Why Search is Driving the Digital Assistant Movement

It was an amazing week at the iProspect Client “Remix” Summit in New Orleans. As Ariana Huffington mentioned, it is a “Brave New World” and the week-long discussion followed suit, revolving around the wild pace of our industry and how we leverage the changes taking place in technology, media channels, consumer behavior and conversion trends to succeed.

My contribution to the week was an in-depth discussion with Jeremy Hull, iProspect’s VP of Innovation. We explored the growing impact of digital assistants on both consumers and marketers. This is clearly an exciting area that is evolving quickly and I wanted to share out some key takeaways to keep the discussion moving ahead.

The Digital Assistant Landscape  

Roughly every ten years something comes along to disrupt and shift how we interact with technology. That last major disruption was the mobile revolution. The next disruption will be driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence as it integrates into every platform we engage with and everything we do, focused through the lens of the digital assistant.

While the idea of digital assistants has been around for a long time, it’s not until now they are really becoming effective. Digital assistants understand what we’re asking, are able to answer our questions and in more and more cases, can even provide helpful information beyond our original ask.

Digital Assistants – Siri, Google, Alexa and Cortana – all have one thing in common; they bring together the power of highly evolved search engines, voice recognition and intelligence to enable meaningful, ongoing interactions. But with each of these digital assistants, there are also some key differences:

·      Siri. Siri kickstarted the digital assistant movement and placed voice search on the map. It was the first step in getting people to speak versus type. Siri can be found on phones and is less focused on completing a task and more focused on simple voice-search, allowing users to receive answers to exactly what they ask.  

·      Alexa. Amazon pioneered the in-home assistant device with Alexa and the Echo. Now, Alexa is now expanding to include some different devices, such as the Alexa app for the iPhone and the iOS shopping app. They are also expanding the number of skills used with Alexa. Many of Alexa’s most popular queries are music related and there is, of course, a heavy focus on retail and ordering through Amazon.  

·      Google Assistant. This digital assistant took the opposite path from Alexa. It started as a voice companion to search and then later moved into the home.

·      Cortana. As part of Microsoft, Cortana has a different story as it draws from the capabilities of the broader company. Microsoft's in-depth research into real-life personal assistants gave the engineers insight into the relationship between an individual and their personal assistant. These deep insights are reflected in Cortana’s capabilities. The programming keeps a user’s interests top of mind when it completes tasks, similar to a personal admin. Scheduling a meeting, providing a weather report, helping navigate traffic on the way to your kid’s soccer game, and providing daily news are all examples of this. Cortana can be found in a wide range of places, some a little unexpected. It’s built into Microsoft Office, Edge, Windows 10, Xbox and is also available across iOS and Android. Cortana has about 145 million active users. 

What’s Driving Growth?

One of the main drivers of growth is NLP, “Natural Language Processing,” basically the assistant can now understand you better. In October, Microsoft scientists achieved a huge milestone, the error rate dropped to an all-time low of 5.9 percent. This means our digital assistants can understand us, just like we can understand another person. And things are always improving, especially around context. What’s happening around the user can provide very helpful information and affects the answer to their question. As users interact with digital assistants, they get more and more effective. They are in continual learning mode – constantly improving.

When you look at the hundreds of ads consumers are hit with every day, you realize this experience is also helping drive growth. This is why search has been successful over the years – it’s the ONLY form of advertising that consumers actively ask for. But outside of search, digital overload is a serious problem as mobile users typically have more than 33 apps on their phone, but spend 80 percent of their time on just three of them. Consumers are trying to block ads – over 70 million used adblockers this year—up 34 percent. Digital assistants offer the relief from ads that are irrelevant and intrusive.   

Critical Factors for Marketers 

Marketers should be thinking about three critical factors: relevance, preference and advocacy.  

1)     Relevance. Consumers do not want to be hammered by irrelevant advertising. Today, brands that focus on providing relevant search ads reap the benefits. As consumer interaction shifts to digital assistants and voice search, relevance becomes even more important. It doesn’t just become a benefit—it becomes the barrier to entry.

2)     Preference. Brand loyalty has always played a major role in advertising, it will be even more important in the world of digital assistants. Digital marketers are no longer optimizing campaigns for conversions, but rather adding value to the multiple touchpoints along decision journeys, thus creating relationships that go beyond a single engagement.

3)    Advocacy. In the future, digital assistants will have the potential to be your brand advocates, serving to filter out unwanted noise and connect directly to your brands of choice.

What You Can Do Today

There’s a lot you can do today to get ready for the digital assistant world of tomorrow. A good place to start is by identifying how your audience is currently interacting with digital assistants and the questions they’re asking about your brand.

What information are potential customers looking for? You can find out now by using search query reports to identify what we call “assumed voice queries.” As you go through this process, assumed voice queries are typically longer and more question-based. When a searcher uses voice search, it’s more like they're talking to an actual person. You wouldn’t say, "bicycle store." You might say: "Hey Cortana, what is the best place to buy a bicycle near me?"

By just doing this one step, you will be able to see the types of questions your customers are asking about your brand, look at who is making the voice searches (use demographic reports), and test bidding on the pay-per-click results for these longer terms. They can play an important role in the customer journey. 

Outside of assumed voice queries, brands should start developing both bots and digital assistant skills. Now is the time to start learning, but proceed carefully and strategically. The most successful brands of the past few years are those that provided ongoing value and leveraged the unique attributes of mobile phones (location, Bluetooth, etc.). Successful skills and bots will be the ones that leverage the strengths of digital assistants and voice interaction to simplify our lives. Think about how you can use voice commands and skills to interact with your products, services and content. Most importantly, provide value and simplify.