At NetElixir, we specialize in refining product content to enhance user experience and drive business performance.

The Challenge: Unclear Product Information Hurts Product Discovery

Customers expect quick access to relevant product details. Poorly structured or overly technical descriptions can create friction, leading to lost sales and increased returns.

Common Pitfalls:

• Overloaded Product Pages: Too much technical jargon or excessive details overwhelm customers.
• Inconsistent Information: Discrepancies across channels reduce trust and cause confusion.
• Lack of Engaging Visuals: Text-heavy descriptions without supporting imagery make it harder for customers to make informed decisions.

The Solution: Structured, Customer-Centric Content

1. Clear and Engaging Product Titles & Descriptions

• Optimized Titles: Keep product names concise while including key details like brand, model, or primary function.
• Benefit-Driven Descriptions: Highlight why the product matters, using simple language that resonates with your audience.
• Bullet Points for Readability: Break down key features in easy-to-scan formats, avoiding large blocks of text.

2. Standardized and Consistent Content Across Channels

• Uniform Data Presentation: Ensure product information remains consistent whether viewed on desktop, mobile, or third-party marketplaces.
• Regular Updates: Keep product details accurate by reflecting inventory changes, enhancements, or new use cases.
• Cross-Platform Reliability: Align content across your website, app, and external retailers to build customer confidence.

3. Visual Enhancements for Improved Understanding

• High-Quality Images: Showcase products from multiple angles with zoom and 360-degree views.
• Lifestyle Imagery: Help customers visualize how a product fits into their daily lives.
• Technical Diagrams: Where necessary, include specifications and dimension charts for clarity.

4. Intuitive Structuring for Easy Navigation

• Tabs and Collapsible Sections: Organize information so users can expand details relevant to them.
• FAQ Integration: Address common questions directly on product pages to remove purchasing hesitations.
• Customer Reviews and Q&A Sections: Encourage user-generated content to provide social proof and further clarify product benefits.

Want to learn more about how navigation impacts revenue? Read our article on Driving Incremental Revenue Through Better Navigation.

Real-World Impact: 26 Bonezzz Success

Leading lifestyle outdoor footwear brand 26 Bonezzz partnered with NetElixir to enhance its e-commerce experience. Challenged by a rapid D2C product expansion, 26 Bonezzz needed to refine its product content to drive conversions and improve customer engagement.

Through strategic content optimization, we delivered:

• 297% Increase in Revenue: A frictionless user experience drove incremental DTC revenue.
• 12% Increase in CVR: Customers were able to find and understand product details more quickly.
• 6% Lower Bounce Rates: Improved content clarity led to deeper customer journeys.

Best Practices for Maintaining Content Clarity

1. Keep It Simple: Use clear, concise language free of unnecessary complexity.
2. Test and Optimize: Regularly analyze user engagement and improve based on feedback. 
3. Ensure Scalability: Use content management systems that allow for easy updates and consistency across platforms. 
4. Encourage Interaction: Let customers ask questions and provide reviews to enhance transparency and trust.

Unlock Your Product Content’s Full Potential

Content clarity isn’t just a UX enhancement—it’s a powerful revenue driver. By optimizing product details, structuring information intuitively, and maintaining consistency across platforms, you create a seamless buying experience that leads to higher conversions and greater customer satisfaction.

Learn more about our web development solutions to see how we can help optimize your UX and generate incremental revenue.

Is your product content working for you? Contact us today to schedule a free UX audit.

The post Optimizing Content Clarity for Higher Conversions appeared first on NetElixir.

At NetElixir, we specialize in optimizing taxonomy and navigation to help businesses enhance their UX and drive growth.

The Challenge: Navigating Complexity

Organizing your inventory presents several hurdles:

• Overwhelmed Users: Too many choices can lead to decision paralysis and higher bounce rates.
• Diverse Audiences: Different user groups, like wholesalers and consumers, have varying needs and preferences.
• Inconsistent Categorization: Poorly structured product data makes it harder for users to find what they need, reducing conversions.

