How Brands can empower their Digital Arena through Generative AI with easy means

We have just seen the beginning of the Generative AI Era. The way we shop is changing. Imagine strolling through an online store, not with static pictures and descriptions, but with a conversational agent that acts like your personal shopping assistant. During the strolling you remember that Youtube video from last night and the blouse the artist was wearing, you need one just like it before the weekend. After sharing the video with the Customer Agent it helps you find similar options, helps out with the purchase, billing and sending it to your home. Within 5 minutes the product is on it′s way. That′s the power of Generative AI. You probably heard all this before, as part of future forecasting. Fact: It is no longer in the future, it is here and now. But with so many newfound "AI experts" out there, who can I trust? In this article I will - based on research, education and experience - sort out how Gen AI is effecting your customers expectations and your brand performance on the digital arena and advise simple first-step actions that will give you bang for the buck.

First - let me be frank and rip of the bandaid fast - traditional marketing firms and non-customer oriented marketing departments will no longer cut it in the Era of Gen AI. The sooner you realize that we are leaving the era of Traditional Marketing for the era of AI Marketing the better. Your customers expectations and shopping behaviour on the digital arena is changing. Fast. There is a powershift from "Brand Marketeers" to the Users and the Customers. Second - Alone is not strong and you cannot do it all by yourself - You need to team up with tech that can help you strengthen your competence. Create partnerships that help you navigate the road. And when doing so, a good question to ask is: "How did you work with AI before Chat GPT was launched in 2022?" That will help sort out the tech people from the fortune seekers and "buzzworders" looking to make money from your ignorance.

How Gen AI is changing Customer Expectations:

• WEBSITE EXPECTATIONS: Remember that aha-feeling the first time you used Chat GPT and got an analysis of 50 pages served to you in a bulletpoint summary with content directed to exactly what you asked for, and this just in 2 seconds? ?This exact feeling is going to be an expectation for all website visitors – no matter the device - within very short time. When visiting a website we will all expect to get personalized content served to us in two seconds. With Google SGE around the corner, Gen AI powered Search and Conversational Agents answering with personal content directed to only You, giving you what you want and even things you we didn′t even know you wanted. Websites that doesn′t use Gen AI to fulfill this expectation will appear unsatisfying and slowly disappear. To meet customer expectations you need to implement Gen AI in search and in Customer Agents that help your customers find what they want.
• AUTHENTIC CONTENT: I Remember when I worked in fashion and retail e-commerce and created campaign stories and content material based on fantastic moodboards guided by trend gurus and this created a buzz and pretty good sales. I hate to break the news, I am a true fan of inspirational campaigns and have been part of creating tons of them. But this is not going to be enough if you want to cut through the noice on the digital arena in the era of Gen AI. The power has moved from marketeers to the customers needs, values and feelings. You need to know what they are and how they are changing as the world changes and then create content directed to fulfill these needs. This can be stretched to the “creators economy” that has evolved with TikTok but that is a niche story for another article. ?Nothing new really says the dedicated Brand Strategist when he hears about customer values and needs, ?and this is true! We are going to back to old marketing and brand plattforms that laid ground for dominating brands such as Coca-Cola and Apple. To cut through the digital noice you must appeal to your audience based on their needs and make a stand for what you believe in and what you want to express. Or you will simply disappear from the target audiences environment. To stand out in the noice you need a content strategy based on target audience nees.
• PERSONALIZATION: You know that feeling when you turn on Netflix and gets all these fantastic suggestions based on what you previously whatched and when you lay on the couch after a hard days work zipping through new things to watch you find suggestions of similar content TV-series grouped into categories, and that satisfying feeling of finding new content appealing to only you? This is what e-commerce is in the era of Gen AI. Customers vill expect you to cut out the digital buzz and personalize their offers with stuff based on their wishes. I know, this is already happening with automation techniques but we are expecting the 3.0 version of what you are doing today. To stay ahead you need a plan and the technique for this.

