We live in a world where a large num­ber of peo­ple like to engage with their favorite brands online, and busi­ness own­ers are under­stand­ing that now.

Today, a chunk of peo­ple find new prod­ucts online and also place the orders online. How­ev­er, a par­a­digm shift can be observed in how they approach this which is how we see more and more peo­ple search­ing for infor­ma­tion on the web using voice-com­mands rather than tex­tu­al queries.

1. Brand voice

AI has impact­ed lots of indus­tries and the brand­ing indus­try has not escaped its reach, nowa­days we have machines that can cre­ate brands based on user inputs. How­ev­er, while AI has made build­ing a brand iden­ti­ty more acces­si­ble, it can also present a chal­lenge, and one of these chal­lenges is the rise of voice assistants.

The voice assis­tants we have today are finite in num­ber. Some of the most pop­u­lar options that we use are Google’s Assis­tance, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cor­tona. How­ev­er, as arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy is becom­ing stronger, we will have a wider range of these ser­vices to choose from. When this hap­pens, then the voice of the vir­tu­al assis­tant may inter­fere with a brand’s per­son­al­i­ty. For instance, if some­one is using a female vir­tu­al assis­tant to look up infor­ma­tion about a mas­cu­line brand, then it can hurt the brand’s impact. To tack­le this prob­lem, brands must keep these poten­tial sit­u­a­tions in mind. So, in this very exam­ple, a brand could alter the con­tent that the voice assis­tance finds in a way that it’s able to retain the brand’s tone (mas­cu­line and rough) even if it’s in a female voice.

2. Consistency

Con­sis­ten­cy is the key to suc­cess­ful brand­ing – there is no deny­ing that. How­ev­er, you need to keep that in mind when you work with voice search­es as well. For instance, you want to ensure that the tone and lan­guage used in the results of voice search­es are opti­mized and in line with the brand book. These affect the fol­low­ing results returned by voice com­mands – prod­uct descrip­tions, social media con­tent, ad copy, chat­bot dia­log, and more.

Consistency

3. Payments

Vir­tu­al assis­tants are main­ly used to find infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. How­ev­er, ser­vice providers are also look­ing into new ways of using these ser­vices. For instance, Google Assis­tant now allows Google Pay users to send and receive mon­ey using voice com­mands. In the same way, pay­ments leader Mas­ter­Card is aim­ing to bring its Mas­ter­pass online pay­ment plat­form into Google and Amazon’s voice sys­tems. So, what does this mean for the brands? Well, for one thing, they need to think about mak­ing pro­vi­sions like this, that is, mak­ing pay­ments eas­i­er and sim­pler with voice com­mands so that they can enjoy first-mover advantages.

4. Optimized content

What’s meant to be read doesn’t always sound good when voiced. For instance, if you define “SEO” on your blog by start­ing with the words “SEO is one of the most-effec­tive dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tech­niques used by brands today”, then you may fail to arouse the inter­est of the user if and when they search for the con­tent using an appro­pri­ate voice com­mand. How­ev­er, if you ignore the intro­duc­tion and focus on the main con­tent by opti­miz­ing the con­tent, then you can let the vir­tu­al assis­tant read some­thing like “SEO refers to Search Engine Opti­miza­tion which com­bines dif­fer­ent kinds of tech­niques…” which is far more effec­tive and engaging.

As you can see, voice search isn’t only mak­ing the lives of peo­ple around the world eas­i­er, but it’s also inter­fer­ing with the prac­tices of old and new brands. Those who are adapt­ing to the chang­ing trends have noth­ing to fear. How­ev­er, the rest of them who have decid­ed to remain unchanged can face all kinds of prob­lems in the future.

Remem­ber – brand­ing isn’t just for big busi­ness­es. It doesn’t mat­ter how big or small your com­pa­ny is, you need to take as many brand­ing mea­sures as pos­si­ble. Nat­u­ral­ly, voice search must be an inte­gral part of the plan.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch