Marketing--or we could call it what it is, which is really just selling dressed up with a more respectable name--has been around since the beginning of the human race. Amazingly, we are beginning to see that marketing could be coming full circle. What started out as bartering, then sellers hawking their wares on the streets, morphed into door-to-door sales, then storefronts. With the advent of the internet, the tide began to turn and you absolutely had to have a website and be selling online.
Then came Video Marketing so small businesses could share their products and services in a more intimate way with their customers. Engagement and transparency have become the name of the game. People want to know who they are buying from.
Now the latest trend in marketing is podcasting and other types of Voice Marketing. Do you think the trend coming up next will allow marketing to come full circle to in-person selling? It seems to be the only next logical step. Maybe it won't be so much visiting people in their homes and at their businesses, but rather a virtual hologram of you inside the living rooms or businesses of your customers and potential customers. The Rules of Thumb blog from MoneyThumb can envision that happening. With the state of the world, we wouldn't even be surprised if eventually, we return to bartering.
It is interesting to discuss the history and possible future of marketing, but today we are going to concentrate on Voice Marketing and help small businesses understand what they need to know to be successful at it.
One of our favorite marketing experts is Heidi Cohen and she has three different articles on her blog explaining voice marketing and how to do it right. We have linked to those three articles below. We always like to refer to the experts in whatever field we are discussing in our articles and you can't get more expert at marketing than Heidi Cohen.
The first article from Ms. Cohen is titled How Voice Marketing Works: The Inside Scoop You Need to Succeed.
She presents 5 questions and subsequent answers to help you succeed at Voice Marketing. These 5 questions and answers will help you to increase your voice marketing to expand your reach across different contexts. The questions are listed below. Read the full article in the link above to find the answers:
- What devices can you use Voice Marketing on?
- How does Voice Marketing work?
- How can you use Voice Marketing?
- How does Voice Marketing interact with your visitors?
- How can you extend your written content into voice formats?
The second article Heidi Cohen has on her blog concerning Voice Marketing is titled Voice Marketing Challenges: What You Need To Know Now To Get Heard.
Ms. Cohen has listed 5 challenges that will assure you WILL get heard when begin to delve into Voice Marketing for your small business. Together these 5 voice challenges lay the foundation to educate your management and the rest of your organization as to the power of giving your business a voice. The 5 challenges are listed below. Refer to the link above to read the explanations of each challenge:
- Voice is more than an extension to another platform.
- Voice-first is more than a single application or technology add-on.
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Voice Functionality Extends Across Departments.
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Voice Ecosystems Lack Processes to Protect Brands and Businesses.
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Voice-first Requires Integrating Marketing Across the Business.
The third article from Heidi Cohen helping small businesses succeed at Voice Marketing is all about a survey and its results. Here is a takeaway from the article and the survey:
Heidi performs an in-depth analysis of the 2021 Voice Consumer Use Research (aka VCI 2021).
Conducted by Delineate, this Voice Market Research surveyed 2,000 individuals in the US, the UK, and Germany, for a total of 6,000 respondents. As a seasoned market researcher, Ms. Cohen gives this level of data collection a big thumbs up!
Unlike most publicly available research conducted online, this information used a sufficiently large sample size to be is statistically valid. Further, they included people who don’t use voice devices.
The Executive Director of the Open Voice Network, Jon Stine, explains:
“Voice will soon be a primary way consumers connect to the digital world and a primary way digital marketers will connect with actual consumers…. It’s time to get ready.”
One of the pitfalls of trying to learn anything online is the overload of information. It is much better to find one or two mentors in your niche and take their advice and follow their leads. The Rules of Thumb blog and the team at MoneyThumb believe the above is all your small business needs to read to make a big splash at Voice Marketing. Many thanks to Heidi Cohen!
We'd appreciate it if you could share this blog post on your social media page so that your peers in small businesses can also benefit from what you have learned here.
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