What is Voice Search & Messenger Marketing?

Voice Search Marketing & Messenger Marketing are two very recent developments in online marketing. They rely on newer features of mobile devices, modern search engines and current social media developments.

What both variants have in common is that they open up direct, almost natural communication with people as a marketing channel. In voice search, users query a search engine by formulating a natural question. Ideally, the search engine responds with directly useful information.

In messenger marketing, on the one hand, users address a provider via messenger, e.g. Facebook or WhatsApp, by asking an equally natural question. This is answered either automatically by messenger bots (chatbots) or personally by a support team, whereby 24/7 live support can of course only be guaranteed in premium niches in terms of scalability. Accordingly, online marketing is almost exclusively about chatbots.

Conversely, messenger marketing uses messenger to provide the user with push messages. An early predecessor of this is mobile marketing with its SMS services notorious for expensive subscription models. In messenger marketing, however, free group functions of messengers are used to distribute current news among a registered target group.

Voice search and messenger marketing are interesting for companies in holistic marketing, respectively multi- and omni-channel marketing, as a very direct and fast medium. While they were used more experimentally in the initial phase, increasingly popular fields of application are developing, especially in the entertainment, home and hands-free sector. Language assistants such as Alexa Echo, Google Assistant or Siri from Apple play music, order on call in online shops or answer quick questions about interesting facts, the weather, current news or traffic volume.