Building a voice team in your agency is the next step in content evolution
First mover advantage is a thing. It’s certainly not an automatic pass to market dominance, but it matters.
It’s for that reason that I consider building out a voice team in an agency is the way forward. Think I’m crazy? Let me explain my rationale…
When we started Zazzle Media Back in 2009 we started we seized on a simple truth; marketers were simply not investing in content online. In hindsight that now seems like folly, but at the time it was true. And, to begin with at least, no one would buy it either.
The world has changed. Content now sits at the epicentre of the majority of marketing plans and the result is a better experience for all. Of course there are arguments, such as the arrival of the content deluge, but overall content has always been the only medium through which audience can be grown and retained. It’s why the biggest companies in the world are investing heavily to create it.
‘So what has this got to do with voice?’, I hear you ask. The answer lies quite simply in the evolution of the customer journey and a corresponding tech revolution.
The internet didn’t ‘do’ content and audiences needed it. The internet doesn’t ‘do’ voice (very well) but audiences need it.
The voice interface is the next era in computing. Being able to use our voices to get what we want from our machines has always been the future as it is the most frictionless interaction possible outside of thought. And if you speak to those working at the coalface of the technology we are now very close to the tipping point.
I’m not the only one who noticed this prospect. According to Baidu’s chief engineer Andrew NG, voice is at present "only 90% accurate," and therefore the results are sometimes a little disappointing.
But he also sees that changing soon: "As speech recognition accuracy goes from 95% to 99%, all of us in the room will go from barely using it today to using it all the time. Most people underestimate the difference between 95% and 99% accuracy — 99% is a game changer.”
Play that alongside the view of Google’s own leading engineer, renowned futurist, Ray Kurzweil in that technological advancement will accelerate at an exponential rate and we can see that we hit ‘tipping point’ in 2019.
In his 2000 thesis called The Law of Accelerating Returns, he explained that Moore's Law (the traditional measure of technological advancement) was running out of runway and it was all down to the fact that the pace of change was picking up faster than anyone had previously comprehended.
The chart below shows how we are very quickly heading towards a world in which we can create machines as ‘smart’ as a human brain. In doing so it opens up a world of opportunity for voice technology.
Add to this the fact that on the hardware side all the big tech players are piling in with voice assistants and we are quickly reaching a point at which affordability, access and usability meet. And that has always resulted in mass take up.
As a marketer that excites me, as major technology changes create real opportunities for quick moving start-ups and agile businesses to upset the status quo and steal a march.
And that’s why I believe in building a team with the skills to build winning strategies for this new world of opportunity.
What does it need to work?
The key to all of it is to build out strategies based on a painstaking process of detailing out every persona’s key user journeys through your product or service.
As for the skills to deliver such a plan a lot of what is needed can be obtained from existing resource. Good news for those fearing yet more cost and change management.
The team
For me the ‘team’ is a straightforward one, initially containing:
- Developer/s experienced in building Actions and Skills (apps for the key assistants)
- An experienced content strategist to shape user journey ideations.
- An SEO to optimise for Featured Snippets, Local and to help identify opportunity through keyword research
- Writer/Editor to shape tonality and consistency as well as to create content
- Researcher/data analyst to identify Micro Moments, pain points and user journeys
With the above assembled, or picked from existing teams, it is possible to build out a voice strategy and execute with relative ease.
The marketplace will become more competitive and complex of course but for now it is enough to get ahead, and with the world’s biggest tech companies now pushing the market it cannot be long before having such a plan becomes imperative. Get ahead while you can!
Simon Penson is managing director of content marketing agency Zazzle Media.
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