"73% of retail customers expect brand to understand their unique needs and expectations"

Source: Insider Intelligence. (2022). "Attitude of Consumers Worldwide Toward Personalization and Customer Experience Provided by a Company 2020 & 2022”.

How Gen AI is affecting website traffic

• SEO 2.0: If you think SEO is just about stuffing your website with keywords and your audience will find you, than you need to think again, and act fast. As Search Engines gets powered by Gen AI they will be better at understanding context, nuances and semantics of content. That means that keyword stuffing will be less effective and high-quality, relevant content will be more important. Questions asked in search will be understood better and the visitor will get more accurate and relevant answers. Does this mean SEO gets a minor role in marketing? Quite the opposite, with a futureoriented SEO your chances of reaching out, gettings hits and create lojalty are highly optimistic! In fact, you should not keep SEO as a separate department it should be part of ?the everyday digital marketing team and part of content creation. By focusing on User intent in searches you get valuableunderstanding of the target audience needs in the creation of content. Another way of optimizing your website search is by Voice in search, this will be a natural tool on all websites in the very near future. Make sure you’re your SEO people is not working in silos but have a superior seat with eyes on the ball in all your content creation sessions!
• PAID MARKETING: Every successful e-commerce business has probably felt that satisfying feeling of increased traffic and sales through targeted campaigns in Google Ads and other tools. It will continue to be an effective tool but the days where any business no matter the product, quality or content could start a business and rapid-scale it through paid marketing are numbered. Or, at least if they wish to earn loyalty and gain returning customer and in the end profit. Google Ads Campaigns that are not based on target audience needs and values will not only be like throwing away they money with fast dropping results, it will be like throwing away the money with NO results as the search engine crawlers will look for Relevant Content, not Paid Content. As this is Googles no 1 income and they are also a leading innovator in Gen AI solutions for Search this is a truly interesting paradox. Quite a game changer on the Paid Marketing arena to be expected going forward! Make sure you are not continuing in the old footsteps with paid marketing and throwing away your money for nothing!

82% of retailers believe gen AI will be extremely or fairly valuable in customer service automation

Source: McKinsey & Company. (2023). “The next frontier of customer engagement: AI-enabled customer service”.

6 easy actions to take now to prepare your brand for the Era of Gen AI (if you haven′t already):

1. IMPLEMENT GEN AI SOLUTIONS AS CUSTOMER SERVICE IN WEBSITE SEARCH. This reasonably simple action will keep you ahead of the game, increase your customer experience, speed up time to value for your visitors, personalize your visitors search answers and give more fulfilling answers. It will also be more cost- and time efficient for your company and a good start towards creating internal competence about Gen AI solutions. Prepare for implementing “Voice” and “image” searches, if you are digital mature and have a frontrunner audience: implement voice search and image search now.
2. ?KEEP TRACK ALL DATA. And I mean ALL data. Make sure that you have a system that allows you too gather all data about your customers, not only CRM, ERP, and GA4 but all of the data combined. Understand and analyze it and let it lay ground for decisions and actions that will help reach your mission and goal.
3. CREATE A CONTENT STRATEGY BASED ON TARGET AUDIENCE NEEDS. Find out what your customers really think about you, what their needs, feelings and values are and most importantly: how are these effecting their purchase decisions? Understanding this is the basic of all growth strategies. Identify the gap between your Brand & Business goal and mission. Create a roadmap with actions to take you to your goal and a content strategy that will help take you there. Keep the Content Strategy Agile and continuously evolving as the market and needs are shifting.
4. IMPLEMENT PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS: Be the “Netflix” for your customers with personalized content and suggestions based on what their searches and behaviors are. Help your customers reduce the noice and your brand to cut through it.
5. IMPLEMENT A CUSTOMER AGENT ON YOUR WEBSITE: If you have customers with needs for help with certain matters, perhaps styling and finding the right solutions for them you can implement a multi-modal agent that can perform many tasks in helping your customers, suggest solutions based on what they ask and supply them with fast solutions and suggestions. A simpler agent with only a few modules can come a long way and speed up time to value and also time to purchase significantly not to mention the customer experience and loyalty factors.? I you are more digital mature and have an digital native audience: create a multi tasking agent that not only can find the shirt in the youtube video the customer is loading up, or create an outfit for a special occasion, but also put it in the cart, suggest things to go with it, charge it to your account and then deliver it in the preferred last-mile choice. Of course, voice controlled.
6. ACCEPT THAT THINGS WILL CONTINUE TO CHANGE, YOU CANNOT SOLVE ALL BY YOURSELF AND KEEP TECH CLOSE: After 25 years in fashion and interior retail I know the proud feeling: we have internal knowledge about it all and we don′t need external help. But after having been part of a tech firm helping Swedish global leaders stay just that: global and leading, through hooking arms with people that stay ahead of tech and can help them stay relevant I have started to reconsider. It is through collaboration the magic happens! Seen so many examples of that only the past 6 months in which I have been part of helping businesses understand, implement and grow their business and internal competence with help of Gen AI powered solutions. Another thing that has helped my clients a lot: understand what your business needs are and where you could benefit from improvements. Don′t push in AI solutions because the crowd says so. And try to get neutral advise from someone who knows about more than ONE Gen AI solution. Different Gen AI suppliers are good at different things and you need a neutral partner than can match your problem to the best solution, not the only solution they know about. Understand that working with tech close -? you evolve your internal competence and also the internal pride of being frontrunners! And of course, increase profit and customer experience also a welcome matter in the retail business!

