By now, you’ve probably said or heard someone say, “Hey Google” or “Hey Siri” to ask a question, make a purchase or ask for a playlist.
While most people generally experience the consumer side of a voice device, it is becoming a powerful business tool as well. From marketing to customer service (and retention) to a powerful SEO plan, voice assistance is the futureproofing strategy your business needs.
Conversation as marketing
Voice marketing presents the most powerful opportunity: it’s the chance to apply your brand voice to your marketing initiatives, literally. By opting for the right chatbot/voice AI strategy, you can speak directly to your customers through hyper personalized responses and localized language options. The reason this is possible is because your chatbot uses machine learning to glean colloquial language cues and powerful insights from customers with each interaction.
The term for this is Conversational AI or Conversational Marketing, and its fast becoming a key component to any website or digital-first strategy.
Just to put that into perspective:
The takeaway – Voice devices and conversational AI are taking over all aspects of people’s lives, which means if you don’t provide it, your competitor most certainly will.
Search as an action
Voice devices and assistance are changing the way people use the search function.
Search began as a simple research tool. You type in a few keywords and boom; you have options to choose from. But now, with the advent of AI, search is becoming an action. One of the most common examples of this features grocery shopping. Previously, someone would use their voice assistant to search a store location, products within a certain store or hours of operation. Now, you can use search to not only locate a store, but make direct, real-time purchases from it.
Search as an action creates opportunities that go beyond basic customer service, allowing search request actions to foster consistent customer service, long-term loyalty, and retention.
Chatbot customer service as a winning strategy
Conversational AI is very attractive to the consumer. It’s fun talking to a device as you would a friend; to make orders with ease in seconds and enjoy personalized suggestions, recipes, tips, and tricks simply by asking your voice device a question.
The same strategy can be applied to online customer service. Consumers, once skeptical of the usefulness of chatbots, now love the immediacy of a response from a bot. A good bot will answer most of the consumers questions and when it can’t anymore, smart companies have a human customer service rep to back it up.
It saves the company money and time while amplifying a good customer service strategy. All thanks to a simple little chatbot, always right at the customers fingertips.
Impact on SEO
Voice SEO (vSEO) presents both challenges and opportunities for marketers. For one, a traditional keyword strategy will likely need to be tossed out. When people speak, they don’t omit stop words like ‘is’, ‘the’, or pronouns, they add them all in! Which means that meta descriptions, and short keywords will all have to be modified to better reflect human speech patterns.
Challenges aside, the impact on vSEO is becoming pretty apparent:
- It’s 3.7 times faster than typed search.
- It’s hyper personalized through conversation and localization.
- Based on customer testimonials it seems to have higher rates of accuracy.
- And finally, it’s much more accessible and can include those with mobility issues or vision issues.
SEO changes at a rapid-click, so the best future-proofing strategy would be through a voice assistant that evolves via machine learning. AI can take in data faster than humans can, spitting out results and adapting faster for the customer than the marketing team can, so understanding vSEO as a strategy is probably one of the best investments you can make.
How to choose a chatbot for your business?
The chatbot and voice world have countless options for your business. If you’ve been convinced to hop on the chatbot train or if you’ve already started ruminating on it, be sure to understand the best options for you by checking out this article by our own, Scott Snowden.