Businesses cannot overlook the impact of personalization on customers anymore. It is now an essential requirement in the world of contemporary marketing rather than just an option. For any marketing team to plan its marketing campaigns and activities efficiently, personalization should be put at the heart. With customized marketing communication based upon data-driven BI tools, brands can easily put out the right information in front of the right person at the right time through the right channel.
This blog isn’t about the importance of personalization but the stepchild of artificial intelligence; Artificial Emotional Intelligence. AEI has taken personalization to a whole new level that has greatly impacted all industries and sectors, including marketing. It allows businesses to determine the emotional state of their customers by utilizing behavioral, emotional, and contextual data collectively. Several businesses have already implemented AEI to redefine their marketing processes and activities but are still understanding how to do it effectively to make the most out of it. Effective application of AEI requires overcoming challenges such as customer privacy, finding suitable candidates with good analytical skills.
Emergence of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
We, humans, are influenced by our emotions at all times, even while making casual as well as important decisions. When marketers found out the obvious after analyzing the impact of customers’ emotions on their online behavior and purchase decisions, they started looking for ways to respond to changing moods to drive sales and business growth. Interconnected smart devices with the power of computer vision and machine learning helped in transforming this idea into a reality.
As per Gartner’s prediction, 2020 will witness the implementation of more and more AI-based marketing solutions by big enterprises. And after three years, in 2023, marketing processes will be framed around emotions and walled gardens (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) will have implemented AEI in their advertising mix to target their customers.
Empathetic marketing strategies can be framed with the help of Artificial Emotional Intelligence. Brands can now understand their customers’ emotions better and marketers can easily measure the performance of their marketing campaigns with advanced BI tools that are capable of collecting more than just behavioral data of the target audience. As a result, companies can boost their conversion rates drastically with the help of real-time empathetic marketing activities and campaigns.
Emotional Marketing isn’t new. If you look around, a lot of your competitors are already using it.
According to researchers, 25% of the Fortune 500 companies are already using Artificial Emotional Intelligence to find out how their customers are responding to marketing content emotionally. Pioneers like Amazon, Walmart, and IBM are already investing in AEI extensively as they plan on capitalizing online as well as offline businesses based upon emotions. The same is the case with giant publications such as The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Spotify, ESPN, etc. who are making the most of Artificial Emotional Intelligence to understand customer emotions in order to serve relevant content and advertisements.
To adopt AEI in marketing, companies have to utilize either one or a combination of the given tech groups: biometric sensors, computer vision, audio, and text analysis. Computer vision is crucial to businesses that run in physical environments as it is used identifying movements, determining poses, and recognizing facial expressions. Amazon Go Store is a perfect example of the application of Computer Vision technology. Several AEI solutions are in the market. That said, with ongoing research and development we never know what this might hold for all of us.
To be a part of this research and development, you can always connect with companies like Affectiva and iMotions that allow businesses to use AEI technologies in product development and market analysis. Soon, more and more businesses will be seen implying AEI technologies in both online and offline models.
Time To Switch To Emotion-Based Marketing & Advertising
Emotional content is ten times more effective than interest-based content. Understanding that emotional content can help businesses grow, companies must also focus on the emotional context that enables the right delivery of relevant content. In simple terms, you must know what emotions you wish to entice in your target audience. For example, positive emotions include conversions, engagement, retention, etc. while contempt can cause damage to your company and its reputation. Therefore, you must ensure that your target audience does not misunderstand the emotional context of your marketing activities.
To effectively use emotion-based advertising for your company, here are a few tips that can help you:
Categorizing Media Based Upon Emotionality
It is important to evaluate the emotionality of your content to categorize it. With a system based on machine learning, you can evaluate the content interactions to an extent to be able to rank your media as per emotions. Reading facial expressions of a person while interacting with your content can give you more useful results about emotionally indexed content.
Put Your Money On Emotional Content
Scale your emotional content by putting more marketing budget on it. Paid advertisements can result in quicker and better results as marketers can target the most relevant users or customers. In your CRM, you must start building emotional customer profiles that can help you find similar customers and markets in terms of emotion.
Start Measuring Emotional Response Rates
Positive emotions are good and contempt is bad but we cannot create anything based upon this until we have actionable analytics. So, using KPIs that help you determine how your emotional content is interacting with the customers will help you optimize your marketing efforts efficiently.
