Guessing the future is our favorite activity, especially in recent months. Why? Because digital advertising is on the verge of large-scale, cardinal changes. Artificial intelligence, conversational commerce, and voice search will change the behavior of both consumers and advertisers.
Search evolves
The future of search is shaped by the major advances in the digital world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technologies will change the user experience.
What is important for us, specialists in context, these achievements reformat the search from the service, in which you need to enter accurate data to obtain ranked results, into a powerful predictive service that uses algorithms. An incredible amount of data from several sources will be linked together. They will work together, anticipating user needs, and providing personalized answers on any device.
Search in the future – personal. Almost 74% of online users get upset when the site’s advertising content (for example, offers, ads, promotions) has nothing to do with their interests. Today, users expect their experience, including products and services viewed, to be taken into account when advertising is shown. And these expectations apply to the search.
Search in the future is omnipresent. Professionals predict that by 2020, there will be 25 billion devices connected to the Internet. Their owners will expect to be able to use the search freely. And they want to get results anytime, anywhere.
Future search is predictive. Today, the search can give people what they are looking for. However, he still doesn’t know how to tell them that they want to find or even find things that users didn’t guess about the desire to receive. But development in AI and machine learning will change that.
Age of talk
Now voice search and conversational interface are quite popular, and brands are looking for ways to take advantage of this.
Now let’s move closer to home: we all want to be able to order pizza using the Xbox and Amazon Echo smart speaker. It’s so easy – say 1-2 sentences and soon pick up the hot pizza right at your door. Domino has done a great job creating a conversational interface across multiple platforms.
With the help of each of these new platforms, our world has become a little smaller, and the processes have become a little easier to perform. The next platform change is built on the previous one but adds a new level of intellectual experience.
With the growth of voice search, the concept of “Conversation as a Platform” becomes possible, opening up a more human, personalized way to explore, search, and interact with information. This will allow us to intuitively interact with devices using natural language and voice instead of the keyboard and mouse.
And this allows us to have continuous conversation and relationships in context.
Voice search – the new dominant technology
Advances in natural language processing (NLP) give consumers more options for personalized search. NLP is its key component because when we think about “personalized”, we do not want to be limited to the keyboard or the need to repeat the request until we can formulate it so that the search engine will give us the desired results.
We need a system that allows you to talk and interact in a natural way. The search must be able to understand and respond in the same form.
This is a huge opportunity for 65% of smartphone owners using a voice assistant. For contextual advertising specialists, it is important to understand how to take advantage of this opportunity.
“Conversations as a platform” consists personal virtual assistants who know you, your world and are always near you. These assistants dwell in all your devices, helping with daily tasks. How? The fact is that Cortana, Siri, and Alexa will perfectly understand the context in which you live.
And it is not limited to voice assistants in our smartphones. Everywhere, where we rotate, these voice things hit us on the head. We cannot get rid of them neither at home nor in the car, nor even on vacation.
This technology is taking root due to its ease of use. Do you know that an average person can type at a speed of 38-40 words per minute, and speak at a speed of 110-150 words per minute? That is, speak 3.75 times faster than typing.
Perhaps the voice will be the main way consumers interact with the brand. How will this affect the text-based marketing that we used to use to communicate with them?
3 ways to get started today
- Keywords
You probably know that textual queries generally include from one to three words. But voice queries are longer: they often consist of 10 or more words and are asked in the form of a question. Look at the diagram with popular question words used for querying in Cortana:
As voice search continues to grow, advertisers will need to think more about interrogative keywords.
You can find groups of phrases formulated in natural language and test questions in your campaigns in tools like SEMRush.
- Geolocation on mobile
If we enter the query “I’m hungry” on the desktop, then on the search results page there will mostly be ideas for recipes or food photos from sites like Pinterest. But if we ask the same question from my phone using Siri or Cortana, the results will be completely different.
On the phone, we’ll rather get recommendations from restaurants nearby, despite the fact that I am where I was when I entered the request on the computer. That is, the purpose of the request is initially associated with the device that we use. If you are logged in from the phone, it is assumed that you are on the road or will soon be on the road.
Mobile voice search is more geo-oriented than text. This indicates opportunities for advertisers to attract customers that could go to competitors. If context specialists use geolocation or keywords with specific cities/countries in campaigns, then advertising becomes even more accurate.
- From interest to action
If you entered the query “camera”, you would have no idea if you wanted to buy it, repair it, or simply look for pictures with it. This is the case when the use of natural language in voice search changes everything.
If we have to sort through requests written in natural language, we can easily determine which of the users has no intention to buy the product and then lower the rates for them. At the same time, we can raise the stakes for those who are ready for action, and thus increase the likelihood of conversion. And for such requests, you can create ads that hit the heart of the aspirations of users.
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