Voice Marketing is the strategies and tactics used to reach your target audience through voice-enabled devices powered by AI assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri. It also includes recorded audio content such as podcasts, voice search optimization (VSO or voice SEO), and sonic branding.
Why do you need voice marketing for your business?
More dopamine means more time spent scrolling, reading, watching, and clicking on links. “Nothing happened today” isn’t news, and it won’t garner attention. Sensible long-term investment strategies are not exciting.
How do you compete with dopamine?
In this age of Robinhood investors and zero commission trades and the democratization of access, we are at a different point in the life cycle of personal finance than ever before. While this is beneficial for society as a whole it also introduces both a challenge and an opportunity for financial advisors.
The challenge is to cut through the noise even though your message probably isn’t titillating.
The opportunity is to connect emotionally which is more powerful and long-lasting because it builds trust over time. Your voice is the key to this connection.
–Voice Marketing: Your Cure for Screen Lock – on Twenty Over Ten blog
You need to communicate with your audience. Reaching clients and leads through voice taps into our most natural and frictionless way to process information, while creating an emotional connection. Most channels such as social media and email are crowded, with the average American spending 11 hours per day on a screen. Voice cuts through that screen lock. Plus, it puts your brand on the fastest growing consumer technology of all time: the smart speaker.
Voice lets you benefit from the natural human instinct to know, like, and trust the storytellers we hear. Beyond that, it lets you stand out from the digital noise while building a stronger connection in the part of the brain where music, emotion, and memory are stored. Purchase decisions are highly emotional rather than rational.
Recommended reading: based on the single largest neuromarketing study ever conducted, Buyology reveals surprising truths about what attracts our attention and captures our dollars.
95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious, according to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman.
Inc
Brand lives in the subconscious.
4 podcasting stats demonstrating why voice is so important:
- There are a lot of people listening: 50% of the US population has listened to podcasts, 32% listen at least once a month, and 22% listen weekly.
- There are a lot of wealthy people listening: Podcast listeners are 45% more likely to have $250k+ in annual income.
- The people that are listening, are really listening: 80% of podcast listeners listen to an entire podcast episode.
- A podcast message might be more effective in less time: About voice in general, hearing is the fastest of our senses. We process sound in .05 seconds, which is 10 times faster than the blink of an eye. In other words, you would have processed that last sentence faster if I said it to you, versus reading. – TD Ameritrade
Voice is a direct route to your audience’s emotions and ability to feel affinity and trust for your brand or business. It’s a key ingredient in retaining and growing your business through content marketing (vs paid advertising where your CAC will be a constant cost with no brand leverage).
Bonus tip: Client Welcome Kits (powered by voice)
The average Client Acquisition Cost (CAC) of a financial advisor is $3,119 per client.
The cost of the WealthVoice Client Onboarding Kit with Echo Dots is under $50.00 total per client. This is a drop in the bucket of what you are paying for your other marketing methods, but it will pay dividends by giving you a strong communication platform to connect long term, over and over without paying for that attention.
Voice is the fastest growing technology because it’s accessible, hands-free, and intimate in a way text simply can’t be.
Establishing your voice presence is similar to building your website in the early days of the internet, but the difference is that voice is already ubiquitous through the rise of podcasting (which hit a waterloo moment of over 50% of the U.S. adult population having listened to a podcast in 2019).
How do you start with voice marketing?
Voice marketing is a key component of a modern content marketing strategy. Podcasting is a highly effective medium for building an intimate connection and sticky trust over time, demonstrated by the efficacy of host-read ads or testimonials: they outperform any other type of ad. But you don’t necessarily have to commit to a full podcast:
- A) Start a podcast. Read more in Dani Fava’s post: Every advisor should have a podcast
- Hot tip: To promote your podcast on social media or in email marketing, share a universal podcast link so it’s a 1-click experience no matter the device or app. We like Plink for sharing podcast links.
- B) Launch a WealthVoice Alexa Skill and send voice updates (broadcasts AKA flash briefings) whenever you like, with gentle smart speaker notifications (request an invite for a demo here). This gives you the benefits of podcasting without the time commitment.
- C) Share bite size audio clips in audiograms on social media – see an example audiogram.
