Being present for customers at the right time and place used to be enough to bring in sales. No more.
The latest consumer research reveals that people in APAC have a lot on their minds and they want to be certain of their decisions amid the swirl. So they’re carefully examining everything, and their purchase journeys are becoming more complex. This means the way brands show up in the customer journey can make, or break, a deal.
To appeal to customers in such a time and win business, brands must empower customers to feel confident about choosing them. Achieving this requires understanding the challenges customers face, reaching them with specific types of cues to boost their confidence, and amplifying those cues with AI on trusted platforms to power the “confidence shift” and profits at scale.
The APAC customer struggle and the “confidence gap”
The sheer volume of information available online, the possibility of disinformation, and the likely reverberations from economic, social, and political uncertainty in the world, make it hard for customers to feel confident about their decisions today.
Of the consumers in India and Southeast Asia who have difficulty making purchase decisions, 81% say it’s because of too much information or too many options.1 And more than 70% of consumers across APAC worry about information being misleading or deliberately deceptive.2
Overcoming this “confidence gap” — the space between wondering and knowing, before people arrive at a confident decision — can therefore require significant effort today. In APAC, more than 70% of consumers want to feel they’ve done their due diligence, putting enough time into research to make the right decision.3
When customers get stuck in the gap, however, it costs them, and brands: 1 in 3 consumers across India and Southeast Asia decided not to buy a brand they were considering because they felt anxious or not sure of that choice.4
To help customers get out of the gap and be confident of their purchase decision, brands need to deliver confidence cues — a signal that shapes a customer’s level of confidence in a brand or product’s ability to deliver on its promises.
How brands can create the “confidence shift”
Research shows that six confidence cues provide customers with the trusted information they need to make a decision.5 One of the most influential confidence cues is industry respect. This cue can come in the form of awards, endorsement from marketplaces, or certifications from reputable sources.
Another important cue that inspires confidence is authority. This can come in the form of reviews from experts and category-specific websites.
In addition, there’s a seventh, critical confidence cue, and that’s trusted platforms. When brands show up on such highly trusted platforms, the "trust transference” effect takes place and the perceived trustworthiness of brands increases on these platforms. So it's important to be on platforms that consumers find trustworthy, and in APAC, customers point to Google Search as the No. 1 most trusted online platform, and the top platform where they look to find information.6
Indeed, trust transference explains why, for example, viewers in the U.S. rate YouTube ads as significantly more trustworthy, credible, and honest than ads on other video and social media platforms.7
When brands deliver confidence cues on trusted platforms in the right format, at the right point in a purchase journey, and at the right time for customers, they can create a “confidence shift.”8 And when customers move out of the “confidence gap” and toward making a confident purchase decision, growth and profits follow.
In fact, consumers say they spend on average 25% more on trusted brands than on ones they trust less, and those who are confident with their product choice before purchasing are nearly 20% more likely to purchase that product again.9
Google AI in ads powers the “confidence shift” and profits
To power the “confidence shift” for numerous customers all at once, it’s necessary to analyse countless customer journeys and predict myriad purchase pathways in a split second, because every journey is unique. Amid this complexity, Google AI-powered ad solutions are the game changer that lets brands thrive.
Google AI-powered solutions use consented first-party data, drawn from responsible and accurate measurements of customer engagements, to identify critical insights, predict the most valuable customers, and generate the most relevant content to communicate confidence cues to them. All this happens at the right time, place, and frequency, and at speed and scale, to help people make confident purchase decisions.
On YouTube, for example, brands can increase awareness and consideration with Video reach campaigns. They deliver ads across all video formats seamlessly, including the latest in-feed and Shorts formats, and use Google AI to optimise for efficient reach, frequency, and cost per impression. The new Video View Campaigns drive consideration further by using Google AI to maximise views at a lower cost-per-view than standard in-stream campaigns.
To help fuel demand and reach new customers, there’s Google’s new ad campaign, Demand Gen. It lets brands engage and drive action with customers, including new, lookalike audiences, by delivering immersive, relevant visual creatives that grab attention. In particular, it pairs tailored creatives with specific audience segments to deliver the most relevant message to customers in their purchase journeys, and drive results.
Google AI is the game changer for brands, powering the “confidence shift” at speed and scale to drive profits.
To power a “confidence shift” on Google Search, AI-driven ad solutions let brands understand what people are looking for, and provide them with relevant, trusted information. Broad match, for example, allows brands to reach customers on related searches and not just on results that contain the exact keywords. And its new brand control feature lets brands only reach the branded traffic they want.
Smart Bidding complements broad match by bidding on only relevant search queries. It uses Google AI to allocate its bidding budget, and it is now able to bid even more intelligently on queries it’s never come across before.
To find valuable customers wherever they may be and drive incremental conversions, brands can pair Performance Max with AI-powered Search campaigns. With Performance Max, brands can deliver the right confidence cues to the right customers across Google’s full range of channels in real-time. Samsung, for instance, doubled its scaled revenue in India with Performance Max, while retaining consistent return on ad spend.
In addition, brands can optimise for new customers with high predicted lifetime value by using the new customer acquisition goal with high value optimisation in Performance Max. And they can use its new re-engagement goal to re-engage lapsed customers.
The need of customers in APAC is simple, if not vital: They want to be sure they’re making the right purchase decisions today more than ever. With Google AI in ads, brands can power the “confidence shift” so that a customer journey, which starts with uncertainty and wondering, ends in a confident purchase.
Learn more about Google’s latest AI-powered ad solution innovations at Google Marketing Live. And check if you have the right Google Ads AI Essentials in place.
