Here are a few data points about the impact voice-centric digital communication is having on consumers – and how marketers are responding: 55% of adults will have a smart speaker by 2022, per OC&C Strategy Consultants, more than doubling the nearly 20% of U.S. adults who report they have one today, according to a 2018 Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report. 43% of companies already invest in technology to enable voice marketing, according to a survey taken at the 2018 Digiday AI Marketing Summit. Read: A New Adobe Study Reveals How Consumers Are Actually Using Voice to Shop Searching for voice assistance Even if consumers won’t necessarily delegate their holiday shopping duties to Alexa this year, there are plenty of other ways brands can – and should – start to integrate voice-response technology into their marketing plans. But, brands also can open up to verbal discussion by building a voice-enabled chatbot that’s capable of delivering relevant information and helpful content in response to customers’ spoken inquiries. Creating a spoken world of engagement Another point of entry into the voice-response multiverse is to build a custom branded “Skill” – Amazon-speak for a vocal command-driven functionality enhancement (think of it as an audio-only mobile app) for digital assistant enthusiasts. Marketers can create these features to provide consumers with valuable audio content – like daily news briefings, a step-by-step walk-through of a complex recipe, productivity tools, puzzles and games, or even pure storytelling efforts – that extends audience engagement or gives users greater flexibility and control over their interactions with your brand and its products. And, because it can be integrated with other voice assistant technologies, Einstein Voice can deliver a daily brief of “key priorities” like upcoming calendar appointments and team pipeline updates. Content conclusion Of course, as with any new technology, information in your content marketing strategy and editorial plan should inform how your business chooses to leverage voice response and how deeply you should invest in it from a content perspective. If the answer is no – or you aren’t even sure how to answer the questions – you might be better off waiting for this technology’s marketing opportunities to become clearer before adding your voice to the conversation. As a content strategy consultant, Jodi helps businesses evaluate their content needs and resources; build infrastructure and operations; and create compelling stories to be delivered across multiple media channels and platforms.
Move over mobile marketing: A little voice is whispering that your time as “the next big thing” is almost up.
Actually, that whisper is more of a shout, and it’s “Echo”-ing across the digital landscape, as voice-response technology is rapidly emerging as the most disruptive force to hit the industry since the internet became a visual medium.
Just how loud will this sonic boom be? Here are a few data points about the impact voice-centric digital communication is having on consumers – and how marketers are responding:
- 55% of adults will have a smart speaker by 2022, per OC&C Strategy Consultants, more than doubling the nearly 20% of U.S. adults who report they have one today, according to a 2018 Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report.
- 24% of respondents would rather use a voice assistant than visit a website, according to a study from Capgemini.
- 43% of companies already invest in technology to enable voice marketing, according to a survey taken at the 2018 Digiday AI Marketing Summit.
If your brand is starting to hear Siri’s siren-like call to action, here are some insights and considerations you might find helpful:
Latest word on voice-based shopping
Research from OC&C Strategy Consultants projects that voice shopping will jump to $40 billion in 2022 (up from $2 billion today). However, the last-touch voice commerce experience has yet to reach the mass adoption levels that retailers like Amazon initially envisioned.
According to an Adobe Analytics Report shared by Adweek, consumers are more likely to use digital-assistant technology to inform a buying decision (47%), add items to a shopping list (43%), or compare product prices (32%) than to rely on purchasing-via-speaker as their primary digital shopping technique. And even those who use voice-ordering do so on a limited basis, such as placing one-time orders for delivery (25%) or reordering products (21%).
Read: A New Adobe Study Reveals How Consumers Are Actually Using Voice to Shop
Searching for voice assistance
Even if consumers won’t necessarily delegate their holiday shopping duties to Alexa this year, there are plenty of other ways brands can – and should – start to integrate voice-response technology into their marketing plans.
Like most marketing journeys, the impending voice revolution is likely to start with a search. Billions of them, in fact, as data from Alpine.AI reveals there are already over 1 billion voice searches conducted every month, and comScore estimates that, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based.
To compete on this noisy (literally) landscape, content marketers may need to follow a few SEO guidelines that relate to the informational needs and behaviors of spoken-word searchers. For example, as a blog post by U.K.-based content agency JBH points out, voice search queries tend to relate to on-the-go topics and are more likely to require only low levels of direct interaction (at least, according to Google). Content marketers may want to focus their content voice-search-optimization efforts on emphasizing shorter-form content offerings and those that provide quick, concise answers – like FAQ pages.
Consider: When it comes to optimizing your content for voice search, it’s also important to remember that digital assistant devices only deliver one search result per request. The key to putting your brand on the tip of Siri’s tongue may lie in getting your content to appear as a featured snippet – the most prominent spot on the SERP. Stephan Spencer offers a helpful primer on how to accomplish this SEO goal.
Chatting up your customers
A complete view of the marketing opportunities in conversational interfaces has yet to take shape. But, brands also can open up to verbal discussion by building a voice-enabled chatbot that’s capable of delivering relevant information and helpful content in response to customers’ spoken inquiries.
Using advances like natural language processing (NLP), chatbots are increasingly able to interpret the meaning and intent of a search query using signals that go beyond the…
COMMENTS