42 Percent Of Voice Assistant Users Favor Their Smartphone

Despite the growth in adoption of voice-activated smart speakers this year, it appears that consumers still prefer to issue commands via the personal device they're most accustomed to: Of those who use voice-activated assistants, 42 percent do so via their smartphone, according to a study from Pew Research Center cited by eMarketer.

Significantly fewer used a virtual assistant on a PC or tablet (14 percent) or a standalone device like Amazon Echo or Google Home (8 percent) to interact via voice this year.

That doesn't mean that adoption of these devices has slowed or ceased: In October 2017, comScore reported that smart speakers had hit a "critical adoption threshold" in the US. But these findings underscore the fact that consumers are still most comfortable with their long-held most personal device — and reminds marketers that thinking about "mobile" now inherently means thinking about voice.

Mobile Voice Search: Answering Users' Questions

eMarketer reports that 60 percent of respondents said they preferred using spoken language because it is a "more natural way to interact with services than physical typing." This corresponds with J. Walter Thompson and Mindshare's findings earlier this year proving that voice is cognitively simpler for people than swipe/text.

With this in mind, it's easy to see why a mass shift from typing on smartphones to talking to them is underway. And it means that marketers need to prioritize ranking in the kind of searches users make on mobile via voice — as well as thinking about how to become a voice assistant's preferred answer.

As Hilton's director of global SEO, Melissa Walner, put it earlier this year, "the challenge… is making sure that [you] have the content on your website that is answering the questions that customers are actually looking for. This means making sure you know exactly what your customers are searching for: Looking at different types of search query data is very helpful. A lot of times, people will think they know what their customer is looking for, but then you find out later on — especially when it comes to using voice search — that they didn't know the intent [behind the query.]"

Essentially, marketers need to make sure they know exactly what their customers are asking for — knowing the intent behind it, and then making sure they have content on their site that specifically addresses and answers it in order to rank in these search results.

Yext VP of Industry Insights Duane Forrester echoed this sentiment in a discussion following the release of his book, Voice Search Changes Everything: "Marketers… have to adopt that long-tail, conversational phrase approach to targeting what to produce content around. You do need to build the detailed answers. You have to think about this in terms of the common and uncommon questions that are related to your product and services. Let's use an example: If a person buys a "red widget," inevitably, they're going to need a widget polishing cloth, and you sell a widget polishing cloth. Well, that means you have to talk about red widgets. That's an easy win for you."

Source: 42 Percent Of Voice Assistant Users Favor Their Smartphone