Talking About Using Your ‘Voice’ Effectively for Marketing Success

Tara Kelly, CEO, SPLICE Software chats with MarTech Advisor about a new area for marketing professionals to focus upon: Voice, Voice Assistants, and Voice Optimization. Get actionable insights into the best way to position your brand in a space ruled by Alexa and Google Home.

The customer journey is a part of holistic CX (Customer Experience). What are the critical touchpoints in a customer journey that a CMO needs to focus on to – a) drive revenue, and b) to enhance the CX of the brand?

I’m currently convinced that the most critical touchpoint CMOs need to be thinking about is voice assistants and how the use of voice will impact them from both a communications and advertising standpoint. Voice is the UI of the future, and while it will change how customers interact with brands, it will even more dramatically impact how brands will find customers.

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When you consider the estimate that 50% of searches will be done via Voice by 2020 and put that into the context of SEO and Search Advertising, it raises some pretty big questions. How will customers be finding you in 2020? How will you get your message in front of an audience that’s listening to search results, and not seeing an ad for your product in the sidebar? I recommend that every CMO at least take the step of asking Alexa and Google Home about their company—they may be surprised at how little the assistants’ can find and use in reply, which means those brands are already behind the curve in optimizing for voice search.

Voice commerce is showing phenomenal growth in the US. The advent of Alexa, Google Home, etc. has given brands a chance to literally “create their own voice.” What crucial elements should a CMO keep in mind when creating the Brand Voice (the voiceover artist, the tone of the conversation, Natural Language Processing capabilities, the script, etc.)?

If you look to the traditional definition of a Brand Voice—the personality of your brand, your choice of language, your tone, the overall idea and feel of your brand in the market—choosing a Brand Voice in the Voice First world is a natural extension of that. You need a voice that mirrors your visual and written brand , which can be harder than it seems. It’s a matter of everything from the pacing and pitch to the fluency and articulation.

What I CAN say for certain is that leaving your brand voice up to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, or Samsung is the equivalent of leaving your advertising message up to the magazine or television station. We’ve been calling it “blood in the streets”—the brand value that’s eroding as brands use Alexa’s voice or Google Assistant’s voice in their voice applications. For many brands, it’s a lost opportunity to establish a consistent voice experience for the brand across platforms.

In continuation of the above question, what tips would you give marketers on making the most of “Voice” for their customer journey? In your opinion, which industries (retail, banking, etc.) will benefit the most from these technologies?

The first piece of advice I’d give is: let’s learn from our past mistakes. We already went through the mobile app craze where every brand felt it needed an app, even if it served no useful purpose. So instead of racing to create a voice app, start by looking at how you can add value to your customer. What can you help them do easier or better by voice than they can do online or within a mobile app?

The other piece of advice I’d give (which may seem contrary but isn’t) is: don’t wait to secure your invocation name. Just like the URL land grab of the 90s, the invocation names on Alexa and Google are being snapped up pretty quickly. If you want a short, memorable invocation name, you should be registering a simple app and holding that invocation name now before someone else gets it. It could be the difference between customers saying, “Ask Advantage for my current balance” or “Ask Advantage Lending Company for my balance” when you finally do launch a utility-rich voice application. A shorter name is always going to be easier for the customer to recall.

How have you seen the concept of seamless CX evolve over the last few years, and where do you see it heading in 2020?

We are almost at the advent of the long-promised utopia of marketing—and by 2020 we will be there—where it’s possible for all our data to be available across all systems and where all touchpoints have access to identical real-time information from a central source. People need to take an active role in their individual engagement preferences, and of course, companies need to follow them.

I believe we’ve passed the tipping point in consumer acceptance of brands using big- and small-data across platforms and touchpoints, but we still need more active preference management and real value exchange.  Consumers have gotten over their initial concerns of searching for a product online and instantly seeing ads for the same product on Facebook or other sites online. That doesn’t mean that they don’t still find it creepy or a little too much when systems action filters or decisions they feel unaware of. So companies will be dealing with those concerns more over the next few years as consumers experience more of what they see as “big brother” marketing techniques.

What are some of the biggest challenges that CMOs face when working in a fast-paced, data-driven environment? How can they overcome these challenges?

I talk a lot about the idea of focusing on “data for good.” Customers don’t mind providing you data and allowing you to use it to market to them—as long as it’s used responsibly and provides something of value back to the customer.