The Solution: Streamlined Taxonomy and Navigation

Creating a clear and efficient taxonomy is key to simplifying product discovery.

1. Intuitive Category Structure

• Balanced Categories: Keep categories simple and relevant to avoid overwhelming users.
• Subcategories vs. Flat Structure: Use subcategories only when they enhance clarity and improve navigation. For example, with automotive retailers, a well-structured hierarchy helps customers find parts efficiently:
  • Engine Components: Air intakes, exhaust systems, turbochargers
  • Suspension Systems: Shocks and struts, lift kits, control arms
  • Exterior Accessories: Body kits, lighting, roof racks

2. Smart Filtering Attributes

• Tailored Filters: Enable users to refine product searches based on personal preferences such as size, color, price range, and customer ratings.
• Dynamic Filtering: Seamlessly integrate multiple filters to refine choices in real time, ensuring users can adjust preferences without disrupting their browsing experience. 

3. Streamlined Menus

• Clear, Defined Categories: Organize by product type, use case, or brand to facilitate easy navigation.
• Targeted Paths: Ensure each user group finds relevant products quickly without unnecessary complexity.

4. Advanced Search Tools

• Enhanced Search Functionality: Features like autocomplete and synonym recognition help users find products faster.
• Keyword Optimization: Ensure that keyword searches are optimized to deliver accurate and relevant results.

5. Cross-Channel Consistency

• Unified Experience: Ensure navigation and taxonomy are consistent across desktop, mobile, and apps for a seamless shopping experience.
• Three Navigation Paths:
  • Main Navigation: Designed for product discovery.
  • Keyword Search: Optimized for finding specific items quickly.
  • Inline Body Links: Enhance content-driven navigation within product descriptions and blog posts.

Real-World Impact: PlanetXS Success

By optimizing their taxonomy and navigation, PlanetXS saw 19.8% increase in revenue:

• 20% Increase in Revenue: A frictionless user experience drove incremental revenue.
• 8% Increase in CVR: Simplified navigation boosted customer purchases.
• 5% Higher AOV: Enhanced product discovery encouraged larger orders.
• 30% Reduction in Support Inquiries: Fewer customer service interactions were needed to clarify product specifications.
• Improved SEO: Optimized categories enhanced organic search visibility.

Common Pitfalls and Best Practices

Avoid These Mistakes

• Overcomplicating Navigation: Too many categories confuse users.
• Neglecting Specific Needs: Ignoring the distinct requirements of different user groups.
• Ignoring Scalability: Using outdated systems that can’t grow with your inventory.

Best Practices

• Keep It Simple: Clear and concise category structures minimize user effort.
• Customize Filters: Tailor filtering options to different user groups for better relevance.
• Continuous Optimization: Regularly test and refine your taxonomy based on user feedback.
• Invest in Scalable Solutions: Use modern navigation systems that grow with your business.

Unlock Your Navigation’s Potential

Effective taxonomy and navigation are more than just UX enhancements—they’re essential to a great user experience and a powerful revenue driver. By organizing your product catalog intuitively and implementing smart filtering, you can turn product discovery into a seamless, revenue-generating experience.

Learn more about our web development services to see how we can help optimize your UX and generate incremental revenue. 

Ready to take the next step? Contact us today for a free UX audit.

The post Driving Incremental Revenue Through Better Navigation appeared first on NetElixir.

But if your business has already taken action on these big picture concerns, you can use this extra time to dig into more granular e-commerce website optimization. User and customer experience is critical to converting and retaining customers. The easier it is for your customer to navigate your site to find (and purchase) what they’re looking for, the more likely it is they’ll return to do so again and again and become one of your high-value customers. That means you should always think about what adjustments you can make to ensure your website is user-friendly.

