Will AI Take Away Our Future?

As we all know, humanoid robots start to become a part of our everyday life nowadays. These robots are powered by the artificial intelligence. It is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machine where it should be able to recognize human speech, to learn and to plan new things as well as problem solving. Machine learning is one of the core parts of AI learning. It is a subset of AI that allows computers to learn the same way people do, only faster, without being explicitly programmed. This machine can often act and react like humans only if they have abundant information relating to the world, that is why DATA is important in this case. This AI is designed to help us, human, to simplify our jobs specifically in doing marketing.

Source: Evolution

AI can be used for ad targeting. Audience targeting is one of the key benefits of programmatic, allowing advertisers to reach the right consumers with relevant messaging or ads. These machines will be able to target individual users more precise than humans did based on a wide range of data points such as the behavioral information, and personal preferences allowing the machines to target individuals in highly relevant matter.

Reaching the right consumer does matter but it is also important to note that delivering the right experience for the right person is also needed. Many companies have used AI to deliver the best experience to their customers. Netflix, for instance, has used AI to make some different movie recommendations for each subscribers by collecting the user’s data of what kind of movies they watched. Based on that itself, AI will then predict what movies might be aligned with their preferences and suggest it to them. Dynamic creative optimization is the machine-learning technique that can be used to ensure that the companies will make the most of customer-centric personalization.

Another example is Google duplex where many businesses use it to enhance its customer service. This technology, which is both impressive and a bit on the creepy side, feature a human-sounding robot having a conversation with a person who couldn’t even tell that they were talking to a robot. It can even recognize different accents that people have. It also uses a natural tone and uses words and phrases like ‘um’ and ‘uh’ just like a human person would. During a conversation, this AI system can also handle interruptions and elaborate. This allows human to have a natural conversation with a computer. It is very helpful when it comes to handle some of or busy work where it can schedule appointments or answering our call to check the hours of operation at a business.

Source: Amazed

Given all the facts above, AI has already had a dramatic impact on the advertising landscape. With further learning, it is possible that AI will replace human jobs as it gets smarter and smarter each day resulting in an increase in the unemployment rate. What do you guys think of it? Do you think that it can completely replace human jobs after all? Do you think that AI brings more positive impacts rather than negative impacts? Or is it the other way around?

Would love to know what you guys think!

I’ll see you guys in my next post – maybe? *wink

 

Is It Ethical?

Social influencers refer to those individuals who have significant followers on social media. These influencers are frequently targeted by businesses to endorse their products since they have a large number of audiences seeing their posts each day. Their content has a large effect on people’s purchasing decisions. This would be a great way to expose the products to their target market.

 

Source: UpCity

According to research, 40% of people say they have purchased a product online as a result of seeing it being used by an influencer on social media. 72% of customers trust a business more after it is recommended by an influencer whereas 49% of consumers rely on product recommendations shared by influencers for their purchases. Some customers have even recommended a product or service based on an influencer post. Moreover, it is stated that consumers trust influencers 94% more than friends or family when making shopping decisions. Survey showed that social media influencers are their most trusted sources for shopping.

Customers trust them for their authentic and honest review of the products and thus, genuinely recommend the products to their followers.

Given the fact above, business has utilized this situation to increase their revenues as well as their brand popularity through paying influencers to say positive things about the products although those products are actually not that good. These influencers do not say what they really thought about the product and some of them, even, have a script of what the business wanted them to say. As a result, many customers are being lied to.

This strategy brings advantages to the business by putting the customers at a disadvantage situation.

Source: Huge IT

My question to you guys is  – do you think that it is ethical for businesses as well as for the influencers to do this kind of strategy – just pay the influencers to talk good things about the product? If you were the social influencer, would you do it? Why or why not?

Happy Reading! ❤

Augmented Reality: There is more

E-commerce has grown to the point where just about every business has a website and something we, as consumers, can purchase for them online. The online presence does generate a huge income stream, but, at the same time also incurs a huge amount of cost for the businesses.

Augmented reality refers to technology that overlays information and virtual objects on real-world scenes in real-time where it uses the existing environment and adds information to it to make a new artificial environment. Many of the businesses have used this technology to facilitate their consumers, for instance, IKEA has adopted this AR technology where it allows their consumers to scan their room and design the space by placing IKEA objects in the digital image of their room to create a new environment with the new products. This AR app helps their consumers who have purchased the furniture to avoid the tightrope in the future such as discovering that the product did not fit the space once it was delivered.

Source: Augmented Reality

Augmented reality has huge impact on the consumer buying decisions journey in the online shopping experience. For all I know, AR helps the consumers more than it aids the business where it utilizes technology to improve upon how our senses perceive things in the real world, however, in fact, it has also helps online retailers to increase its sales as well as reduce the cost amounts.

1. Reduce the cost of returns

Research stated that 30% of all products ordered online were being returned. With the high percentage of products being returned after it was delivered, this increases the cost of returns for the retailers. Augmented reality can help to reduce the costs by providing an engaging ‘try-before-you-buy’ digital experience so that the consumers feel reassured that the product will turn out like what they have expected, thus, will lessen the likeliness of the products being returned.