One of the best examples of this in action is Walt Disney World’s MagicBands. Disney’s customers (or “guests”) know that those MagicBands are tracking them throughout the park, and enable Disney to do everything from deploying cast members into busy areas to popping up food and gift carts to sell more merchandise. But, in return, those guests get convenient access to rooms, parks, and fast passes, easy payment methods, and “magical” experiences like automatic access to on-ride photos and personalized tombstone graphics at the end of the Haunted Mansion ride. We trust Disney to use that data responsibly, but also to give us something valuable in return.

I expect the use of data cross-channels to continue to expand, especially as firms improve the ability to share data seamlessly across touchpoints. Figuring out how to use the data to improve the bottom line without crossing the line into violating customers’ sense of personal privacy—will be a huge challenge for CMOs. Keeping in mind that the idea of “using data for good” should help them stay on the right side of those decisions.

“Interactive Marketing” is one of the buzzwords in the MarTech landscape. How can CMOs leverage interactive marketing to boost not only their sales but also their CX?

I’m a huge proponent of Voice due to its interactive nature, but in a broader sense, almost any marketing can be interactive in some way. Television ads can become interactive by having consumers “Shazam” the ad; print ads can become interactive by adding a trackable URL or source code. As a big believer in testing, measuring, and then improving based on those measurements, the cost of making those channels interactive more than pays for itself in being able to measure the results.

From a CX angle, it’s important to use that information in the other direction as well. Learning everything about your customer helps you make their experience that much better. That’s one of the reasons I talk so much about getting data back out of your voice apps. As an example, a customer asking Alexa to see if she has insurance coverage for eyeglasses tells you that she’s probably in the market for an eye exam and possibly for eyeglasses. If you’re not returning that insight back into your CRM, you’re missing the chance to send a message to that customer guiding her to preferred optometrists that will save her money on her co-pay, or sending her a link to providers who participate in her insurance plan. Those are examples of “using data for good” that I mentioned earlier.

Personalization has gained momentum as an important marketing strategy over the years. How does personalization affect CX? What techniques can marketers employ to make their personalization strategies more effective?

Personalization techniques have moved light years over the past few years, assisted largely by Big Data and AI. Personalization used to be about form fields in emails and direct mail.  Personalization has evolved into customized landing pages targeted to individual preferences, previous purchase behaviors, search histories, and social intelligence. That’s a huge leap in a handful of years! But this ties back to my earlier point about data across systems—not every company is ready to take advantage of those expanded data capabilities. But personalization doesn’t have to be that complex to be effective.

What are the crucial new skills that a CMO needs on their team when it comes to adapting to these new tools and strategies (Mobile marketing, omnichannel marketing, AI and machine learning, chatbots, etc.)?

I’d say the big three skills to hire for would be designing for Voice First interactions, data analysis and interpretation, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That last one may be surprising, (SEO has been a buzzword seemingly forever) but Voice Optimization is still evolving, and it’s currently tightly intertwined with SEO—Google, for example, doesn’t do much for you in Voice search unless you’re ranked highly in SEO—so getting someone who is strong in SEO and giving them the mandate to begin optimizing for Voice would be high on my list.

Would you like to give our readers a little sneak peek into the latest innovations at SPLICE Software?

Well, since you asked about opportunities for both Voice and personalization, SPLICE has been a leader in Voice since long before it was trendy—we’ve been offering personalized, data-driven, human voice messaging since 2006.

And while we’ve been building Alexa Skills and Google Actions for our clients for over a year and powering them with natural human voice (instead of the default Alexa/Google Assistant Voices), we’ll soon be enabling agencies and brands to leverage the power of on-brand, natural human Voice within their Voice Apps, whether we’ve built the app or not.

We’ll be rolling out these capabilities in Fall 2018, so watch for an announcement about our SynthIA™ product offering coming in just a matter of weeks.

MTA: Thank you for that great conversation, Tara. We hope to speak with you again, soon!

About SPLICE Software:

SPLICE Software blends art and science in creating stronger connections and improving the customer experience for insurers, bankers, and retailers. Their cloud-based Dialog Suite™ uses Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to deliver personalized Voice & SMS messages at critical moments along the customer journey. For more information on SPLICE, visit their website, connect via LinkedIn or follow on Twitter at @SPLICESoftware.