by Julie | Oct 15, 2018 | Research, Smart Assistants, The Lens Blog, Voice commands
Our most recent study, Voice Commands: Current State October 2018, highlights a growing use of voice commands today and the potential for exponential growth. Easier to use, higher quality voice experiences are essential to capturing market share, especially for industries that are currently being found through voice command. Developing higher quality voice experiences for consumers will be essential for companies to stay competitive in the next five years. Key Findings: Although voice command usage is still in the early days, voice commands are a critical part of the mobile experience. Designing a mobile voice experience is important now. Entertainment, media and local businesses are the most likely to lose out if they don’t optimize for voice search and create compelling voice experiences in the short-term. Poor voice experiences, narrow use cases, privacy concerns, and limited IoT device ownership are limiting voice adoption. Fixes to these issues are likely to accelerate the usage of voice commands. Given existing high usage and the natural fit, opportunities exist for voice-first IoT devices at home, in the car, at work, and at school. Multicultural moms who are constantly online are the current power users of voice. They are more likely to use voice commands for more activities, across devices, and in different locations. Voice experiences that are consistent across devices will likely be important to meet their needs. Different audiences will require distinct voice experiences that take into considerations device preferences, locations, and use cases. http://www.sociallensresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Voice-Command-Research-Study.mp4 View the strategic implications here: In the next few weeks, we will be releasing industry-specific data with current trends and voice command usage examples. For more...
by Julie | Aug 6, 2018 | Smart Assistants, The Lens Blog
Here are a few stats all marketers should know about voice assistants as they evaluate how and when to include voice first tactics in their marketing strategy. Usage of voice assistant is widespread, with nearly 50% of Americans using voice assistants via smartphones, dedicated devices or other devices. Most usage is occurring on smartphones today. Only about 8% use voice commands via standalone devices. Source: Pew Usage of smart speakers is expected to grow exponentially as voice search grows. Voice searches are expected to be 50% of all searches by 2020. Source: Comscore Smart speakers are used mostly to play music, ask a question or check the weather. Other top uses are set a timer/alarm, find a recipe and listen to news/radio. Source: VoiceBot.ai Amazon and Google Assistants control approximately 80% of the smart speaker market today. Amazon is the leader, with 40.7 million monthly users of Amazon Echo and about 60% of all smart speaker users. Google Home comes in second with 18 million users. Source: eMarketer Google has an accuracy advantage that will likely help it close the market share gap. The Google assistant is close to 5x more likely on average to know an answer than Alexa. Google’s superior accuracy is not surprising given its history of being a search engine. Google also wins on the smartest voice assistant on mobile over rivals Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. “Google obviously plugs into the Google search network, which has all the resources that Google has including all the history of search,” 360i Dentsu’s Calladine said. “It’s why Google has become the most popular desktop search engine. I think that’s the main advantage of...
by Julie | Jan 30, 2017 | Research, Social Research, The Lens Blog
Public health marketers trying to reach multicultural audiences need to take a mobile-first approach. Multicultural audiences tend to have larger out-of-pocket health expenses, delay seeking help from medical professionals and are more apt to look to mobile devices to manage their health. Top implications for public health marketers trying to reach multicultural audiences include: Budget constraints need to be addressed and taken into consideration in order to help multicultural audiences make positive health choices, especially Hispanics. Hispanics (76%) and African Americans (67%) were more likely than whites (59%) to say that budget at least sometimes limited their ability to make healthy choices. Hispanics (67%) and African Americans (67%) were also more likely than whites (52%) to say they sometimes avoided seeking medical help because of the cost. Health educational campaigns need to be mobile-optimized to reach multicultural audiences. 94% of Hispanics and 93% of African American respondents reported using mobile phones to help achieve their health goals compared to 88% Whites. 58% have used their phones to research information about a health issue. Hispanics (59%) and African American (61%) were more likely to use their phone to find health information than whites (56%). Social media distribution, influencer outreach, and mobile apps are great opportunities for initial attainment and ongoing engagement with multicultural audiences Hispanics (44%) and African Americans (40%) were more likely than whites (32%) to follow health-related social accounts Hispanics (46%) and African Americans (45%) were more likely than whites (39%) to read a blog for health info. Health app usage is high across ethnic groups at 57%. Hispanics (61%) and African American (60%) over-index on the use...
by Julie | Mar 2, 2016 | 2016 Election Social Media, The Lens Blog
Super Tuesday was as exciting as expected! Here is my take on the campaign’s social strategies, which builds off a piece I did yesterday for Portada and a MocoSpace Community Voter Engagement Study Lens released last Friday. My biggest takeaway from a social-marketing-lessons-learned perspective was on the Democrat side. Basically, what’s coming out of the Bernie Sanders camp is really interesting from a content perspective. The Bernie team has done an excellent job of using authentic and issues-based content to spark engagement and even get his community to create content for him. It’s an Obama-like movement aka “Yes We Can.” This has led to some messaging and content that really stands out and has helped Bernie Sanders build an engaged community and war chest of more than 40 million in donations just in February. Here’s a shout out to one of the best Spanish Latino-targeted campaign videos I’ve ever seen aimed at Mexican Americans. It was made by David E Rojas, part of an Austin, Texas collective of artists working to create videos for Bernie: But as Super Tuesday showed, Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem to have cracked the code on getting votes. One supporter summed it up perfectly, “you need to vote, not just say you are.” The “We got so many tweets, likes etc. But they bought zero, they didn’t sign up” is something every social marketer struggles with. Translating social interests and engagement to conversion is hard and often takes some not as exciting, backroom tech and data activities: building up proprietary data on fans, continuous engagement/management of these contacts and giving your organization access to the data they can actually use. Here is...
by Julie | Nov 9, 2015 | Conferences, The Lens Blog
Social media can have a big impact on small businesses. Unfortunately, it’s not just about publishing a few posts and nice graphics. To really stand-out on a small business budget, your business has to understand its target customer, build great content and take a bit of a guerilla marketing approach to build experiences and programs that foster community and credibility. Here is what I have seen work in my own business and also via the research I do monitoring social media and mobile marketing trends. Below is a high-level summary of my recent Business Bites 2.0: Marketing On A Shoestring session. The session was put together by the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Rhode Island Avenue Main Street to help DC small businesses to leverage social media to grow their businesses. STEP ONE: Get to know your industry space before you market Define your target customers, the competition and what’s working well in your space. Craft stories that exemplify why your target audience should choose you and your business. This will drive the content and marketing actions you’ll invest time in. Top Tips: Your target: Take a highly targeted approach to understanding who your customer is and refine your message and marketing efforts to maximize communication. What motivates your customer? What are the use cases for your product? Who influences your customer the most? Why should they care about what you do? The competition: Understand the competition so you can stand out and be noticed. What social accounts and tactics do your competition use? Which are working? Are there gaps in what your competition is doing? Is...
