As consumers become more comfortable using voice search queries on their mobile devices and smart speakers, both B2B and B2C marketers should be considering how this channel will impact their work, whether its Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant. The answer to that question may not be easy to define, but there is another question that can help you make your decision: Is my target audience using these devices now or will they be there soon? Predictions are that by 2022, 55% of US households will have a smart speaker device. Two factors to consider when thinking about if and how to add smart speaker to your marketing mix are: how comfortable is your audience with technology and what their attitudes are about data privacy.
Comfort with Technology
While it’s easier for most to speak requests to a device than type them, especially if you’re elbows-deep in your pandemic sourdough starter, not everyone “gets” technology well enough to agree with the idea that speaking is the preferable route. Concerns about accuracy are common and not entirely unfounded. If that defines your audience you likely have some time before you need to focus resources on voice-activated search.
Comfort with Privacy
Similarly, if your audience would prefer not to share personal information with anyone they don’t have to, they’re likely to have concerns about who’s listening in on the other end of their request.
Reports of always-on digital assistants listening and recording when they shouldn’t be won’t help win this audience segment over. If that’s who your audience is, you can hold off on diving into voice search.
But don’t ignore it entirely. My purely anecdotal research indicates that the breakdown isn’t what you’d expect — digital natives vs. retirees, say, or tech workers vs. people who aren’t in front of a computer for work all day.
This may be in part because the younger set aren’t as invested in their homes yet and speakers and smart speakers aren’t a high priority. And those who work in tech and marketing seem to either love the underlying tech or mistrust those who are supposed to be safeguarding our personal info. I would expect this to mean attitudes could shift within these groups more readily than they might if they broke along generational lines or career paths.
Who Owns Your Marketing Data?
Finally, you might consider privacy from your own perspective as a marketer. What are Amazon, Apple, and Google doing with the data they are gathering? What rights have you ceded in the fine print? And do you trust that they’ll abide by the rules they’ve set out? It’s worth remembering that their interests and yours aren’t necessarily going to be aligned.
Chances are, this isn’t a critical channel for you yet, but it’s one that seems to be
growing beyond the “best pizza near me” queries that dominate now. Keep these tools on your radar and, as with all marketing technology, think about how privacy concerns will influence your audience’s behavior and how those concerns should influence your marketing.
