The Role Of Voice Search Webinar Highlights with Clark Boyd | Digital Marketing Institute

Key Takeaways

hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on voice search today we'll be talking about the role of this very trending topic both today and tomorrow my name is Clark Boyd and I'm a digital marketing consultant spent about eight years working at digital marketing agencies in London and New York but now I work for myself and spend probably more time than anyone should thinking about voice search what it really means beyond all of the hype I think we've all read a lot of articles that offer 10 tips and great takeaways and may be left feeling a little unfulfilled with what we found so I'm setting myself up for a bit of a fall here but I think I'm going to go beyond that today I was reading an article a couple of weeks ago and this seemed quite telling to me this was a Tom Ward he writes for Wired and he wrote that the more a user interface is able to replicate how humans interact with the world the more our interactions with computers will come to feel natural and intuitive and that's in self-explanatory but I think there's some subtext there which is that as it stands our relationship with computers and with technology is not natural and it's not intuitive it's a little bit stilted and the next point on that is that well if you were a big technology company wouldn't you want it to become natural and I think that gives us a way into understanding this where we are today is that yes it can be rather stilted but if you think about the potential benefits for a technology company for consumers and for brands if that was a seamless communication and if it was natural we can probably see where we're going to go next so I wanna have a quick look at how we learn to communicate now if anyone on this this webinar doesn't know all of this stuff I'll be very surprised so I will go quickly we listen to the world around us and then we speak we read before we can write and you know historically that's true we've been speaking for many many thousands more years than we've been reading and writing but when we think about how we communicate with computers and how we interact with each other online it's kind of happened in Reverse and not for any good reason other than a technological one it's been much harder to get a computer to listen and to speak so we rewrite so we go to a search engine and we type in our query we write a word document we write email and then we read the responses of course over time we start to speak at the moment more for actions than for anything else but we start to speak and then we listen that's the last stage isn't it and I put up this well actually would you like to hear a joke and I haven't thought it through completely until I was on my way here and I asked Google assistant to tell me a joke so yeah God lighten the mood very quickly and go through that this is a Google joke by the way and what is a pirate's favorite letter you might think it's R but actually his first love was the sea I picked a compliment on that I thought was good okay people here maybe not the green I'm easily amused I thought of create slightly different tone this is from an academic study in 2007 I will say this might come through and some of what I'm saying I will try and keep it down beyond the dry details I did my degree in linguistics and it's now becoming useful with voice search 7% of our message is communicated through the words we use so the exact text if you were to transcribe that's right what is said that would be about 7% of the meaning 93% of that is in the body language the tone all of those things and it seems quite drastic doesn't it but if you think about the people you know and how much of their personality comes through in the way that they talk it starts to make a little bit more sense at the moment we're kind of tapping into that 7% are we're starting to understand the questions that people are asking of Google home and as an echo but we're not really understanding what they mean and that that ninety-three percent is where we're going into next so with that in mind Google assistant is not available on over 1 billion devices worldwide no I would advise anyone that's thinking about voice search to keep focused on the Google assistant and on Amazon Alexa rather than the devices themselves so we focus quite a lot on say the Google home device and we think well it doesn't have a screen which really limits what we can do from a marketing perspective but the aim for someone like Google is actually to be ubiquitous so that the technology fades into the background you don't really always see it it's ambient they use that term quite often they'll search being ambient always at your disposal always at your fingertips that's where we need to be as marketers rather than just thinking about these devices and as we see over 1 billion devices worldwide now I have the Google assistant installed on them the question I always ask her on that though is why why is a company as big as Google or Amazon or you may have seen the new Facebook assistant coming out and Apple Siri given that at the moment we're asking them to tell what I think are very funny jokes that doesn't seem like a big business opportunity does it it doesn't make that much sense that the biggest companies and the richest companies the world has ever known are trying very hard to get into our homes if we're just going to ask them what the weather is like it doesn't really seem like a great investment unless it makes a $20 loss on each Amazon echo device sold in the US they're pretty savvy business people so we need to think about what's going on longer term there for someone like me that does a lot of these these sorts of talks this sort of thing is catnip to me when I see that Alexa wants to know how you're feeling today and Amazon has patented technology that would allow as devices to read your emotional and physical state and sell advertisements based on them are we entering the era of the mood targeted ad in isolation maybe this seems a little bit sensationalist in other presentations that I've done I haven't put too much of it in in here I've looked at a lot of different patents that have been filed at Fairleigh filed by Google and Amazon and a lot of people would say well a patent isn't the product you know there are many many many patents that never see the light of day as real products but what they do tell you is what they intend on doing or what they're considering doing or something they're planning to prototype and this very much falls into that category there was a story that went out about Amazon actually the the device changing color based on your mood so it might try and cheer you up if you weren't denigrate mood and um people really really didn't like that because it seems a bit creepy but five years ago it felt creepy to be talking to our phone even to be carrying a phone with us everywhere they'd feel strange to a lot of people knowing that we're being tracked and yet we do still do it so these behaviors are not set in stone this is taken directly from the patent that informed that article we see here the consumer the user cough I'm hungry sniffle an Alexis asked well would you like a recipe for chicken soup she says no thanks ok I can find you something else by the way would you like to order cough drops with one-hour delivery that would be awesome thanks for asking probably American this one have no problem I'll email you an order confirmation feel better did a nice touch although it's not that nice when you consider that your cough drops are coming from Amazon's new pill delivery company Amazon has bought a company that will help to fulfill all of this and it didn't give you a choice which means that it will come from wherever is most convenient to them if you're looking at this as a search marketer and you're thinking well you know if I had voice search data in search console or make a big difference it's tricky here isn't it because all that this person has done in terms of the query that you would see is said I'm hungry and they've ended up with cough drops so probably not what they were considering having for dinner that night but that's why they've ended up with so if you looked at it from a marketing perspective it would seem rather strange so automatically we've sent someone cough drops the the devil is very much in the detail with this though if you look at what it has done it has understood or interpreted an underlying physical intent state so the person is not well they have it said that they aren't aware that they might be looking for a remedy of some sort they simply said I'm hungry the chicken soup idea comes from understanding they're not well and then it goes ahead with the cough drops so what is really that what is search about this I I very much see this as being the future of this where the intermediary being the search engine or the digital assistant those a lot of the work on the consumers behalf it does a lot of the conversation it is moving things forward it's nudging them towards something that they maybe didn't even know that they wanted well I'm not sure that this conscious voice search does it the person isn't searching they're not even voicing in in a classical way what it is that they're looking for as marketers all we can do is focus on those states so if you are working for a company that does work with cough drops for example think about how you can serve that information to Amazon and try and compete so that when someone is like this the information is being served to them so it moves us away from a very direct relations between they searched for credit cards and then they clicked on our website and we paid 20 points for the click and then they're worth a thousand points also for the lifetime great deal it becomes much more sophisticated much more nuanced harder to measure harder to to look out in a causal chain of events but also I think a lot more exciting