As privacy regulations have increased and consumer expectations around privacy online have shifted, e-commerce sites have added privacy notification pop-ups and banners to allow customers to understand what first-party data is being tracked. From there, customers can opt to accept or reject the use of certain cookies. A smart design for these notifications can help ensure that customers stay on your page and allow you to access their data, while a poor design might see customers closing your site before they’ve even started to browse.

Web Development for Privacy Notification UX

Ever since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was put in place in May 2018, it’s become a regular occurrence to see a privacy notification pop up when you first visit a website. Some are unobtrusive, while others won’t allow you to view the site until you’ve reviewed and accepted or rejected the terms. How these cookie notices look, and what options they present, can be informed by the type of site they’re gracing and what kind of information that site needs to track. Understanding what a business needs from its cookies is key to making decisions about the design of privacy notifications.

Some sites have little need to track their users and only require essential cookies, while other sites might need what could be called non-essential cookies to even function. These “non-essential” cookies may be connected to certain plugins that have been used to build or modify the site. Other sites may want to encourage users to allow “non-essential” tracking because the data collected can have a big impact on the business’s success with customers as well on the customer’s experience. Whether you are refreshing an existing website or building a new one, making sure your website is user-friendly — right down to the privacy notification that greets new customers — is critical as we move toward the cookieless future. 

Best Practices for Cookie Consent Notice Design

While your privacy notification has to meet the needs of your e-commerce business, here are a few high-level principals to keep in mind:

• Aesthetics: Your privacy notification should be unobtrusive, streamlined, and easy to read.
• Prioritization: Prioritize the essential cookies your business needs and the data it needs to collect to make your business a success, and keep the non-essential cookies to a minimum.
• Functionality: Make it easy for your customers to review, accept, or reject your terms as needed, in as few steps as possible.
• Clarity: Build trust with your customers by providing clear information on what data is being tracked and how it will be used, while still keeping the notification as streamlined as possible.

How NetElixir can help

At NetElixir, we live by the motto, “Say No To Average”, and that’s especially true when it comes to web development. Your web presence is where your customer interacts with your business, and no detail is too small and no challenge too big for our team at NetElixir. Our web development experts can work with you to build a new e-commerce site from the ground up that is ready for the cookieless future, or we can help you ensure your current site is up-to-date and ready to go by the time deprecation is complete. We have over 18 years of experience creating sites that are tailored to customers’ needs, and we will work with you every step of the way. Learn about our web development services today and contact NetElixir today to learn more!

Additional Resources

• How to Optimize Your Website With The Latest Digital Marketing Trends
• Smart Cookies: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World

The post Web Development For the Cookieless Future appeared first on NetElixir.

It’s a lot to consider! But in the ever-evolving world of e-commerce, there are research and data-informed ways to leverage optimized content and technology to keep your site ahead of the competition. Your web presence should be designed to improve customer lifetime value, drive cross and up-selling, and encourage high-value customers to love your brand and keep coming back to purchase from you. At NetElixir, we live by the motto: “Say No To Average”. Why would you want an average e-commerce site when you could have an amazing site that grows your business?

What Are The Top Signs Your E-Commerce Business Has A Successful Web Presence?

Your site has clear, consistent branding, which makes it easy for the customer to recognize your business, no matter what page they are on. Almost 50% of customers are likely to let businesses use their consumer data if they like the brand, which is more important than ever given recent changes to data privacy restrictions.

Your site has a seamless user experience (UX): it’s easy to browse, to search, and to buy. If your customers know what they want, they can find it quickly and convert to a sale – and if they don’t know, your site makes it simple to explore your products and services. With an omnichannel marketing approach, your site is easy to get to and navigate regardless of your customer’s point-of-contact. Whether a customer clicks on a link from a search engine or an ad, whether they are navigating from an iPhone, an Android, or a laptop, your site looks awesome.

