How Voice Is Changing Marketing in 2018 and Beyond?

Kasia Cieslak

November 30, 2018

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How Has Marketing Changed Over Time ?

Philip Kotler, the father of Marketing and author of popular textbooks on the topic, has given some concepts of marketing as a discipline into group of five eras:

Product
Production
Selling
Marketing
Holistic marketing

These terms don't have particular beginning or end dates, and the practices of each era are widely visible at industries in every sector. In the modern, "holistic" marketing era, Kotler says, "everything matters". What does it really mean?

Marketing includes all aspects of a company's operations starting from production, distribution, advertising and distribution. What’s different today, is that the customer is in control, not the company. Nowdays marketplace is more dynamic - customer experience that is quick, accessble and efficient. Take online shopping during making a meal and tapping the message as an example.

Marketing 4.0.

According to the first thought of Kotler’s marketing eras, let's focus on the current image of modern customer’s needs - Marketing 4.0.

The most popular objectives of this term are grouped to area of the creative products based on consumer’s values that support the idea of personalization. The final effects of this revolution affect on marketing practices around the world.

One of the common definition is that ‘Marketing 4.0 is focused on humanocentric perspective where the main goal is brand or product anthropomorphization and by giving them humane’s attributes.

This change is widely visible as smart speakers got equiped with our favorite tone of voice and "know" our daily routines. What's more, voice enabled devices are engaging theirs users in more humane relationship than classical technology. It is observed in the way users communicate with them using words like "please", "thank you", and even "sorry".

Voice Marketing

Voice marketing grouped the varied approaches required for the many kinds of voice interactivity available with voice technology in the home and mobile space. said Deepa Naik from Humans AI.

People are adding voice to their shopping routine using voice assistants and interfaces like voice-enabled devices, voice search and smart speakers. Brands and marketers are finding innovative ways to respond to these newly opened channels.

Let's take a look at three voice solutions adopted by different industries that included voice in the marketing strategy.

Lego

Lego launched two Alexa Skills within the last half a year. One of them's an interactive storytelling service for children aged 2 to 5 called "Lego Duplo Stories". The toymaker approach is less about buying search adverts and more about producing content via conversational interfaces.

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“I don’t think voice search is as much a risk to a brand like Lego, where we have a more interesting proposition to a category like consumer goods.I’m a big believer that by 2020 nearly every major brand will have an audio strategy and that’s because of how fast the smart-speaker market is growing.” said James Poulter, head of emerging platforms at The Lego Group

Moët Hennessy - "Bottles and Bubbles" Skill

With "Bottle and Bubbles" app consumers can engage with six areas of conversational and educational content. The skill provides basic information about Moët Hennessy brands and suggestions on how to enjoy champagne with food pairings and social gatherings.

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Domino's pizza

In 2013 Domino's introduced Easy Orders - a feature that enables saving favorite pizzas and ordering them with just one click. It turned out to be a huge success gaining lots of customers switching from traditional ways of ordering pizza to a simple app. Later on the company experimented with Zero Click application, ordering through emoji and of course - voice.

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To sum up these marketing cases, I noticed some actions that are similar for all of them. It means, building a customer experience with a brand personality comes from unique sound, graphic or content. Just over of them are focus on consumer intent. What's so different from well-known marketing practices voice-enabled devices are 'listening' more than typical ads pushing.

The Numbers Around

Pindrop survey

94 % of managers see voice technology as an important driver of customer satisfaction
88 % believe they’ll gain a competitive advantage
57 % believe it will increase operational efficiencies
57 % also believe it will reduce the cost of each customer transaction

SEO: How to Optimize for Voice Search ?

Firstly, it’s important to understand that voice search is more natural and conversational. Due to theirs instinctive character... voice searches also tend to be longer than text-based queries. It means some extension for typical SEO activites such as:

Use simple sentences, short paragraphs, and bold headers to 'break up' your content as much as possible
To be more conscious in this theme read the official guides to voice search for each major platform (Google, Siri commands, Cortana)
Target long-tail keywords, it means thinking about how consumers will ask about your product ? Answer the public, offers a proper tool in that case.

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Digital Marketing Institiute

Try to gather common questions on the same page, and grouped them into FAQ pages
Stimulate your's microdata like prices, directions to your physical location, store hours, address and phone number, then help Google to understand them. Here's a Structured Data Markup Helper a it could help you implement structured data on your website.

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. said Christi Olson Head of Evangelism for Search, Microsoft

PASO — Personal Assistant Search Optimization

PASO was introduced at the begining of 2017 as an answear to growing popularity of Personal Assistants. The future of SEO related to voice technologies focused on new issue - PASO - personal assistant search optimization.

Most of the people, when asking their personal assistant for information, ask in the form of a question. Therefore, company's website content should have a primary question. Another issue is a way of thinking about how people are saying things apart from typing. Especially, think about the questions they would ask if they have purchase intent.

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Chart based on internal data from Microsoft Bing.

Main differences between SEO and PASO included:

Provides customized results
Saves user's time by giving required information
Boosts efficiency and efficacy of the search
Cuts down the ad clutter

Content Marketing

The rise of voice search means that brands need to place a high priority on long-tail keywords and core of the natural, spoken language related to conversational approach. It's the high time to think about voice-activated content.

Content marketers should prepare for voice searches by trying to be suitable to the long-tail of complex searches. What's more, there're some PASO friendly advices created by WorldLift related to content marketing:

Organize the content of website with subtitles, bullet points, tables, and some highlights - it's make a composition easy to read
Add Schema.org - is a shared vocabulary that writers can use to structure metadata on their websites to support search engines understand the content.
Have charge of Rank Zero - one source of information that answers questions for a search query term.
A lot of people use voice search to get information about local businesses - remember to put in your website basic information.
Think about spoken content such as: podcast series or a video it'd increasingly engage the Voice Assistants users

Summary

In the process of making voice strategy for your business don’t think about voice as a campaign. Think of it as a valubale product that could be a part of the consumer experience.

Every voice is unique, therefore brands can now create a hands-free development of themselves to struggle new products, offers, incentives to boost sales process.

In the meantime, if you have thoughts to share on the role of voice-response technology in marketing, feel free to contact us. We're always ready to talk about the new voice tech soulutions!

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