Digital marketing is constantly evolving, becoming faster and more efficient year after year. Modern consumers are not willing to spend too much time searching for products or services, so they use voice commands to find relevant content. A study even showed that more than half of all online searches will be voice-based by 2020.
In such circumstances, it is important to understand a new trend and prepare for it as early as possible. In this article, we will explain to you what makes personal voice assistants the next big thing in digital marketing.
Why People Use Voice Assistants?
A virtual assistant is a computer-generated character that simulates a conversation to deliver voice-based information to a user via the Internet. It’s been one of the fastest-growing IT trends ever since Apple introduced Siri to the global market in 2010. Since then, Siri remained the most popular personal voice assistant with 45% of market share, right in front of Google Assistant (33%), Microsoft’s Cortana (27%) and Amazon Echo or Alexa (10%).
There are a few important factors that contributed to the development of the personal voice assistant industry. We will show you the 3 most important features in that regard:
1. A rise of voice searches: Voice searches came as the result of user demand. Most users consider typing queries a boring activity and they simply want to speed up the search process through voice commands. Last year, 20% of searches on an Android app in the USA were made through speech command and this figure is only about to grow in the future.
2. A growth of the Internet of Things: People are not the only ones who are interconnected by the Internet these days. There are also devices and machines – billions of them. The installed base of IoT devices is forecast to grow to almost 31 billion worldwide in the next 3 years. This adds more power to personal voice assistants, expanding their reach from search engines to the wide variety of everyday gadgets and devices.
3. Smart speakers: Smart speakers are special devices that you can use for remote communication with the personal voice assistant. You just need to leave the speaker at home (or anywhere else for that matter) and make a distant conversation with the assistant. Naomi Witter, an editor at BestEssays, has been using Google Home for half a year now. Naomi shared her thoughts with us: “I think smart speakers are extremely useful for individuals who move around a lot. For instance, it is perfect for travelers and commuters who have to deal with long-distance tasks. I can see a great future in this technology and wide marketing perspectives.”
How to Align Digital Marketing with Personal Assistants
If you want to keep a high level of leads and conversions, you need to align digital marketing activities with voice-based personal assistants. For this reason, we suggest you follow these tactics:
Prepare a keyword strategy
Keyword strategy should not be the same in text-based and voice-only searches. Voice commands rely on a more conversational and everyday language, using real sentences to form questions. According to the research, a voice search usually consists of 4 to 8 words, while traditional text-based inquiries typically take 1 to 3 words.
For example, a traditional inquiry sounds something like ‘best smartphone 2017’. On the other hand, the voice-based question would be: “Siri, what is the best smartphone in 2017?” If you want your digital content to be ranked high in voice searches, you need to adapt it so as to fit this kind of user inquiries.
Find trigger words
Keyword optimization in voice searches depends on the so-called trigger words that searchers will most likely use while looking for digital content. Keep in mind that user questions have a more conversational tone than before, so it’s reasonable to assume they’ll be asking a lot of questions. In that regard, words like When, Who, What, Where, Why, How are the obvious choices. Besides that, you need to use all variations of industry-related keywords. If properly combined, these two types of trigger words will make your digital content fully optimized for voice-based queries.
Mind the location
Customers often make decisions in micro-moments. They think about the product and instantly check it online to see whether to conduct the purchase or not. At the same time, a study showed that almost 25% of all voice searches are dedicated to local issues. This means that users often look for the outlets or events nearby, which gives you the opportunity to hook customers in your area.
For instance, an average user will post this kind of question: “Where can I find a good Chinese restaurant in Pittsburg?” If you are a local restaurant owner, you should answer this question on your website and the user will probably find your place on top of all voice-search results.
Voice commands are gradually taking over the Internet and the process is influencing digital marketing, too. Successful business owners and marketers should embrace this trend and use it to go one step ahead of their competitors. In this article, we showed you why personal voice assistants are the next big thing in digital marketing. Feel free to use our advice and let us know in comments if you need more explanations about this topic.
About the author: Warren Fowler is a marketing enthusiast and a blogger at BestEssays, who loves music. If he doesn’t have a guitar in his hands, he’s probably embracing new technologies and marketing techniques online! You can meet him on Twitter and Facebook.