Your site’s technology is up-to-date and secure. Your customers conduct their business easily and trust you with their data and their personal information. Good web development is forward-thinking! How people access your site will continue to evolve and your e-commerce  site is flexible enough to meet those changes.

Your site includes tools to support advanced analytics that measure every moment in a user’s purchase journey, helping you build a deeper understanding of your customer and their pain areas to develop a frictionless path to purchase.

When Should You Consider Creating Or Updating An E-Commerce Site?

How long has it been since you refreshed your site or migrated to a new e-commerce platform? If it was 2015 or earlier, your site is likely not mobile-friendly – and it’s probably slow. What a turnoff for potential customers! If you’re dealing with a slow site, constantly fixing bugs, or struggling to get your site to perform simple tasks other businesses’ sites can handle, your site requires an upgrade. You may need technical help to keep pace with the ever-evolving industry standards, SEO algorithms, and customer demand. 

If your site functions as it should but it’s not attractive and the content is outdated, it’s due for a refresh. And if you were working with another developer and they left you high and dry, it’s definitely time to get the job done right.

What Can NetElixir Do For You And Your E-Commerce Site?

Literally everything! We can build you a fresh site from scratch, we can take over a half-baked project from an unreliable developer, we can migrate you to an all-new platform, and much more!

• Branding: We help you create clear, consistent branding for your e-commerce business so your customers build a strong connection with your brand.
• UX Design: We develop engaging designs for your website and optimize your user experience to improve performance.  
• Technology: We work with you to figure out how to develop your e-commerce site so it meets not only your present needs but also your future requirements.
• Analytics: We include NetElixir’s proprietary customer analytics technology, LXRInsights, and in-built SEO framework in every website build and migration. 

We also provide full-funnel solutions including paid search, SEO, social, retail media, content creation, and more to ensure your website is built to drive success.

What Makes NetElixir’s Web Development Services Different?

With 18+ years of experience, NetElixir specializes in retail e-commerce. We’ve developed proprietary frameworks for design, development, and quality assurance to make sure we understand your business priorities and get it delivered. 

If your e-commerce business has unique features or a complex product portfolio, NetElixir will determine your current and future requirements and tailor a custom solution to meet your needs. We’re at the forefront of technology advances (including augmented reality!) and we’re always happy to recommend growth solutions that may be a fit with your business. 

And don’t forget about the NetElixir Assurance: Four weeks of post-launch technical support, a dedicated team for your project, and platform training for all stakeholders

Ready to learn more and start saying no to average when it comes to your e-commerce site? Check out our web development services and contact NetElixir today.

Further Reading

• A Marketer’s Guide to AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning
• Insights Into the DTC E-Commerce Explosion
• Repeat Customer Prediction

The post Not Your Average Web Development Service appeared first on NetElixir.

What Is Cyber Five?

Black Friday traditionally marks the start of the holiday shopping season, but this notion has evolved in recent years. Many retailers now begin offering their best deals as early as Thanksgiving (or even sooner), and consumers are more than eager to scoop up the bargains. 

The five-day period that starts on Thanksgiving, includes Black Friday, and concludes on Cyber Monday has widely become known as “Cyber Five.” It’s the most important shopping period on most retailers’ calendars, and performance during these very busy days can set the tone for the rest of the holiday season.

Why Should You Attend Our Cyber Five Webinar?

As we’ve discussed frequently, there are six fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas compared to last year. This means the competition among retailers will be especially intense, with an absolute mad dash to the finish line at the end of December. In fact, retailers will need to surpass last year’s daily sales by 20% just to keep growth flat year-over-year.

Working with the most-up-to-date information is a great way to gain an advantage over your competitors, and that’s exactly what we’re offering with our webinar. During this highly informative session, NetElixir Founder & CEO Udayan Bose will share:

• Results, insights, and key Cyber Five shopping trends for top holiday retail categories
• How search-shop-buy behavior varied from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday
• Digital marketing strategies to adopt during the remainder of this holiday season

Back in September, we predicted 9% YoY ecommerce sales growth in our 2019 Holiday Season Forecast. The results from Cyber Five will provide a strong indication of how close our projection might be to the final numbers.

