How voice is turning out to be an effective marketing tool for brands

Brands have started taking a shine to voice search and assistant, using it as a direct tool for marketers to reach out to brands.

The growth of the medium is visible from the fact that Google has seen a 300% increase in voice queries in the last one year.

Companies that were only using mediums such as text and video content have now started using voice as a part of their media strategies.

According to experts, voice is solving two main problems for marketers; providing direct reach to audiences and getting the less technology savvy audiences to digital platforms more frequently, hence expanding the base.

In an interaction with BuzzInContent, Charu Joshi, Business Development and Partnership Lead, Google India, discussed if brands in India are ready to imbibe voice as one of the marketing strategies to engage the audience.

“Voice has a lot of potential and will solve two problems for brands. First, to generate communication with the user. Secondly, if a user can’t write or read in a certain language, he/she can speak to the volumes,” said Joshi.

If appropriately implemented voice as an element can be best utilised as one of the content marketing strategies for the brands, she said.

If a user who does not understand the print or a digital ad, voice would help build the conversation around the same.

Talking about the current market scenario in India, Joshi said brands in India are already activating themselves in this arena. Quoting the example of Flipkart who had used bot as a communication tool to talk to the users to negotiate the price of the products, she said, "It is happening in a very tactical form currently in India, but would scale out much more."

"Being illiterate is not a concern anymore. A vast amount of assistant and voice users come from the people who are not literate. They are still interacting fundamentally well because this is the only access that they have ever seen,” she added.

With technology becoming more and more smart and contextual, Joshi said it would enhance the consumption of content in the form of information.

The machines’ ability to understand what humans are saying has over 95% accuracy right now. If machines understand users better, and users are using devices more, automatically the usage will increase. The usage would be in the form of various content formats.

Since the majority of the tech brands are also investing in content marketing, Joshi said every brand needs to tell a story to its audience.

“Content marketing is all about leading a story with a purpose and a context. Not just FMCGs, most tech brands also want to tell people how their technology needs to be used and that is why they are advertising via content marketing. Users need to be told more than what the USP of the product is and they need to be told with an informative and educative manner. And that's why this content building is happening,” she said.

Most of the brands do approach Google for their marketing strategies. And Google for its own marketing also follow the same rules of marketing, said Joshi.

 “We don't have crazy budgets, but we realized that with some products of ours, users need to be informed what the benefits of the products are. And that's where content marketing helps. We do a lot of marketing on digital, not on mass media,” she added.