How Speech Recognition Can Improve Efficiency in Marketing 

Marketers are constantly faced with the overwhelming task of making their brands stand out in increasingly-crowded marketplaces. While there seems to be no shortage of means to accomplish this, the responsibility still remains to continue leveraging new tactics to ensure the most efficient impact possible.

Speech recognition, an underutilized tool in the marketing world, is a solution to many of the key challenges that face marketers. A key component to a promising future of voice technology, which is expected to grow $3.2 billion to $5.4 billion by 2026, speech recognition can work with marketing applications to create efficiencies and cost savings across the board. Marketers who use speech recognition technology are in a position to redefine how they reach customers, ultimately increasing revenue and value.

So, just how can marketers combat industry challenges using speech recognition?

One of the issues that plagues marketers is scaling customer reach efficiently. On a basic level, current marketing tactics including audio and video are successful in reaching general audiences and continue to see industry growth. In fact, it's estimated marketing teams will spend $6.21 billion on digital audio services in 2022. By relying solely on these avenues of communication, we risk isolating potential customers,including the hearing and socially impaired who might have difficulty comprehending the content when shared in these formats. And it's not just those with impairments who benefit from the additional comprehension support that speech recognition can provide. General consumers appreciate a better understanding of the product, which can be an important factor in their purchasing decisions.

A recent report from MIT Technology Review states 80 percent of executives attribute speech recognition to measurable improvements in service delivery and customer satisfaction. With a universal solution here, there's little reason for speech recognition to not be an important technical piece to marketing programs, especially in a business environment that often requires change in a matter of minutes.

Reducing turnaround time in content creation

With substantial growth of digital audio services, the ability to edit and process video content in a timely manner is essential to keeping your brand relevant. Using speech recognition is an important tactic to speed up turnaround time to not only help marketers reach their audiences faster but for better comprehension of the messaging.

Snackable AI, a machine-learning based audio content search engine, uses speech recognition to populate a vast and searchable content library, saving users hours of time finding the content they need.

"There are a lot of great minds making a lot of great points on webinars, conference panels, and more, but if those points get lost, a lot of value obviously gets left on the table," said Mari Joller, founder and CEO of Snackable AI. "Fifty percent of event viewers don't even watch when the event first airs. If you're the marketer in charge of that content and you make sure the world receives that valuable insight, you're a hero. Better speech recognition is the first thing that helps you. The better the transcript, the more accurate and easily accessible the insights. You also need to find them faster, and AI is just as critical for instantly mining through hours of content to reveal the gold."

Creating time and financial efficiencies with customer feedback

One of the more exhausting and time-intensive tactics marketers employ to improve their product and offerings is collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Often done manually, this tactic is open to human error. Speech recognition can accurately and efficiently process customer feedback, whether sourced via calls or other audio means, and eliminate manual input. By integrating this technology into daily workflows, marketers can have real-time data on customer feedback , allowing adaptability in a shifting marketplace.

The time saved also allows teams to prioritize and focus on other aspects of their role in increasing brand awareness and sales for their organizations, ultimately netting more success for the department as a whole.

Improving stakeholder engagement

The pandemic has caused a shift in workplace models, and employees are now more dispersed than ever. While many companies are still figuring out their path forward in a remote or hybrid environment, video and audio technology has remained stagnant when it comes to supporting these workplace models. Speech recognition is an asset across the board for companies with remote employees, but particularly for marketing teams.

In a world where jargon is a part of our daily communication, it benefits marketers to use speech-to-text , allowing decision-makers to better understand and therefore make informed decisions regarding marketing strategies. With speech-to-text, the ability to review transcripts and fully internalize the information shared allows marketers to have their value to their organizations amplified.

Earlier this year, my company, Speechmatics, released its annual Voice Report, surveying global industry experts. In this report, we found 36.4 percent of people reported the pandemic affected their voice technology strategies, which is a nearly 17 percent drop from a year prior. This suggests that speech recognition limits the disruption caused by COVID-19. Based on the data, we concluded industry movement will not slow down as we continue to make incremental advances until we reach perfect transcripts. The benefits to the marketing world are wildly underrecognized, and this is promising to those of us who continue to push the limits in what's possible against new challenges we face in a constantly shifting marketplace.

The responsibility is on the engineers behind speech recognition technology to improve and uncover more benefits to using it, but there is equal responsibility for marketing professionals to recognize how this technology can reach its full potential and ultimately result in increased success in communicating brand narratives to a growing audience.