Don’t Wait – Register Now!

The “hot-off-the-press” data and insights from our Cyber Five webinar will help you give your digital marketing plan a last-minute tune-up before the sprint to Christmas. This is the perfect opportunity to get an early look at the shopping trends that are shaping this holiday, so you can maximize your revenue over the final weeks of the season.

Click here to register, and don’t forget to download our free Holiday Paid Search Calendar, too. This easy-to-use tool allows you to plan your PPC budget for the most competitive days of the holiday season.

May your 2019 holiday sales snowball!

The post Join Our 2019 Cyber Five Webinar for the Latest Holiday Insights appeared first on NetElixir.

Download via Hyper Targeting Audiences Based On Intent

The post IdeaForum: Leverage the Power of Audience Intent appeared first on NetElixir.

Automate Reporting Across Platforms

Depending on your platform, automating reporting is one of the easiest things you can do! There are many tools at your disposal to create different pipelines to your data or to ease data visualization.

On Google Analytics all you have to do is hit the share button to have Google send an email linking to this data everyday. On Google Ads, this button is available on any report and says “schedule” underneath a clock for your convenience.

Microsoft Advertising has a similar function for reports. Under “my report” settings, you can check the box next to “schedule this report” and select when you want to have the report sent to you over email. You’ll have to save your report as a custom report, so this option will select itself automatically.

Tracking Trends with Google Alerts

Being on top of what’s new is a full time job, but it doesn’t have to be! There are plenty of tools available to you so can focus your attention on more pressing tasks.

Google Alerts allows users to track a keyword or topic and receive emails whenever Google discovers a new article, webpage, or paper written on the subject. This is a fantastic way to passively monitor your brand, your competitors, or your industry as a whole.

Google Trends and trennd.co are also a quick and easy way to check in on how topics and words are trending online. Google Trends will allow an easy way to track interest and compare two words or more topics, while trennd.co excels at showing new topics and how they’re trending by volume.

Reading Your Email with Python

Most people might assume that writing a piece of code to go through your emails would be incredibly difficult and they’d be wrong. It may a little tricky at first but overall, it can be done in an afternoon if you have the right help and instructions. Check out the link below for a showcase into how ease it can be. Code Hand Book is a great resource to help you get started.

Social Media Posting with Hootsuite or Buffer

Social media can be a huge time sink for professional who wear multiple hats. Checking for company mentions, interacting with meaningful content, and sharing posts can fall to the wayside for more important tasks. This holiday season consider preloading your social media posting by taking advantage of tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

CRO with Google Optimize

This used to be a difficult and costly task, requiring a small team of experts. Now, anybody with Google Tag Manager on their website can conduct their own CRO tests. Using Google Optimize, you can make edits to your webpages and test with a percentage of your traffic without needing any specialized skills or knowledge

These steps are all super easy and allow for you to focus on your work and get into the “flow” and use your time to make the biggest impact you can during your busiest time of year. Adopting these processes will free you from menial tasks and allow you to adapt to the unexpected events that arise and get home before five.

Make sure to like and share, and if you want to learn more about how to do any of these steps, reach out to our team at NetElixir.

The post 5 Things You Can Automate Before the Holidays appeared first on NetElixir.

“I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.” – 7 Rings

Pinterest recently announced a major update to Pinterest Lens, its camera/visual search technology. This latest improvement identifies products and objects that a user takes with the Lens camera feature and shows shoppable Product Pins with the current price and a direct link to check out on the retailer’s website. Users can take those Pins and immediately add them to a board to collect their various inspirations. The tool will also provide suggestions on other items that might go well with the identified products.

All you have to do is snap a picture. See it, like it, want it, got it. 

