Introduction

This article is a complete guide to voice marketing in 2022!

You will learn about:

• Voice marketing fundamentals
• The 5.5 current top voice marketing trends
• The 4 key ways you can leverage voice marketing
• Top-ties tips and tricks to make an awesome voice campaign.

Then we will have a look at a couple of case studies.

So, if you want to learn about voice marketing and implement it into your business, you’re at the right place.

So, let’s jump right in!

Voice marketing

In this chapter, you will learn the fundamentals of voice marketing.

If you’re new to voice marketing you will enjoy this chapter and, if you’re a bit more advanced, it never hurts to go through the fundamentals again.

In later chapters, we will go deeper into strategies, trends and case studies but for now, let’s cover the basics. 

Chapter 1 – Voice marketing fundamentals

What is voice marketing?

Voice marketing is a set of strategies and tactics (including planning, editing, promoting) that businesses use to promote a brand, business or product through voice-enabled devices.

Common platforms companies use for voice marketing are Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Spotify, Soundcloud, Instreamatic or Vocads.

Why is voice marketing important?

Nowadays, because of the number of advertisements people are facing daily, they tend to get less receptive to them. The current market is not used to voice advertising yet, which increases the likelihood of people getting aware of it. 

In 2020, there were 4.2B voice assistants on the market and according to Statista the number of digital voice assistants should reach 8.4B by 2024.

People are spending a lot of time around voice-enabled devices, but voice marketing opportunities are still untapped.

According to Juniper, voice commerce (purchasing by voice) is estimated to reach $80 billion by 2023.

We process things faster when hearing than any other of our senses. Think about how quickly you react when hearing a sound compared to when reading a text.

We also give 5 times more information 5 times faster than we write text.

How to develop a voice marketing strategy?

It’s important to have a solid voice marketing strategy for your business to be successful!

For that you need to take several things into account:

• You can present several things at the same time, but you can’t speak about several things at the same time. That’s why you need to be even more clear on what you want to put in front of your customers.

• Take time to script your voice content! Every customer will hear the same thing and you will have no images to back up your words, so you need to be clear about what you will say.

• No visuals can be a benefit as voice marketing enables you to play with your customers’ imagination!

• Distribute your content on the right platform: it should be adapted to the device you expect customers to listen to content on. For example Spotify for podcasts and Vocads for websites.

• Track your voice marketing campaign stats to improve your content and get feedback from your clients.

I’ll go later into tips, tricks and more details on how to make an amazing voice marketing campaign.

How can voice marketing make your business grow?

Here you might think: “but wait a minute, there has always been audio advertising on the radio so what makes it such a big revolution?”

 

I am not only including voice advertising when I am talking about voice marketing. I am talking about an integrated voice marketing strategy across several platforms.

As mentioned in the previous parts, voice marketing is going to be developed massively in the next few years.

But you’re part of the lucky ones: you’re reading this article right now and it’s still time to be part of the early adopters!

 

Audio marketing is cheaper than video marketing and for now, it’s easy to get your content out there and to stand out as every channel isn’t super competitive yet.

For example, companies like Instreamatic can help you create interactive voice ads that you can then implement into a voice-enabled device.

With Vocads, a no-code tool to create voice campaigns, you can augment your website with voice to guide customers, give product suggestions or create voice satisfaction surveys all through natural conversation. This enables you to get very accurate data to improve your products and services.

You can also ask a voice agency to help you implement voice in your business. Check our article on the top voice agencies here.

I do voice marketing every day.

So, let me share with you everything that I know about it!

Let’s head to chapter 2.

Chapter 2 – Voice marketing trends

In this chapter, I will give you the current voice marketing trends.

Knowing more about these trends will help you adapt your voice marketing strategy and content.

Some of them might sound obvious but I am pretty sure you don’t know all of them yet!

So, if you’re thinking of bringing voice to your business you might want to consider these trends and try some of them!

Trend 1: Podcasts

What’s amazing with podcasts is that you can find a topic for literally everything! 

Sometimes even the smallest niche such as classic cars collectors have a podcast!

