When you visit friends and family you may have noticed just how many people have installed voice assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
Latest reports by Juniper Research has predicted that there will be nearly 8 billion digital voice assistants by 2023. Growing at an annual rate of 25% each year.
This is a huge growth, making v-commerce (voice commerce) something that businesses need to make a plan for.
How do you plan for V-Commerce?
The most important thing to consider when it comes to v-commerce is how you and your friends would interact with the devices such as Amazon Alexa.
The interaction is natural and framed as questions or statements. This is unlike usual search behaviour that you would have with a search engine.
For example, if you were looking for the opening hours of your local garage and you used a traditional search engine then you might search for ‘Garage X opening hours’. Whereas if you were using a voice assistant then you would say ‘When does Garage X open today/tomorrow’.
At the moment, the website for the garage has been optimised for the search engine query ‘Garage X Opening Hours’, but now this same website needs to be optimised for questions such as ’When does Garage X open today’.
The basic factors to implement are:
- Proper schema mark-up
- Questions wrapped in H1 or H2 tags
- Any answers wrapped in paragraph tags
- Standardising any formatting of lists
It is also worth looking at what answers typically get given by voice assistants for queries that your customers may ask, and seeing where there is opportunity for your website and feature to be a stronger answer.
This trend does drastically change the way in which you conduct online marketing, and unfortunately does add another element to consider and work on.
If you wish to integrate v-commerce into your online marketing strategy, then contact the team today to learn more.
Published: 2nd Mar 2019