Voice Marketing For Your Company: Everything You Need To Know

Voice Marketing: Alexa, Siri, Bixby, Google Assistant … All these names of voice assistants are increasingly present in our daily lives. And voice search or voice marketing is one of the great technological revolutions on the horizon.

In countries like the United States, for example, online audio is already a key part of the strategy for marketing departments. Since Apple announced on October 4, 2011, that it would include an artificial intelligence system in its iPhone 4S with voice assistant functions called Siri, a world full of possibilities has opened up in which the voice takes on the main role. Ready for the Age of Voice Marketing?

The Rise Of Smart Speakers

Smart speakers are currently the fastest-growing consumer technology, and a good example of this is that last Christmas’s best-selling gift on Amazon was the Echo Dot, a voice-controlled hands-free device that incorporates the virtual assistant Alexa.

Google, of course, was the first company to launch Google Home, its voice-enabled smart device, in Spain, but Ikea has also teamed up with the speaker manufacturer Sonos to launch its smart speaker, which looks like a lamp.

The rise of these smart devices raises the possibility of facing a new paradigm shift. In addition, it represents a new challenge for many companies and brands, which will need to be ‘found’ by these devices when consumers request any service, another challenge within the digitization process in which many companies find themselves.

From SEO To YOU

How Does Voice Search Transform Searches?

According to ComScore, an international company that measures the digital audiences of newspapers in Spain and analyses users’ behavior’s beyond the media, 50% of the searches we carried out in 2020 will be through voice. In a few years, we can say goodbye to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) searches to embrace VOS (Voice Optimization Search) through the so-called ‘smart speakers’ or smart speakers.

In the same sense, Google has expressed itself, which has already advanced that by 2020 half of the searches will be by voice. Therefore, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will become VOS (Voice Optimization Search), and the search engine will only offer a result when a voice search is done.

It is, therefore, inevitable that in the next 5 years, we will see the transition from the SEARCH ENGINE to an ANSWER ENGINE, and it will be essential to think about how to speak and not how to write.

The Importance Of Audio Branding

Faced with this foreseeable paradigm shift, companies must redefine their personality through an auditory identity and define their corporate identity through an image. In this way, customers will be able to distinguish a brand through the image and sound.

Numerous studies highlight the importance of audio branding in brand identity and sound’s importance when identifying a specific brand.

In this sense, one of the best examples of this practice is Coca-Cola, which has a sound identity consisting of 5 sounds that it introduces in all its advertisements, and in this way, in addition to taking advantage of the evocative power of sounds, it reinforces brand recognition.

Kevin Perlmutter, Chief Innovation Officer of Man Made Music, states, “Sound is a shortcut to creating sensory connection, and it’s 20 times faster than sight: they spend twice as much, they remember better, and they share more.”

Listen To The Message: Welcome To The Age Of Voice Marketing

It doesn’t seem like voice marketing is going away, but it’s also clear that some usage and privacy issues will need to be overcome before it spreads to mass use among the public.

Some of the doubts that arise in the face of these technologies are, for example, whether the machines are finally going to be able to understand all the tones that we are used to using (irony, insinuations or suppositions) or pitfalls such as the privacy of users before a device that emerges as a Big Brother that listens to everything.

But the evolution of conversational technology is a fascinating unknown. We are still determining how far these new devices will take us, which, for the moment, do not have a wide margin for development.

Are we facing a fad, or, on the contrary, is it a paradigm shift? Will we be in what Google has come to call the Age of Ambient Computing in a couple of decades? Is voice search the main challenge for companies with an online presence?

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