You see where I am getting here right?

This is a great opportunity for voice marketing as your target audience has been gathered in the same place to listen to the same podcast.

On top of that, the number of podcast listeners is rising. According to Statista the number of podcast listeners in the United States in 2021 was around 120 million and is expected to reach around 160 million in 2023.

Not only can you ask to put your ads in someone’s podcast, but you can also create your own which will enable you to create a loyal community and will give personality to your company.

What is important here is really to choose the right podcast with the right audience and if you have your own, choose the right topic to engage your customers.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that you have no visuals to back up your words here. So, try to stimulate your listeners’ imagination.

Trend 2: Audio streaming apps.

Here again, we are making an app that people consume a lot of! 

I have spent 42 000 minutes on Spotify this year. That is 700 hours! 700 hours where I was exposed to advertising.

Well, anyone with a free version of Spotify will be massively exposed to audio advertising and usually, when someone is listening to music, their attention falls on the music and they wouldn’t miss an ad.

As I mentioned previously, we have been overexposed to ads and have developed automatic filters, which makes them less receptive (actually we don’t even notify them anymore). The Spotify ads are the ads that are hard to escape from.

Yes, we can’t skip these ads and they can last up to 30 SECONDS!

On Spotify, you get an ad every 3 songs and on Soundcloud every 2 songs which is a lot!

The problem with this type of advertising is that it disturbs the listeners in a good moment, and he is not likely to buy. The other problem is that it is much harder to target your audience with music than with podcasts.

Trend 3: Voice Assistants

As I mentioned in the first chapter there will be 8.4B voice assistants by 2024, and no it’s not far, it’s in 2 years. 2 years fly really fast.

The point is not to start when all these voice assistants are already in the market. You have to be already in the market when they arrive.

The most popular voice assistants are Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. They offer a lot of possibilities, and they get better every day.

Voice assistants can help you increase your sales. More and more people purchase products by voice as I mentioned in chapter one. If people can buy on other websites and not on yours this might harm your sales.

But don’t worry it’s not too late yet! It’s still time to be loud on voice assistants! 

My advice is not to just throw out an ad on them. You need to have a real strategy.

• You need to enable purchase by voice on your website otherwise competition will beat you

• Edit your voice messages to be short and efficient so it stays in the listeners’ mind and doesn’t bother them really.

• Keep your communication as casual as possible. People are chilling at home while listening to you.

• Advertise new products at every given moment: the more your ads are different the more people are likely to engage with you.

•  Engage people as much as possible: it’s voice! You need to have a conversation.

• People don’t have a lot of time. From the start to the end of the conversation, you need to do as much as possible by voice so users don’t need to touch their screens.

Trend 4: Social Media

First, there is Twitter: they recently created Twitter Space which is still in the early launch but enables people to create rooms and join rooms to have conversations with people.

So how does it work:

• Create a space (there are always public so anyone can join) and you will become the host
• DM, tweet or share a link for people to join!
• Name your space, schedule it and start it!
• Have two co-hosts and up to 13 speakers total including the host and the two co-host

The other one is called Clubhouse and it’s a social audio app. You can discover millions of rooms with people talking about various topics.!

It is a great place to talk to people about specific topics. You can also host rooms!

If you want to learn more about them, they have a really good blog.

Trend 5: Websites

Yes, your website can have a voice too! Are you surprised?

Well, bringing voice to your website can REVOLUTIONIZE your business. Let me explain to you why!

You will be able to redirect your customers easier. They just need to ask. You can create voice surveys to get valuable data that will help you improve your products or services

You can push the products you want to sell by suggesting them to your customers. It’s also amazing to get some data about how satisfied your customers are with different parts of your business to improve it.

Not only is it the quickest feedback you can get but also the more authentic one as your consumers are talking directly to you.

Another good thing about voice on websites is that you have a visual (your website) backing what your voice bot is saying.

Let me show you an example here

Trend 5.5: Dating apps

I labeled this one as half a trend as it is not actionable for businesses quite yet but it tells a lot.

