The evolution of search marketing: less artificial, more intelligent
Once upon a time you had to go to a search engine site to find answers. Now, as search is embedded in the fabric of people’s online lives, Microsoft's Christi Olson argues it’s time for marketers to realise what’s truly at stake.
It has been 50 years since Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As such now, the image of a malevolent artificial intelligent machine is one that’s hard to dispel. From The Terminator to Ex Machina, AI characters are often antagonists set on subduing the human race and taking over the world.
Christi Olson, head of evangelism at Microsoft, says pop culture over the past few decades has done a poor job of preparing people for AI’s true potential. As responsible creators, companies can use AI to advance the way they help people.
“We’re moving into a new era where tools and technology are essentially coming to life alongside us to assist us,” she says. “We’re moving from the information age to the age of assistance. It’s actually going to help us so much as marketers and as people. And there’s so much opportunity.”
The key is not to think of AI as ‘artificial’ but to remember that it is ‘intelligent’ and being trained to ‘reason’ large data sets that very few humans would have the patience to pore over, extrapolate valuable information from and understand. “It’s difficult without tools and technology to actually make sense of all that information,” says Olson. “It’s technology, doing what we do, but helping us do it even better.”
Ten blue links
Olson is no newcomer to search technology. Since 2004 she has seen search go from “ten blue links on a page” to something embedded in the fabric of our online lives. “We started off as a destination. You went to a search engine to search for something. It has now evolved from the destination to an experience, a platform across multiple different devices,” she explains.
It’s the device-neutral concept that tends to confuse people, she argues. Citing Microsoft research, which asked consumers, ‘what is a digital assistant?’, Olson said the majority of people describe it as: “A thing that sits on my counter, and I ask it questions or I talk to it, it searches the web and plays songs’.”
“What I love about this definition is everything is wrong,” she argues. “They’re defining a device, not the actual technology that’s on the backend. It’s not limited to that one tool—everybody’s smartphone has a digital assistant on it.”
So how does AI and search work in a device-agnostic world? It’s an interesting question for Microsoft, whose search engine Bing commands a third of the United States’ search market and 12% of the same segment in Australia. Active search, however, is only a fraction of what Bing understands about us, claims Olson.
“Bing as a search engine powers a ton of different tools and technology that you might not realise. It is a bigger platform than you think. We’ve integrated AI across the board into our suite of services and software.”
One of those services is Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, which is not as widely known as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant precisely because it isn’t embodied in a device. “I talk about data and insights I get from Cortana, and people not are like, ‘yeah, but no one uses Cortana’. Well, you’re actually wrong,” says Olson.
Cortana uses data from 148 million active users in 13 markets globally across “everything from Windows & Xbox to Office 365”, as well as commercial partners such as Ford. “So we actually have a lot of really good information and data about consumer behaviour,” says Olson. Instead of focusing on active search terms, Cortana pulls in a lot of information about what you do, “to understand consumer behaviour, user behaviour, what you do and why”.
Listening, speaking, learning
Marketers need to realise that the integration of AI into different tools is shaping what responses are delivered when users make explicit requests, a change that will not only mean better tailored results for consumers, but also the end of practices like keyword stuffing in search engine optimisation.
While SEO was about improving results on a collective level—anyone who used particular search terms would be served what the search engine believed was what they were looking for, based on the best-optimised website—the new search paradigm is personal, contextual and conversational.
As an example, Olson sets up the following scenario: “It’s 11pm, you’re at home and you haven’t had dinner. You go to order pizza. In a search bar you’d perhaps type ‘pizza Sydney open now delivery’ before choosing a website, selecting a menu item and inputting payment and delivery information. With a digital assistant trained the right way, you might only have to say ‘Cortana, I want a pizza’ and within an hour your standard order, a large supreme with no onion and extra olives, from your favourite pizza joint turns up at your door
At present, consumers don’t have the confidence that any digital assistant would know what pizza to order and from where, as well as getting billing and delivery information correct. “There are too many steps,” Olson notes. “But the thing is, if you have the right technology on the back end to connect those dots, essentially a bot or a digital assistant of your own brand, you could get to the point where there is trust.”
So it’s this idea you can move from ‘question and answer’ to ‘question and taking the action’. Consumers aren’t just asking questions, they want to take an action,” she highlights. “What’s interesting about those questions is, depending on the words I use, it can give a marketer my intent on the purchase, my intent to engage with your company and your brand.”
Creating a brand voice
Marketers who heed this evolution have realised their brands need a digital assistant in their own voice and tone, says Olson. “Right now, the biggest opportunity you have is making sure, if people ask questions about your brand, is your brand showing up? With a chatbot, can you make it from them asking a question to taking the action that you want them to take?”
The task for marketers? Developing a brand persona that uses theses AI principles to listen to, speak with and learn from customers. “What do you want people to feel about your brand when they ask a question? You don’t want to create an unempathetic robot. You want it to have emotion, you want it to invoke feelings. You want it to have a personality.”
All this indicates an era where consumers, not brands, are at the centre of search. “We’re moving from the information age to this experience age, where consumers expect to be the star of the show. They want you as a marketer, and as a brand, to create something for them,” says Olson. And the fact that AI allows you to have a conversation is important. “Consumers want to feel that emotional connection with your brand. They want to engage with you.”
So, start the conversation.