This new business development by Pinterest is driven with extensive research backing the feature’s utility to users. According to Pinterest, 80% of Pinners start with visual search when shopping and over 85% of survey respondents put more importance on visual information than text when shopping online for clothing or furniture. By making use of computer vision as well as machine learning, Pinterest enables users to shorten their purchase journey. Pinterest also notes that Lens’ visual search capabilities can identify more than 2.5 billion objects across home and fashion Pins.

For retailers whose products have an important visual component, this is exciting news. It makes allocating a higher Pinterest ad spend even more enticing since we know that Pinterest drives the highest paid social average order value compared to Facebook and Snapchat. The other big component of this is the products being linked back to the retailer’s website. That means you get the vital data about your users and learn more about their purchase journey. We’ve seen that some platforms have begun to build out in-app purchasing, but this setup by Pinterest is more helpful to brands.

As Pinterest continues to improve their user experience, it’ll be fascinating to see how the company grows their audience or their offerings. Businesses can make the most of Pinterest’s tools while owning the important user information related to their marketing efforts. With this in mind…

Here’s How You Can Solve For X 

Keep an Eye on AI 

Pinterest has once again deployed their AI/machine learning to make their platform work better for users. Based on their previous developments this year, we know that’s one of  Pinterest’s main drivers going forward. Thinking about your shopper’s purchase journeys and psychographics will help you optimize your Pinterest ads and content. By identifying any gaps or areas of friction (which is what a lot of today’s AI features are being used to improve) in your user journeys, you’ll help your brand get the most out of Pinterest’s ad options to maximize your spending. 

Learn about the Pinterest Community

This is purely speculative, but we could be seeing the groundwork being laid for Pinterest’s next big business development: a user marketplace. We know Pinterest has the technological muscle and the brand loyalty. We know that when it comes to furniture or clothing, Facebook Marketplace or the LetGo app are two of a handful of platforms offering a way for people to buy and sell products. What if these were combined? By working with Pinterest now, you may open a door to getting in on the ground floor of a big new development.

Is your Pinterest strategy ready to take advantage of Lens and its new features? Contact us to talk about your approach.

The post Solving For X: Pinterest Updates its Lens Feature appeared first on NetElixir.

To him, the objective of marketing was to connect an audience with a certain need to a seller who has the solution. Nothing does this better than AI. Yet, our industry suffers from a deep lack of understanding.

Why? There’s simply a talent shortage of people who can build and understand these tools, as top technology firms can’t meet their own demands. Marketers love AI. They know that this is the direction the industry’s been moving toward, but few understand the technical side of it.

How many marketers could tell you the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning? How many know what a neural network is and how it’s structured? How many of them are getting prepared for Facebook to build Skynet?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

It’s important for every marketer to understand what AI is. It’s the most general term given to any machine that responds to input in a way typical of humans.

AI is a moving benchmark, if just colloquially. Yesterday’s AI is today’s responsive design. Automatic doors, motion-detecting lights, and Roombas were all simple machines that did tasks normally required of humans, but nobody would call them AI as it’s no longer the norm to have doormen or spotlight operators.

However, this isn’t what we think about when we hear people talk about AI. We think of Google finding the answer to our every question, Netflix recommending new shows to binge-watch based on our previous ratings… and who could forget all the Terminators? Of course, this is AI, too! It’s just part of a subset of AI known as machine learning.

Although most people may not be aware, machine learning has actually been around for decades. But why is everybody suddenly talking about AI now? It’s because of a fairly recent breakthrough subset of machine learning known as deep learning.

What does this mean for marketers? It means that we’re currently at the crossroads of some incredible technologies and possibly the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution. The availability of low-cost computing power and data storage has allowed for the accumulation of more data than previously possible. This data has enabled the development and training of some of the most complex and powerful deep learning models in the world. These models are the vessels through which we serve online ads.

