What’s the Sound of Your Brand? VoiceFirst Marketing
Packaging will take on new meaning for brands, expanding from visuals into sound. Logos and text won’t be enough in a voicefirst world.
In the next couple years, the visual look and feel of a brand will not be enough to compete. Packaging will be more sensory and holistic. It will feature sound. Marketers will compete for mindshare and attention in a new way: beyond the screen, in the air.
Visual Packaging
Brands have spent billions on visual identities. For marketers, zeroing in on the ideal look for our brand has been paramount. We’ve rebranded and focus grouped or crowdsourced new logos or containers, meeting with delight or vitriol (everyone’s outraged these days). We’ve designed and tested retail packaging with great attention. Smart brands have realized that the packaging that helps you compete when placed next to a competitor on a shelf is often overkill for ecommerce packaging. Similarly, sonic packaging must be approached as a different animal for a customer at a different point in the funnel.
The impulse to buy operates on fundamental human instincts. It’s ultimately simple and deeply rooted in the brain. Help customers avoid loss to survive (best) or achieve gains to thrive (still good).
Let’s talk about packaging. As voice becomes more prominent as the way in which we interact with machines, a brand’s package will need to be increasingly sonic. This goes beyond your audio logo or the person you hire to be the voice of your brand. Just as users scan a website and have an emotional response within milliseconds, we process audio even faster than visuals. Sound moves through our brains faster than any other sense – it is our first sense.
We process sounds in 0.05 seconds. That is ten times faster than the blink of an eye.
You are reading this right now but if you were listening to my voice, you would perceive richer meaning and you’d process it faster and more naturally. All of this is to say that your sonic brand packaging will require great creativity and care. The sound of your brand will be instantly judged on a level that humans are hardwired to process fast.
If you thought marketing became more challenging in the last decade due to competition for attention on multiple screens with flying newsfeeds and short attention spans, wait until we begin to compute more with voice and less with hands.
We will shift away from the manipulative, ad-supported revenue models that social media companies (including this platform) have relied upon with unwitting users’ data as the product. People are tired of shrouded privacy policies.
Engaging customers will require more creativity and true brand strategy as voice takes precedence.
And voice will take precedence. Smart speakers are the fastest growing consumer technology since the smartphone. In 2018, voice purchases increased 3x on Alexa over last holiday season. Voice assistants are 1.0 today. Just wait. They’ll get smarter, more anticipatory, and more contextual in a way that a screen just can’t. Until now we’ve been computing in computerese, as Brian Roemmele put it. Typing is not natural or easy for us. Our brains are lazy by design – we gravitate toward ease of use. Your customers want hassle reduction and less friction. Meet them there, and start now.
In a voicefirst world, tactics won’t be enough. It will be harder to trick clicks because we won’t be clicking so much. Deeper strategy including true assistance will make the difference.
“Join the conversation” will become literal
“Personalized” and “intimate” will take on a whole new meaning when we go beyond passive visual consumption and start having a literal conversation. Tap, type, and swipe will become talk, listen, and solve.
Get the Daily Beetle Moment:
Daily Beetle Moment available on Alexa Flash Briefing and Google Home
On Alexa or Google Play Music (Google Home). A briefcast about marketing, voice technology, career, and more in 3 minutes or less. Hear samples.
Case Study: Alexa Flash Briefing - Ritholtz Wealth Management Voice Marketing
In 2018 we began working with Ritholtz Wealth Management on a voice marketing strategy to get their foot in the door of the Alexa ecosystem. As trailblazers in blogging and social media in the finance and investing space, “Downtown” Josh Brown and the Ritholtz Mafia wanted to beat the crowd to voice, too.
"Downtown" Josh Brown (@reformedbroker) asks Emily about the voice marketing work she’s done for Ritholtz. Hear why Ritholtz is "kind of a big deal" when it comes to voice in the investing and finance space.
Barry Ritholtz and Josh Brown. Image credit: thereformedbroker.com
Top Flash Briefing about Stock Market History & Investing
Market Moment is an Alexa Flash Briefing we created with Ritholtz Wealth Management, a New York City RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) run by two of the most online-savvy and established advisors in the industry: Barry Ritholtz (Masters in Business podcast and Bloomberg columnist) and Josh Brown (The Reformed Broker). Josh and Barry wanted to be first and best in voice in the investing space - and now they are.
IN ITS FIRST MONTH IN 2018, MARKET MOMENT BECAME THE FASTEST GROWING BRIEFING IN THE ALEXA BUSINESS & FINANCE CATEGORY … ORGANICALLY ($0 MEDIA BUDGET).
Based on the popular “Today In Market History” tweets from @RitholtzWealth, Market Moment hosted by “Downtown” Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) is a 5-star briefing packed with great information about business and the market.
The Ritholtz team has been a blast to work with. They’re hands-on, ahead of the curve, and excited to invest in voice branding.
Having vision in 2008 that social media would explode helped Josh and his team get millions of followers. They’re doing the same thing with voice. Check back in a couple years and see who in finance-related content marketing had the head start voice.
Tactics:
We took care to choose keywords, title, and description for Amazon SEO (search engine optimization). Through monitoring and tweaking these fields, we have been able to climb the rankings for our top search terms, including investing, stock market, and financial advice. For example:
Improving Alexa Skills store page rank (SEO):
After eight weeks, with $0 spent on promotion:
We improved from position #75 to #20 for "investing", a 73% improvement. I.e. we were #75 of total results and now we are #20, on page 2.
We improved from position #24 to #8 for "stock market" (and to #7 a week later, below):
Amazon SEO: Market Moment Flash Briefing climbed rankings in Alexa Skills store from #24 to #7 for keyword “stock market” in first nine weeks.
Phase 2: The Compound Show - Mini Podcast and Alexa Skill
In March 2019, we launched a first-of-its-kind custom voice skill and mini podcast about investing based on The Compound YouTube channel.
What if you could listen in on regular conversations between professionals working in money management today?
Josh Brown:
I invented the mini-podcast. All the financial industry and investment-oriented podcasts are an hour long or more. I think that’s because the person whose podcast it is feels bad about asking a guest to come on and then cutting them short. Some podcasts should be an hour – Patrick O’Shaugnhnessy interviewing Michael Mauboussin, for example, or Barry Ritholtz interviewing Ray Dalio, or Michael Kitces interviewing Ric Edelman.
But most podcasts are too long and not every guest has an hour-plus worth of stuff you want to hear. However, the format persists. I think it’s just something that’s become a tradition – to interview each guest for an hour and change – even though that’s not what the listener actually needs or wants from every conversation.
Click here to enable The Compound Show on Alexa then say, “Alexa, open The Compound Show!”