The revolution will be vocalized: how voice is changing everything
As marketers we have become used to dealing with new ideas, new ad formats and new platforms, many of which have presented incremental changes to our business. But the change being driven by voice-activated technologies has happened at remarkable speed. Within the next year and a half, there will be more than 1.6 billion digital assistants in use, and fully half of all searches will be voice-based. The revolution is not coming; it’s already here, and those at its vanguard are working to build unified strategies that leverage data and integrate experiences from the brand to the local level.
For marketers interested in making the most of voice-related opportunities, the most important thing to consider is context. For example, according to Search Engine Watch, mobile voice-related searches are three times more likely to be local in intent than text-based searches. The 2018 Voice Search Survey from DAC finds that the types of local information Americans are looking for when using voice assistants are the phone number for (68%), directions to (67%) and hours of operation (63%) of a business. In addition, 36% of consumers are looking for reviews and 43% are using voice assistants to buy something. Further, 70% of millennials report shopping using their voice assistantsand 56% of those shoppers say they use voice assistants on a daily basis. Since the use of voice assistants is heavily skewed towards the last mile in the customer journey, marketers can maximize the value by paying attention to four key principles:
Optimize local data and content. For voice interactions, where you are truly matters as much as who you are. Platforms such as Google My Business, Apple Maps, Bing and Yelp have long been the building blocks of local search. Using these in combination with traditional SEO principles such as schema markup and optimizing for rich snippets is even more important with voice search.