THE GAMES WE PLAY

The best way to understand the history of AI research and development is through the games we taught them to play. By jumping into three different programs, we can learn what separates AI, machine learning, and deep learning from each other. Plus, this will provide some context when you find yourself discussing AI at your next team meeting. 

AI: IBM’s Deep Blue

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer system defeated reigning world champion Gregory Kasparov in chess. This feat stunned the world. Chess is a game that requires deep thought, careful planning, and patience. With two individuals playing against each other, the game itself can be unpredictable with so many turn options to choose from. How could chess be played by a computer? This was so hard to believe at first that people accused IBM of cheating.

Deep Blue won through sheer brute force. It could compute over 200 million positions every second, sometimes calculating as many as 20 turns out. It would score all possible boards and use a decision tree to determine what the next optimal move would be. It’s what’s known as “Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence” (GOFAI) or symbolic AI. It’s so basic in its design that one of its creators denied it being AI at all!

This was a key event for AI in the public mind. It disrupted the notion that certain tasks could never be meaningfully replaced by computers. It was dubious as to whether a computer could ever beat the best human chess players, but when it happened it opened up possibilities to what could be replaced or improved upon by computers.

Machine Learning: IBM Watson

In 2011, IBM’s Watson defeated legendary contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the quiz game Jeopardy. Again, this stunned the viewing audience at home. I can recall watching as Watson won handily, albeit making egregious mistakes along the way. I vividly remember Ken Jennings writing “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” on his Final Jeopardy response.

If you were watching Watson as it played that day, you would’ve been treated to a window into its “thought” process. Watson is a question-answering program. It worked by reading the clue for salient phrases or keywords and checking them against its 15-terabyte database, at the rate of one million books a second, for possible associations. Then it would take an educated guess, calculating a confidence probability as to what it believed was the best answer. 

At its core, Watson was a display of the incredible abilities of machine learning. Machine learning is a subset of AI where algorithms are trained by a set of data to discover patterns and make predictions. Watson is trained by being provided question-and-answer pairs, whereby it can consult its database to map how to best reach a given answer from its corresponding question. Then it uses the model it built from the known questions and answers to guess at unsolved questions. Watson comprised of hundreds of such models to go about breaking down questions, checking its database of knowledge and scoring an answer.

Deep Learning: Google AlphaGo

In 2017, AlphaGo defeated the top-ranked Go player at the time, Ke Jie, in a three-game match. While this got the least press attention, it was perhaps the most astonishing feat yet. Nobody thought it was possible, as no current methods could handle the sheer number of possibilities to be accounted for in a game of Go. Up until this point, the best algorithms played at an amateur level and couldn’t beat professionals without being given a significant handicap. So what closed the gap? The use of deep neural networks, also known as deep learning.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning centered on the use of structures called artificial neural networks. An artificial neural network is a loose representation of how neurons work in the brain. (This topic deserves its own blog post, but let me try to simplify it as best as can possibly be done in a couple sentences.) Your brain takes inputs from your senses and converts these into electrical signals that bounce around an interconnected web of neurons in your brain to ultimately form a response. Similarly, an artificial neural network takes a series of given data inputs and passes them through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, which function as neurons, to determine a given output. The word “deep” in deep learning actually refers to the amount of layers in these neural networks.

AI has significantly picked up in popularity because deep learning tools like AlphaGo have been shown to pull off the unimaginable. Many of the recent breakthroughs in AI and consumer electronics, like voice assistants and self-driving cars, rely on deep learning algorithms.

WHY MARKETING?

Hopefully this has given you a concept of what AI is, what it can do, and the levels of AI innovation. Understanding these nuances and what they mean is important for positioning your business for the future and finding solutions to the problems you experience. It’s especially critical that we as marketers understand these technologies, as some of us leverage them every day. We must also realize that our industry is one of the next in line to get swept up in the coming change. Best learn about it now so you’re ready and able to adapt.

