As this reliance on voice-first communications grows, so too does interest among brands. Companies in all industries are experimenting to figure out how these new communication channels can help them interact with their target audiences and build brand engagement in more personalized and frictionless ways.
Voice, however, is unlike anything that’s come before, which is forcing brands to think differently about how they design their campaigns. Rather than using traditional “push” messaging, they must work harder to make brand interactions useful and valuable—or they risk becoming irrelevant. While best practices for voice are still evolving, eMarketer's latest report, "Marketing Beyond the Screen: Using Voice Technology to Boost Brand Engagement," delves more deeply into these market dynamics and describes some concrete steps for getting started with voice control.
The biggest change is that voice-first technology requires marketers to design auditory interactions, without screens or keyboards. “When you do a visual search on a desktop or a mobile phone, you're presented with multiple choices or answers to your query,” said Allen Nance, CMO at Emarsys. “But when you do voice, you're pretty much getting whatever answer the device—or the company that owns the device—thinks is the right answer.”
What’s more, it’s not yet possible to buy sponsored ads or keywords to improve the chances of being that one result. Instead, marketers must use trial and error to optimize content and try to organically appear in “position zero” (aka the “featured snippet” or “answer box” in a Google search).
According to Christopher Lundquist, vice president of strategy and consulting at SapientRazorfish, this "changes how marketers can work” and is further complicated by differences in how search engines like Google and Bing process queries, source information and prioritize results.
Voice devices also differ from other channels in that advertising is still very limited, and there are no ad networks or large-scale monetization models to work with. Even as brands clamor for more paid opportunities, voice platform companies—including Amazon and Google—are treading cautiously for fear of alienating users with invasive or inappropriate messaging.