B2B Digital Marketing Trends: Preparing for Voice Search

Voice search is vital to your business if you want to be competitive. If you’re not using it for your business, you’re missing out. Think about Alexa and everything you can ask her to do. How about everything you as Siri on your phone?

Digital Marketing Institute says: “Adopting a voice search strategy isn’t just about remaining relevant – it’s also about creating a unique and optimized customer experience that will foster relationships and build brand loyalty.”

Voice search is growing and you need to be prepared.

Prepare Your Business for Digital Voice Search

A forecast from Strategy Analytics shows that by next year, less than 25 percent of internet-connected devices will be a PC, tablet, or smartphone. People will be using watches, TV’s, game consoles, and cars to use their voice to search for information.

You want to make sure your business has the information available to be found via voice search. Some of the steps are simple and similar to other searches. Others involve a bit more work. An example, if you ask, “How do I select the correct widget?” A voice search may only provide one answer and it most likely will be the “featured snippet” on Google. A featured snippet is a direct answer the search engine gives to queries that show up above the regular search results. Let’s take a look at how you can prepare your business.

Steps to Take

Three things you can do to get on the right track for voice search:

Learn more about tools like Google Assistant, Cortana, Amazon Alexa, and Siri. They will be the key focus of your optimization efforts.
Learn how to get featured snippets for your site. This is big and it prepares you for the future, and it also will help you drive a traffic increase to your site right now.
Learn the most common questions prospective customers have about products and services like yours. Get out there and learn what they want to know, and then start building content to answer those questions proactively. Being one of the best information sources in your market space will be critical to surviving and thriving.
Start experimenting with conversational interfaces. Experiment with the Amazon Echo (instructions for Amazon Skill here) or Google Home (instructions for Action on Google here).

The business and marketing world is changing fast, and we’re approaching another point of major disruption once again. While this can be a bit scary, it can also be exciting. It’s a time of great opportunity to start exploring the right ways to prepare for voice search, and your business will be in a much better position to do well as the digital trends become more popular.