The Importance of Visual Intelligence in Sales and Marketing Today

Today, in a marketing context, “video” can mean any number of things: platform-specific social campaigns, pre-roll ads, product tutorials, user-generated content, sponsored collaborations, and on and on. A tidal wave of video content floods out of every marketing office on a daily basis. Collectively, this material can be a valuable asset: video, as we know, is an incredibly potent marketing tool. But the risk is that the sheer size of your archive will prevent you from making use of it. These days, the quantity of video content a given company deals with doesn’t increase linearly; it explodes exponentially.  At a certain scale, video becomes a black box: it can be hard to even know what you’re working with.

Over the last few years, one clear solution has emerged to this increasingly vexing problem: AI. Once a useful option, AI has grown to become a necessity—the only way to navigate and exploit years of accumulated content to ultimately help drive your core business objectives. Below, a quick guide to some of the ways companies are using AI to stay on top of their content, reach new customers, and increase sales.

The Future of Content Organization

Video organization can be a daily struggle. You’re looking for a clip from a few years back—say, a certain social campaign for a new car—and you don’t know where to start. A colleague points you to a relevant folder, but you need permission to access it, and its owner is on vacation. Or you access the folder easily, and you’re confronted with roughly five hundred confusingly-labeled video clips, which you now have to go through manually, one by one. And there goes the workday.

With a centralized, AI-powered video repository, you can streamline and automate these kinds of daily workflows. AI can quickly process and organize vast amounts of material. It’s capable of the kind of granular tagging that would be more or less impossible manually. AI can identify the people in your videos, and what they’re saying; the products, brands, logos or presentation material in the video; and even the sentiment. What was once a scattered, unknowable mass of material can become, with AI, an organized, easily searchable fount of knowledge.

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Automatic Contextual Targeting

Few things are more likely to keep a customer on-site than targeted recommendations—and few things are more likely to lead to a purchase than increased time-on-site. But manually setting up a viable system of recommendations is a task beyond any marketing team. Embedding videos on hundreds or even thousands of product pages is difficult enough—but the task becomes infinitely more complex when you have to judge which video is best-suited to each page. In addition to infinite time, it would require a thorough working knowledge of every video in your video library.

Once again, AI presents itself as the perfect solution. AI can “read” not only your videos but the text on your webpages. It can effortlessly match video to page, and can then recommend related videos, keeping consumers on-site and driving higher levels of conversion. Videos that have gone unwatched for years can start actively driving engagement or conversion. AI is allowing businesses to activate their video arsenal using just the material they have at hand—and without investing in additional production.

Search and Interactivity

Let’s say a customer is trying to learn more about one specific feature of a product. If that information is buried eight minutes into a twelve-minute product demo, they’re likely to throw up their hands in frustration without ever finding it. But as countless businesses have discovered over the last few years, AI-facilitated search quickly fixes this problem: customers can search within videos, finding the answers they need with ease.

So let’s say they’ve found the information they’re looking for and are waffling on whether to purchase. Often, interactivity can be of great help in situations like these: a shoppable link, floated at just the right moment, can pay excellent dividends. But shoppable links are a pain to set up at scale. Here too, AI can help: with barely any work on your part, your videos can auto-populate with shoppable links—a thousand ‘Buy Now’ buttons blooming without any significant work on your part.

Getting More out of UGC

It’s well-established that consumers trust UGC more than any other form of marketing communication. And yet marketers are, inevitably, wary of it. UGC, by its nature, is unreliable: you can’t trust a total stranger to stay on-brand. If you’re willing to give up food and sleep, you could manually review every user-generated video, filtering for inappropriate content. But AI, in this department, is a much more sensible option. AI-triggered brand safety filters allow you to tap into a vibrant new content stream, without the inherent risks.

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More Feedback, Better Content

As video views increase on your website and across socials, you’ll want to know what’s making an impact (and what isn’t). With AI, you can get a clear, real-time, data-driven sense of what’s working, and can use that knowledge to inform your overall video strategy moving forward. You can then monitor the performance of your new videos, and generate content based on what’s working in them. Ideally, with each round, you get closer and closer to producing the perfect content for your audience (or audiences, as the case may be). Interactions can also be linked to your CRM/marketing automation, allowing you to segment and retarget your audience.

AI is the Answer

In marketing ca. 2021, video is inescapable: the main tool we use to communicate with consumers, as well as with each other (think, for instance, of all those digital training programs, onboarding and announcement videos, event livestreams, Zoom recordings, etc.). In just the time it’s taken you to read this article, your company’s video repository—internal and external—has likely expanded. For anyone who wants to stay on top of all that material—to make the most of video’s boundless possibilities—harnessing the power of AI is the solution.