4 ways to get the most from visual-data insights

According to the Content Marketing Institute, social posts that focus on an image earn 2.3 times the engagement of posts that are exclusively text based. Images are so valuable because they evoke a feeling, create an association, or inspire an action from customers that can’t be fully captured in words. 

These unspoken motivations are incredibly important, especially in a digital ecosystem where consumers may interact with your logo or other brand images across dozens of channels. But that same digital context makes it difficult to understand how your logo is experienced or used and how those encounters are affecting your brand. Even though top brands spend millions to create a distinct visual aesthetic, they often struggle to understand and measure the impact of their investment.

If you can’t access real-time visual data and turn that insight into action, you might be missing an enormous opportunity to create more meaningful experiences and grow your brand. 

Capturing every aspect of the customer experience

Sprinklr research estimates that as many as 95% of companies are engaging in some form of social listening to tap into customer conversations across digital channels. Chances are you’re already leveraging some of these insights. 

Visual data completes this picture (pun very much intended) by giving you richer context for how your brand is performing in the marketplace — even when consumers don’t mention you by name. Brands that don’t add a visual component to their social marketing strategy face common challenges.

• Limited visibility into customer sentiment or associations with brand logos

• Incomplete share-of-voice metrics 

• Inability to benchmark logo performance against competitors and partners

• Unreliable logo-performance reporting and missing campaign ROI metrics

• Inability to detect or prevent risks from the illicit use of brand images

• Poorly informed crisis mitigation teams 

Fortunately, the combination of AI-enriched visual analysis with unified marketing and communications teams can help your brand avoid these pitfalls and capitalize on a truly comprehensive view of the customer. Here are four things winning brands do to extract actionable insights from visual data. 

1. Look beyond mere mentions

Imagine you’re a manufacturer of high-end watches. After the release of a new model, dozens of customers Tweet happy pictures of themselves proudly wearing their new watches — only they forget to tag your brand in the post. 

In this situation, you’d love to amplify those authentic endorsements, understand which product features customers like best, and engage with them on their channel of choice. Similarly, if they Tweet an unhappy picture of a defective watch, you need to know about it. If you are only using social listening for direct brand mentions, you are likely to miss these insights, as well as the opportunity to act on them. 

When visual data is added to social listening, your brand can be more adaptable and better measure the efficacy of social campaigns. AI pulls together related images from across social channels so you can better understand customer demographics, analyze facial expressions for sentiment and feeling, and unlock hidden associations with objects or activities most common in customer content. This also gives you stronger share-of-voice data for better ROI metrics than listening alone. 

This visual analysis can be applied to your competitors’ logos and images, too, so you can see where you stack up, learn from their successful strategies, and avoid their missteps.     

2. Leverage user-generated content (UGC)

When users share positive images of your products or logo, other potential customers are more likely to respond than they would be if similar imagery was included in an advertisement. That’s because UGC is more authentic and creates a greater feeling of trust around your brand, which leads to greater engagement and more successful content. 

Visual-insight solutions give you the ability to monitor this organic content, identify potential influencer partners, or validate similar messaging in your own campaigns. Visual data can save you time and resources by identifying UGC that your brand can repurpose, knowing it’s already been vetted by your customer community. 

Your brand can also leverage visual data to track the use of your logo in brand partnerships or sponsored content. This can help you understand how effective the partnership is or gain a clearer sense of sponsorship ROI.   

3. Protect brand reputation and prevent misinformation

Not every interaction with your brand will be positive. When a customer shares a negative experience or negative sentiment using a photo or image, greater visibility gives you the power to rectify the situation and provide exceptional service.

But reputational risk also extends beyond the occasional dissatisfied customer. In a digital world, scammers can easily modify your brand logo slightly, hoping to take advantage of consumer trust to sell counterfeit versions of your products or steal personal information. Your actual brand logo may appear in images related to negative news stories or unlicensed images could be used in vulgar, inappropriate ways. 

By tapping into visual data, you can identify these risks and mitigate them before they turn into crises.  

4. Engage and empower your entire marketing team

Tapping into brand images and logos across social and messaging channels provides critical insight that would otherwise be lost to every member of your brand team — and gives them the power to take action.

• Brand manager: gains understanding of customer sentiment in images across social channels

• Advertising team: incorporates visual data and high-performing UGC into campaigns to publish more targeted ads and drive higher conversion

• PR manager: adds visual insights to traditional media monitoring for complete visibility into crisis-management risks

• Digital marketing analyst: drills down into trends at a granular level using image patterns

• Social media manager: engages with customer conversations even when the brand isn’t mentioned by name

• Legal counsel: mitigates brand risk and identifies logo trademark infringement on digital channels

This connected ecosystem needs insight to do their jobs at the highest level, but they also need a unified platform so they can share accurate data, act quickly, and collaborate. Reduce point solutions in your marketing tech stack and seek out tools that allow teams to communicate from a central hub, automate workflows, and execute faster across silos. 

Unlock the full power of your brand logo with Sprinklr Visual Insights

Sprinklr Modern Research combines powerful Social Listening with Visual Insights to give you a 360-degree picture of customer sentiment and brand performance. As the only unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform, Sprinklr makes it easy to:

• Track the use and performance of your brand logo across 30+ digital, social, and messaging channels

• Utilize optical character recognition (OCR) so you don’t miss brand-related text embedded in images

• Leverage advanced AI for deeper analysis into sentiment, demographics, and patterns in visual data

• Automate workflows to eliminate redundancies and reduce human error across silos

• Engage with influencers and top-performing UGC through built-in rights’ management tools

• Receive alerts about potential reputational risks involving your logo

Reach out for a demo of Sprinklr’s Visual Insights solution and experience the difference of a Unified-CXM platform.