Still, nothing would be complete without leaving you wanting more! We’re going to be diving into the synergy between AI and marketing in upcoming blogs, where we’ll  discuss neural networks, the different available structures, and their applications. Also be on the lookout as we develop an AI tool to play in our office fantasy football pool.

How does NetElixir use data and the latest technologies to drive results for your retail brand? Browse our Analytics and MarTech service offerings, and contact our team for more information.

Additional References:

• Deepmind: AlphaGo Zero: Starting from Scratch
• Live Science: Deep Blue Beats Kasparov: Progress of AI
• PC World: It’s Not Elementary: How Watson Works
• Scientific American: 20 Years After Deep Blue: How AI Has Advanced Since Conquering Chess
• Skymind: AI vs Machine Learning vs Deep Learning
• Skymind: Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Wikipedia: Artificial Neural Network
• Wikipedia: Deep Blue (chess computer)
• Wikipedia: Machine Learning
• Wikipedia: Watson (computer)

The post A Marketer’s Guide to AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning appeared first on NetElixir.

Instagram announced in a blog post that they’ve added the option for brands to promote organic Influencer posts as feed ads, identifying these with a ‘Sponsored’ tag. Creators make their posts and toggle a setting that allows business partners to boost them, amplifying the post to make it a part of the brand’s marketing campaigns and target audiences. In other words, an Influencer could create a post for a brand, send it out to their audience, and then have that brand use it in their marketing campaigns as if it’s one of their own assets.

With this shift, retailers can fully integrate Influencer marketing as a part of their campaign and overall marketing strategies. Not only will brands be able to amplify Influencer content to their audience, as well as in any campaigns they run, but they’ll also be able to track and measure the impact of those Influencer posts. This connection creates more transparency, improved communication, and a deeper understanding of what the reach of Influencer really is. Considering how important trust is in today’s digital economy, this move helps brands improve their relationship with consumers.

The Big Winner: Brands

Extending the reach of Influencer content is a fantastic opportunity for brands to take a more authentic approach to their Instagram presence. (Yes, we see the irony in this.) Whether it’s product reviews, ads, or a more creative post, this gives brands more content to use in paid campaigns. These posts could potentially act as a social-proof tactic, helping improve conversion rates. Branded content ads will also be great to target a wide range of demographics and audience types like Lookalikes, while being a useful tool for prospecting strategies. Overall, we see this development as a way for brands to improve reach and measurement. 

The Other Winner: Influencers

This one’s pretty simple: Influencers get to share their content with more people. In doing so, they attract more followers and build their communities. These metrics make up some of the main KPIs brands look at when choosing which Influencer to partner with. Creators that deliver content that cuts through the noise and resonates with users have a chance to grow their brands and stand out in a crowded field. 

Wait and See: Users

We’ve noticed the frequency of ads have risen lately on Instagram. This may result in people getting fatigued with the content, and seeing the ‘Sponsored’ tag is going to make some users skip past no matter what’s happening in the post. It remains to be seen whether best practices will develop when it comes to which types of content end up being best deployed in these assets, and what insight gaps will rise as a result of how people interact with them. As Instagram continues to explore ways to improve engagement, this step could help audiences find more Influencers who align with their values.

Here’s How You Can Solve for X

See the Pieces of the Puzzle 

Brands integrating Influencer content into more of their marketing campaigns can bring insights from these assets in-house. By learning more about the performance of these posts and Stories, retailers can create a more nuanced marketing approach. Make sure to map ad targeting audiences with an Influencer’s audience, which can both deliver more conversions and build your overall following.

Know Your Worth

Influencers taking part in these campaigns should be excited, but they also have to understand how these ads function in a marketing strategy. By being served to a wider audience, there’s a natural tendency for efficiency metrics to fall off. The key here is to identify the gaps in your content and the brand’s target market, so that you have a keen understanding of how your assets are best used. This will not only engender you to your brand’s audience, but also to your brand, who will be able to better deploy what you create.

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