2. Lessen the number of abandoned baskets

It is very common for us as shoppers to abandon our shopping baskets since we only use it as a wish list where we will eventually remove half of the items when we finally review our basket before payment. Given the fact that 24% of people stated that they had abandoned a basket in real life while the other 76% goes to those who shop online, AR will be able to help the business to lock up these sales and reduce the number of baskets being abandoned pre-payment by allowing shoppers to have an e-commerce experience more similar to the in-store experience.

3. To build an emotional connection

With AR, consumers are able to experience products in their homes. This will help the consumers to bond with the product before they purchase it. As a result, once they have fallen in love with the product and its features, it will be quite hard for people to get off the products of their mind. They would be able to visualize how they will use the product, to see how things could look perfectly when combined with the product and how much their family will love it .This will, then, form a strong emotional connection between the consumer and the product before it has been purchased. The good odds will be in the business’ side where it will raise the revenues for the business.

If you have any comments or want to add something else, please feel free to drop it in the comment section down below! 🙂

Happy Reading!

 

 

 

Website or Social Media?

In this digital era, it is important for a business to have a website.

Why?

Research stated that company websites attracts more consumers than social media when it comes to product information.

In the consumer journey, social media can be considered as an important tool to increase brand awareness, however, website plays a very crucial part in helping consumer to make decisions in the consideration and purchase stage. A survey showed that 52% of respondents go directly to a company’s website for gathering product information and branded content, while the rest goes to social media and company blogs.

Source: Creative Can

Since all businesses aim to maximize its profit, marketers need to ensure that this active evaluation stage would lead the consumers to the moment of purchase since it would help the business to increase its revenue and achieve its objectives. Therefore, having a good and easy-to-access website matters.

It is, therefore, substantial to assure that the website of the business will appear in the first page of the search so that it is easy for the consumers to find and access as research says that on average consumers will visit several websites before they make a purchase decision.  In this case, SEO also plays an important role and need to be seriously considered. In addition, it is important to take into account the website’s loading time. Make sure that the website does not take too long to load its content. A research by Google stated that 53% of website visitors will leave the webpage if it does not load within three seconds.

Further, the website design also matters. It would be best to break up a long page into different parts. Infinite scrolling could break user experience as sometimes it leaves user feeling disoriented as they scroll down a page that seems to never end. It is also important to not have too many ads in the website that makes the page looks too crowded. Poor web design could increase the bounce rate of the website which is unfavorable for the business.

Source: TLDR

Lastly, having mobile responsive website is also another thing to consider. 57% of people will not recommend or look at a business with a poorly designed mobile site. It is critical that the website could change its layout based on the devices that consumers use for the convenience of the users. Unnecessary images could be hidden so that it will not interfere with the more important information on the site’s smaller display. Thus, as the users adjust the screen and view them on different devices, the website will still look great.

Do you agree that website is more important than social media when it comes to the consideration stage in the consumer journey? Why and why not?

I’d love to know what you guys think!

 

See you on my next post!

 

Free Is Not Free

Who does not love free stuff? Everybody LOVES it!

Source: Free Stuff (Kitten)

It is, however, natural human reaction to ask ‘why? what’s the catch? what are you trying to sell me?’ once they hear the word ‘free’ since many of us growing up knowing that there is no such thing as free. From a business perspective, the goal of free is to convert free users into paying customers. It is the objective of every business to make money, after all. Giving away something for free often supplies value on the back end – businesses will make sure that it is going to be worth it. Sure, the upfront costs can be substantial, but it can easily pay off in some monetary value form a little further down the road.

It might be true that there is a ‘catch’ behind the ‘free’.

Let’s look at Course Hero. It is one of the education technology website company which operates an online learning platform for students to access course-specific study resources contributed by a community of students and educators. At first, this website allows users to gain information from its website for free, however, after certain periods, it restricts the users to access its website. It requires users to pay membership fees in order to get to the websites. Since it was free at first, it attracts users to explore the websites and when they love the experience they get from using it, some of these users, would then, might bond with it and would want to continue accessing it. Marketers could also make use of freemium model to get customers’ attention where marketers provide the basic product for free whereas a premium will be charged if customers want to access additional features of it. Free offer might serve as a magnet; it hooks customers and could encourage impulse purchases from users at the end.

Further, sometimes, in exchange of free product or offer, consumers are being asked to provide their data such as email, and gender. For instance, in order to get free Wi-Fi, consumers will be asked to enter their email address and any other details. We, as consumers, might not realize how important that is for the marketers. We thought it was just an email and nothing more, but marketers get our data which worth everything compared to the free Wi-Fi they offer us.

This proves that free things are not actually free!

As a marketer, would you adopt this kind of strategy where you are going to offer free things in order to attract customer’s attention first and take the risks of whether they are going to end up buying your products?