The voice of someone is very important and even dating apps are starting to understand this. Hinge, a dating app, added a voice prompt to their dating app which enables people seeing someone else’s profile to listen to that person responding to a question by voice. 

Would you rather know the voice of someone you haven’t met yet? 

Interesting right?

Chapter 3 – What can you market by voice?

Now that you know about all the voice marketing trends, let’s explore what you can market by voice!

In this chapter, you will learn about the different things you can do in terms of voice marketing with the tools available on the market today.

Knowing this will enable you to have extensive knowledge of how voice can be included in all aspects of marketing.

You might already have an idea of what you want to do with your voice but maybe the next chapter will give you extra ideas!

Let’s dive in!

Sales funnel and CTA by voice 

Every human likes to be guided, that’s just how we are! 

We prefer to have a fitness program that guides us through every step rather than a list of all the exercises and a sentence saying if you do these exercises, you will lose weight.

Coming to a big website with lots of different information can be overwhelming at first. Including voice on your website can help guide your customer where they want to go and where you want them to go because you know what your best products are.

It’s like being there to give your customer some advice on your website and according to their responses you guide them.

For this, you can use a no-code tool like Vocads which enables you to create voice conversations on a website. This tool will enable you to have a conversation with the user from the moment they enter the website until the moment they are about to pay. 

Sales funnels by voice are a lot more straightforward than written ones and on top of that, they are interactive.

At the end of your sales funnel, it’s always better to have a Call To Action (CTA) and in a voice sales funnel you can have a voice CTA.

We all wish we could say something to our customer that is spending too much time on your sales page because he is hesitating to buy.

Indeed, a call to action is always more motivating by voice than by text and adding a CTA to your voice marketing campaigns can significantly increase your sales.

Check the demo just above in trend 5 to see

Voice survey and voice satisfaction

The advantage of surveys by voice is that people have less time to think about the answers which makes the results a lot more authentic.

You can collect the data you need to improve your products and services by having a simple natural conversation with them by using Vocads’ platform.

On top of that, voice surveys are faster and easier to fill.

You can also measure satisfaction by voice. Vocads’ algorithm can understand whether people are satisfied, average satisfied or unsatisfied about a product, situation or anything.

This is key for your business as it doesn’t only help you constantly improve your voice marketing campaigns but also all the processes in your business.

Voice advertising

Voice enables businesses to advertise in a completely different manner. You can build a voice ad like you built a video ad as you don’t have the visual support.

This might sound like a disadvantage at first but trust me it’s not. When you voice advertising, you can use something stronger than visual support!

Your client’s imagination!

My advice here is to play as much as possible with feeling and say something that enables your customer’s imagination. This hasn’t been done enough in recent years while the opportunity is here.

Talking about unused opportunities, my second advice regarding voice advertising is to create INTERACTIVE voice ads!

Almost no businesses are doing this yet but it’s incredibly powerful! 

Imagine enabling your customers to interact with your ads. It will give you extra useful details about what your customers like and it will make sure customers don’t consistently get bombarded by ads when they said they didn’t like a product.

Several tools allow you to do this today. One is Instreamatic. You can also do this with Vocads.

Voice content marketing

Yes, you can also do content marketing by voice!

Audible enables you to listen to an entire book by voice. But even on a smaller scale, you have tools such as trinity audio that enable you to put voice on your website. Your website will then be available in audio mode!

Pretty useful right?

But it doesn’t stop here. There are a bunch of tools out there that let you do voice learning. With Vocads you can build an entire voice questionnaire without a single line of code and explain answers when wrong.

Soapbox Lab is an amazing tool that can help educate kids with powerful speech technology built specifically for kids!

 

Chapter 4 – How to make an amazing voice marketing campaign 

Now that you know what you can do today with voice marketing it’s time to create an amazing voice marketing campaign!

Here I am going to give my advice on what to say how to say it and all my tips and tricks to create an amazing voice marketing campaign

Some you might already know but trust me, there is always something interesting to get!

So, stick until the end!