Summary:

Accept that shopping behaviour and customer expectations are changing fast and your traditional marketing strategies needs to be updated if they aren′t already. Businesses benefits from teaming up with tech to keep their brands high performing on the digital arena while increasing company efficiency, profit and internal competence. It doesn′t have to be hard or expensive, you can actually save money in the long run. Start small, try it out and grow from there. But - whatever you do, do not sitt still and do nothing.

Interested in finding out more or discuss potentials for your business?

Welcome to send me a text here on Linkedin, or an e-mail to [email protected] . In my work helping industry leaders implementing AI solutions on their websites to increase their brand performance I work with established experienced AI & ML developers such as Magnus Perman that has helped #Ikea for many years, and also the highly skilled performance marketing lead Joakim Hampus who is a true frontrunner in all things AI no matter the supplier. I also have the benefit from working with the well-known retail industry advisor and brand online guru Caroline Thorén . I am lucky that way! Surrounded by both clients that I work closely with and fantastic colleagues! You can also check out our Nexer Maverick website to read more.

Me and my dear colleague Emma Boberg - our marketing advisor - are starting these articles since we saw a need for sharing our knowledge and telling retail it is not so hard to get a grip around securing your marketing and brand for the future. Generative AI does not have to be such a strange and scary buzz word it should be a natural part of the marketing strategy. Emma has implemented the fantastic koncept of #MAAS or "MarketingAsAService" for Nexer Group for the purpose of helping companies - big and small - to get a full resource marketing department for the cost of one person. In times of necessary cost savings that many businesses faces they almost always at the same time have struggles reaching out to their customers and to keep up with the latest strategies and tech knowledge. It is expensive to hire several experts to grow your e-commerce. In the MAAS-concept she offers the solution to this and enables also growing companies a small scalable solutions instead of them having to hire staff. Brilliant! If you ask me. And I wonder why someone haven′t done this before? Of course we are adding gen AI to the resource team in the #MAAS concept! You can read more about MAAS here.

What do you think is the most challenging part in growing your brand on the digital arena? Cost savings or cutting through the noice?

Thanks for reading this far! I hope you have gotten at least a little bit richer in knowledge and that it was worth the time spent. Please share your thoughts about what you think is the most challenging part in growing your brand on the digital arena? Cost savings or cutting through the noice?

// Maria Wahlgren

[email protected]