Many brands are beginning to look at how they can express their brands through voice apps. With the maturing of voice to text technology and the growing prevalence of voice activated devices in our homes and pockets, the time is now to create a voice marketing strategy. In this article, we discuss the steps a brand can take to best express itself through a voice experience and explore some real-world examples.
How To Create a Voice Marketing Strategy
At its core, a voice marketing strategy is defining how a brand can reach its audience as they interface with voice-enabled technology. To set up this strategy, three main areas need to be discussed and understood.
- A brand should have a good sense of how their audience is using voice technology in their day to day. Knowing what the audience is seeking via voice queries or commands will help to shape the brand’s strategy.
- A brand should understand what part of its overall marketing and/or communication strategy would work well on voice-enabled technology. If there is information that has been deemed important in other marketing channels to deliver to the audience that can be satisfied by answering natural language questions, this type of communication may be a good candidate for a part of a voice marketing strategy.
- A brand should bring to light any part of the marketing strategy that would fit in the unique format of a voice-enabled experience. Using the framework of voice technology can provide brands with new touchpoints to increase and strengthen audience engagements.
Examples of Voice Marketing Strategies In Action
Brands often find inspiration for their own strategy (or counterstrategy) by reviewing other applications already in the marketplace. Here are some examples of voice strategies in action.
Voice Marketing In Customer Service
Voice assistants by definition are set up to “listen” for input from someone asking a question or stating a command and providing a response through the interpretation of that input. Backed up with AI, voice enabled technology can provide great support for your brand’s customer care unit. They can handle many of the frequently asked questions from your audience, providing quick answers when needed. Typically designed as chatbots, these applications can improve your brand’s efficiency and productivity. Since they can be available 24/7. Voice enabled services can provide helpful services to your audience whenever they need them. Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support cost and can help businesses save on customer service costs by speeding up response times and answering up to 80% of routine questions. In addition to the efficiency that comes from the speed of answers and “always-on” services, the audience queries can be used to create helpful content in other areas to improve customer relations in other brand touchpoints.
Voice Marketing In Search
Optimizing your website for voice activated searches is becoming more important than ever as more people use devices with Google Assistant by speaking their queries. Most often, a featured snippet in Google’s search result is the answer to a voiced query. Featured snippets appear at the top of organic results and receive an 8.6% click through rate. Conducting research on natural question queries that are related to your brand is the first step for voice search. Once you have a list of query targets, you can use a tool like SEMRush to see which of those queries trigger a featured snippet result. From there, you can make changes to your site so that your site’s information is presented in that spot of Google results; therefore, putting your brand’s content as the script that Google reads back to the person who asked the query. Some of the changes to the site you can make include creating bullet point lists that answer natural language questions succinctly. Beyond this initial strategy, brands who are focused on a voice search marketing strategy make a plan to create pages that are designed to quickly answer important audience questions as they discover them through analyzing their site’s data and audience surveys.
Voice Marketing In Applications
Brands are developing applications that are made available on marketplaces such as Google and Amazon. Each of these marketplaces have different names for the applications that live on their platforms - Skills are for Alexa and Actions are for Google. These applications are stand-alone entities and can be used to expand the brand’s reach in new ways. Many voice apps provide information that compliments the products they sell like Tide with their app that has advice for removing 200 different kinds of stains or Patron Tequila’s app that has personalized cocktail recipes. Other apps like Domino’s allows people to order a pizza and get it delivered to them with a voice command. The landscape for voice apps is still in its early stages and is ripe for innovation for brands that want to take advantage of this new frontier.
Voice-enabled devices and applications can provide brands with another intimate touchpoint to reach and engage their target audience. AMP Agency can assist any brand that is looking to create their voice marketing strategy along with developing and implementing a plan to make it come to life.