Find your brands’ voice

Okay, what I am going to say might sound a bit obvious. But choosing the right sound and tone of voice for your brand is extremely important to make an amazing campaign!

For example, you don’t want to use the voice of a woman if you are selling beard razors, the same way you are not going to use a male voice to sell red lipsticks!

Several brands such as Acapela or ReadSpeaker enable you to choose from many different voices in many different languages. It is worth it to spend some time and compare different software to find the voice that suits your business.

None of the voices convinces you? Not a problem!

With Acapela you can create your digital voice. It might be less expensive than you think!
Contact them to give it a try!

Use the right vocabulary

Now that you have your voice let’s think about what this voice is going to say!

To be relatable to your clients you need to voice to use the same vocabulary as they do daily.

For that, you can go on Reddit or Twitter and find the specific words and expressions that they use and reuse them in your voice marketing.

For example, you won’t use the same vocabulary if your company is a law firm or a fast-food chain.

Think also about the age range of the people you’re addressing yourself to.

Ok, the example is a bit extreme but you get what I mean.

Think about timing

You might wonder: what do you mean by right timing?

When you do voice marketing and you’re not using a human voice recording you have to keep in mind that it would be an artificial intelligence that will be saying your text. 

That’s why punctuation is extremely important because it will give the AI the rhythm of the conversation.

Think also about the background noise check if the timing from the background noise combines well with the voice message.

My advice: listen to your voice messages several times before publishing them to make sure it sounds great!

Check the three recordings below, trust me you will feel the difference!

So what do you think? Huge difference right?

Use humor

According to me, a sense of humor is key when it comes to voice marketing.

Unlike other types of marketing when you use voice marketing you are having a conversation with someone.

And no one wants to speak with someone that isn’t funny right?

You can be funny by:

• Having the right punctuation
• Music 
• Voices
• Words
• Expression 

Think about your community and what inside jokes you might have with them.

Adding some humor will make your user forget that you are trying to sell him something. The whole process will seem less pushy.

Once again think about your audience and what makes them laugh. The more the jokes are personal the better.

This takes your voice marketing campaign to the next step!

Make it interactive

As I mentioned before, when you do voice marketing you have to think “conversation”.

And when you’re discussing with someone you ask different kinds of questions (yes/no questions, open questions, multichoice questions).

You will also have affirmation when you explain something that doesn’t require an answer.

Well, it’s the same for voice marketing.

You need to alternate between all kinds of questions and different messages to make the conversation as lively as possible.

No one likes to be bombarded with questions and no one likes a conversation where they have no chance to speak and the other one only talks about his life nonstop. You need to find the right amount of interaction

We will look at three different examples here

So what sounds best to you? Let us know in the comments

Advanced Tips and tricks

So here I will go into extra advice when you create a voice campaign:

• Ask the user how they are doing. Nowadays we all ask how someone is doing without listening to the answer. Well, make your AI listen. Not only will this catch their attention as it’s unusual but also it will create a good overall mood around the conversation.

• This is not a fixed rule it will depend on the context, but you have a good dynamic campaign when you separate each question by on average 2 messages. This is a good way to ensure it stays dynamic, informative and engaging at the same time.

• Always add a message when you redirect the user to another web page. It creates more dynamism.

• Nowadays AIs are good at understanding context. Test your campaign to see what it understands as sometimes some unconventional words are not understood (ex name of company’ family names)

• Put some CTA throughout your campaigns.

• End campaigns with a message to ask the user how he felt about the campaign. This will not only make your users feel good but will also give you valuable feedback to improve your campaigns

Case Studies

Burger king activated smart speakers with one of their ads. No one thought about this before and I am sure many of you will come up with new ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5lgYe0trRE

Here is an example of how voice can work in the hotel industry.

Here is an example of how voice can work in the bank industry.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article on voice marketing

Now I want to hear from YOU!

Are you going to implement voice marketing into your company and if yes, which strategy are you going to use first?

If not, what is voice marketing missing today according to you?

Anyway, share your opinion in the comments!

Also, be generous, you might know someone interested in voice marketing!

Share this article on your social media!