website.
Organize Your Website Structure
You have to make sure that your website is accessible to visitors. The site should also contain fresh content and originality. Optimize your site’s performance level to increase the site loading speed and accessibility. You can read up on how to organize your websites/ landing pages from our post here
Visual search engine is integrating and becoming a part of eCommerce today. Big brands are now using it to give the best user experience for their customers. It is therefore expedient that small businesses consider espousing it into their businesses. This will enable you to be a part of an evolving generation and enables you to stay on top of the competition.
