Accessibility involves meeting everyone's needs, including those with disabilities. The CDC reports that over 61 million persons with disabilities live in the United States, comprising more than one-fourth of the entire population. This makes accessibility not just a mere buzzword in business—it is a necessity. In marketing, making a brand accessible requires creating inclusive experiences that make it possible for users of all abilities to receive and understand communications and use a brand's products and services.
Why It's Time to Make Your Marketing Strategies More Accessible
People with disabilities experience widespread barriers that make it more challenging for them to participate in a variety of experiences. As the rate of disability continues to grow in America, so does the need for brands to impact this sector positively.
Making your marketing strategies accessible allows your business to broaden its reach and serve the needs of an entire subset of the population. A recent LHH post about diversity and inclusion explains how inclusivity isn't just a force for positive change in organizations; it also delivers results. People with disabilities can enjoy your services while recognizing your efforts to make your brand inclusive. After all, it's high time we embrace people with disabilities as critical members of our society while acknowledging the value and insights they can bring to a more progressive business environment. Drawing people from different backgrounds can increase innovation and creativity, nurture a broader range of perspectives, and develop a greater understanding of your target markets. Fortunately, accessibility in marketing now takes on many forms, one of which is through voice assistants.
How Can Voice Assistants Improve the Accessibility of Your Marketing Strategies?
Voice assistants benefit those with limited dexterity or sight. Because of this, voice assistants are one of the most effective tools you can use to improve the accessibility of your marketing strategies. Here's how they can do so:
1. Voice assistants can increase your reach to individuals with disabilities
Having voice assistant technology on your website can increase traffic coming onto your website. For instance, Google Assistant tells users they can open a webpage to see more at the end of a verbal answer. Not only are you raising brand awareness through the initial response, but a voice assistant can direct users to head on to your page and navigate your website to read more. Voice assistants often answer a question with a featured snippet, so your content will have a good chance of being tied to that snippet. Positioning your brand as an expert on that subject matter increases the likelihood of users seeking additional information on your site. Thus, optimizing your business for voice search results will allow you to raise brand awareness and strengthen customer loyalty.
2. Diverse voice assistants can remove language barriers in your advertisements
Voice assistants are continuously developed to accommodate more languages. Over 7,100 different languages are spoken worldwide, and many people cannot communicate because of it. Through artificial intelligence, voice assistants can demolish language barriers that prevent users from accessing a brand's website fully. Enabling voice assistant technology and pairing it with machine learning can help your advertisements adapt to the user's language and widen your brand's reach. More specifically, there is merit to adjusting tone and timbre to create a genderless voice assistant, which is essential in designing advertisements for tonal languages such as Thai or Mandarin.
3. Your marketing strategies can be personalized through voice assistants
Through natural language processing, voice assistants can remember customers' past inquiries, delivering much more personalized and relevant information than traditional keyword searches. Personalization is a key feature in voice assistant technology, and it's all a matter of maximizing them. In our 'The 5 Most Valuable Things to Know About Voice Assistants Before Generating Branded Content' post we highlight the importance of personalizing your assistant's tone and timbre to reflect your brand's "voice." After all, it is crucial to keep all brand collaterals consistent in tone, style, language, and sound.
Using True Reply, you can leverage next-generation voice technology to reach new markets and connect with a larger variety of people. Businesses need to recognize people with disabilities as a target market without treating them as a homogenous group, without nuanced consideration. Accessible marketing, therefore, should meet the needs of various impairments in mobility and vision, and harnessing voice assistant technology is one good way to start.
Article for truereply.com by Giselle Simmons