Voice Assistants; and Their Marketing Importance
What is Voice Search Marketing?
As the name suggests, voice search uses speech recognition technology to let users process inquiries by speaking into their devices. Right now, these devices are typically either phones or in-home personal assistants like Amazon’s Alexa. The not-too-distant future will see voice search become commonplace across smart homes, vehicles, wearables, and the entire internet of things.
Voice search marketing is the practice of taking a fresh look at your digital content and making sure it’s adapting to these changing search habits because the differences between voice and typed search are huge.
Who is Using Voice Search in 2021?
Research from Salesforce gives us some insight into the adoption of the voice search across different demographics. When asked if they use voice-activated personal assistants like Siri or Alexa to communicate with companies, and whether they prefer it to traditional channels:
39% of older generations and Boomers use them,
10% prefer them, 50% of Gen X use them,
18% prefer them, 67% of Millennials and
Gen Z use them, 35% prefer them
That’s a significant uptake in only a handful of years, and the technology is being well received. 39% of older people and Boomers either ‘like’ or ‘love’ these voice-activated personal assistants. That stat is 49% for Gen X and a whopping 74% for Millennials and Gen Z.
Today, most smart devices can carry out voice searches. The manufacturer of each device will dictate which search engine it uses:
Google powers Google Home, Google Assistant, and all Android devices,
Bing gets used by Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana,
Siri uses safari on the iPhone
Why is now a good time to hop on the Voice Assistant Bandwagon?
Global Voice Assistant Market Research Trends valuation stood at USD 1.68 Billion in 2010 and is projected to reach USD 7.30 Billion by 2023, registering a 24.32% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) during the forecast period (2019 to 2025).
Voice assistants are garnering significant popularity these days, becoming a key component of smart/connected homes. The adoption of smart speakers has been growing, with voice assistants. For example, today, most Americans own at least one. The numbers of voice assistants in U.S. homes have quadrupled exponentially, and it is increased to 25 million by 2020 and projected to arrive at USD 275 Million by 2023.
How Much is Voice Assistant Use Growing?
More than 50 percent of U.S. households now own a smart speaker. According to some estimates, 128 million people in the U.S. are using voice assistants. Voice accounts for a considerable portion of online searches and more than 50 percent of searches for local businesses. And voice assistant usage is growing in cars and other settings where users instead not be looking and interacting with a screen.
What is more important is that all these figures are growing year-over-year, indicating the increasing acceptance and expectation of voice features in devices and applications. The voice assistant market owes its growth to several factors: Advances in machine learning and deep learning have improved the accuracy of voice-to-text technology. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models have made it possible to carry out more complex commands.
How Important are Voice Assistants?
The overwhelming majority of marketers assign some importance to voice assistants as a channel to reach customers today, and more are taking it very seriously than in the past. In 2019, 91.5% of marketers listed voice assistants as at least somewhat necessary, and that figure was 91.8% for 2021.
The notable change in marketer sentiment came in the “essential” category. Data for 2021 show that 29.1% of marketers believe voice assistants are critical marketing channels. That is up from 24.0% in 2019.
