Why Siri is a Digital Marketing Game Changer

We all asked Siri stupid question: « Are you Human? », « Siri what is the best phone on the market?». Although we often giggle at Siri’s answer, we still often rely on him because often he delivers the information that we were looking for.

So what has Siri to do with digital marketing?! Well, Siri unlike other website does not rely on traditional website such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to find his answers. Rather the application gives more importance to business with update reviews. For example if you ask Siri to find you a « restaurant », the application will review data from your location and your review data in Yelp. If for example you usually give good reviews to Asian restaurants it is likely that nearby asian restaurants will be on top of your result. In other words if a dealership’s marketing is exclusively or mainly based on search engine keyword result, this particular dealership will be missing a large portion of a target market that use Siri.

We thought this subject is very interesting because we think that we will increasingly use digital assistant (Siri, Cortana…). The year 2015 is a big year for mobile marketing, indeed Google recently announced that mobile overtook desktop internet traffic on 10 countries including the US and Japan. The trend is that mobile will completely dominate desktop internet research in future years.

Today digital assistants function as intermediaries between users and the world wide web, early version of Siri were often unpredictable, mistaking spoken words for nonsense and Siri was enerating unreliable answer. Voice recognition technology is always improving and today most digital assistant function well in mostly any situation.

Early version of digital assistant were not overly used because it relies on an internet connection. Holders of previous smartphones were mainly using it at home while connected to Wifi because cellphone data was expensive and not available everywhere, therefore disabling the assistant’s functionality. Today cellphone data has become cheaper and is accessible nearly anywhere.

The dawn of wearable device and connected object will in the future reinforce digital assistant search. Indeed as explained earlier, Siri for example use data to give result to enquiries. If we project in the future we might be surrounded by sensors, if you are for example following a diet with your activity tracker, your smartphone will know it. Looking for a restaurant, Siri will therefore give you the best place for restaurants with healthy meals.

Apple, Samsung and other companies are currently working on active digital assistant. Indeed right now, our digital assistants are « passive », we need to ask them questions to get the answer. But a good assistant in the real world would seem to know what you need even before you asked it. Siri for example use notification push depending on your localization, if Siri understand that you are abroad it might send you the address of the best currency kiosk so you could successfully change your money.

If Digital assistants aren’t the most used form of search today, they are growing fast and could soon replace our typical browser-based researches. It is therefore more and more valuable for companies and dealership to invest in online presence in reviews based application such as Yelp and Tripadvisor for example and not only in mainstream search engine optimization. Developing strategies to turn digital assistant users into customers will in the future make you gain market shares.

Alban Couturier, Margaux Peuvergne

Article source:
http://forcemktg.com/news/index.php/why-siri-is-a-digital-marketing-game-changer/ 

Other sources used:
http://adwords.blogspot.fr/2015/05/building-for-next-moment.html 
http://www.audiencebloom.com/2015/06/why-digital-assistants-may-soon-replace-searchengines/