But it isn’t as simple as it seems! You will have to overcome some AEI challenges to fully leverage its potential.
Finding Skilled & Experienced Resources
For organizations, that plan to integrate Artificial Emotional Intelligence with their existing content marketing activities will require more specialized resources that can interpret massive amounts of data. Looking for talented professionals who have a strong analytical background is challenging but it is essential to build effective methods of pairing insights of customers’ emotional needs. Skilled data scientists are hard to find considering this is relatively a new field. But once you have the right resources, you can take your business to new heights.
With marketing becoming more customer-centric and data-driven, the need for data analysts capable of conducting research, analyzing market trends, interpreting customer analytics, and transforming insights into actionable marketing activities, is increasing day by day. However, the companies have to compromise because of the limited availability of such talented and skilled resources with proven experience in the field. In Artificial Emotional Intelligence, data analysts are further required to create customer personas, customer journeys, and their touch points to understand how emotional factors impact user behavior.
Rather than looking for talented data scientists, companies can invest in training their in-house resources who are keen on this field. When you put your reliable resources for new opportunities, they tend to perform better than the newly hired resources. It might as well be a good idea for entrepreneurs to start learning the fundamentals of it and advise the marketing managers and CMOs to do the same.
>Gaining Customer Trust
With time customers have become skeptical about marketing. There are too many brands competing for the same thing that end up making the customers more confused than ever. Most of the customers, now, prefer to use ad blockers to get rid of the unwanted ads they see on every page they visit. Amidst all this, they are ignoring the most carefully curated messages just for them. On average, an American receives 126 emails in a day. It is almost impossible to read each and every email without getting your brain drained.
On top of that, customers have become more hesitant about using their personal information online. With emotion integrated into marketing, businesses are trying to safeguard more amounts of sensitive data. So, privacy concerns and customer cynicism are slowing down the progress of Artificial Emotional Intelligence.
Brands must try to gain the trust of their customers by giving authority to customers about their rights. Transparency can also help in trust-building. Additionally, brands that offer something in return for the data provided by the customers are more appreciated by them.
Increase Your Business’s Emotional Intelligence With These Simple Steps
Do Not Rely On Tech ONLY
In the past few years, marketers have become too reliant on technology without realizing how it affects the results. Tech interactions lack that human touch responsible for engaging customers emotionally. You need to understand that humans crave emotional experiences. As a business, you should make the customer feel valued and not used for the profits. It should be evident that you connect with your customers’ problems. To enable such emotionally engaging customer experiences, businesses must utilize creativity, insights, and personalization altogether.
Emotional Fluency Throughout The Organization
Data insights need to be transformed into actionable and measurable marketing activities that create emotionally engaging experiences. With the increasing emotional intensity, customer trust and loyalty increase simultaneously, thus, boosting the spend. Data-driven creative strategies that use emotional connect can be used within organizations too. Therefore, emotionally optimized language can lead to many benefits that aren’t just limited to marketing.
Building Ecosystems With Vibrant Experience
Businesses can build different ecosystems that offer vibrant and fun experiences, that customers will love to participate in. This improves the emotional engagement of the customers and they feel a part of the business, thus improving the business performance. Subsequently, insights from such activities or campaigns can further help in enhancing the emotional intelligence of your business.
Strategies Based Upon Emotional Intelligence
Before putting the insights into action, you must have an in-depth understanding of your target audience. To understand the customers from an emotional aspect, you cannot simply rely on traditional research methods. So, to get your customers to act, you need to make them feel. So, marketing strategies need to be focused on building powerful customer insights using neuroscience, machine learning, and next-generation data analytics.
Emotion Is The New Economic Driver
Businesses need to recognize emotional intelligence as an important asset that has several economic benefits that drive business performance. Just like creativity, emotion will also prove to be a significant business currency and performance driver.
The Future of AEI
With so many capabilities, AEI can add more value to every business if implemented in an effective manner. Developers and researchers are continuously working on emotion detection technologies to further help companies extract behavioral data for the most effective customer targeting. Businesses will be able to hyper-personalize customer experiences in both physical and digital environments. This will be a gradual process in which businesses will keep evolving as per the collected emotional user data. At the same time, more and more resources will become available with appropriate training and skill development.
Having said that, you must not sit idle, instead, this is the perfect time to hop on. Early adopters always have a competitive edge and right now you must discuss with your marketing team and other stakeholders about ways of educating customers about artificial emotional intelligence.