As new technology gets introduced into the digital marketing arena, it is necessary for digital marketing professionals to try and determine how that technology will benefit their clients. Ever since the rise in popularity of voice search devices from Microsoft and Google, the idea of voice search has started to take on a life of its own. In order to integrate this technology properly into a marketing program, digital marketing experts need to know as much as they can about this new search method.
When people were able to put text searches in their phones, most people thought that would be the pinnacle of search technology. But the ability to simply tell your device what you want has taken the technology world by storm. As a digital marketing professional, it is career suicide to try and ignore the rising impact voice search is having on everything from commerce to streaming videos.
When a consumer does a voice search, they speak in their native accent and they use terms that can often be pinned down to certain geographic areas. With this kind of information, digital marketing experts can learn even more about a target audience and learn how to speak directly to that audience in a language that makes it comfortable. This is information that was almost impossible to get in the past, but now it can be easily gathered through voice search devices.
Amazon and the other voice search device companies are being quiet about how voice search will affect commerce, but it is definitely going to change things. For example, when you tell your voice search device to order duct tape, it never asks you what brand you want. Are the brands being chosen by the popular searches done by the consumer, or are they being chosen by the retailer based on pricing or other factors? Commerce and voice search is still in the beginning stages of its relationship, but this is definitely going to be something to watch.
How much information are voice search devices actually gathering? In 2017, some smart television manufacturers sent out notices to customers warning them that their smart televisions are “listening in” to private conversations all of the time. We can assume that voice search devices are doing the same thing, and we can also assume that private information is being collected for some purpose.
A voice search device is a treasure trove of consumer information, but for who? While gathering demographic information on a target audience is normally a relatively simple task, that is not going to be the case when it comes to voice searches. Only certain companies are gathering that information, and it is difficult to tell what they intend to do with it.
In the years of the rotary telephone, people were afraid that the government was somehow using the phone to secretly collect data. Fast-forward to 2018 and now everyone is telling their most intimate secrets to voice search devices. Any digital marketing expert who wants to be able to use this valuable information to help their clients needs to start becoming familiar with voice search technology and how it works right now.
