A Wealth of Experience
Paul Hickey, founder and CEO of Data Driven Design, has grown businesses and their audiences via digital strategy and internet marketing for over a decade, specializing in analytics, SEO, paid ads, and content creation.
With the rise of voice technology in 2017, Paul was determined to cultivate new opportunities for his company within the voice space. Being heavily invested in data and what it can tell your business, his team had already determined that companies could greatly benefit from having a strong presence on Alexa and Google.
Data over Opinions
As Paul might say, "the proof is in the data."
In late 2017, it was estimated that nearly 600 million people used voice assistants on a weekly basis globally. Voice-assistants were being incorporated into a larger range of consumer products, and close to 46% of U.S. adults were using voice technology to interact with their smartphones and devices.
Paul and his team adopted voice as a surefire channel to help businesses drive engagement, improve accessibility, and bolster discoverability.
Fast forward three years, and Data Driven Design has built and published customized voice experiences for hundreds of companies. They have even kick-started their own voice conference in Nashville to help businesses integrate voice-based apps into their digital strategy.
From delivering voice-based websites to developing private skills that catalogue a company's intranet - Paul has armed his digital agency with the knowledge and tools they need to go above and beyond traditional marketing efforts using voice.
To learn more about Paul, Data Driven Design, and how he used Voiceflow to help scale his voice offering, check out our interview below!
Transcript:
0:00 - 0:17
What's up everybody? I'm Paul Hickey - I'm the CEO of Data Driven Design. We're a small, scrappy digital agency based out of Nashville. We build digital marketing strategies, websites, software, and voice apps for small businesses and midsize level companies.
0:18 - 1:02
So right now to leverage voice technology, you've got to think through things like, "how can I make my every day business function more efficiently and effectively. So we're doing things like just voice enabling data for example. Voice enabling employee training manuals, intranet-type content, um, and then incorporating those types of things for our clients. So is there anything frequently asked question wise that we can voice enable for you?
And then on the content marketing side, there's a lot of opportunities there too. So a presence on top of Alexa and on top of Google is becoming more important for all businesses. So weaving that into the overall content marketing strategy - how do we take a voice app and make it help social media presence and vice versa.
1:03 - 1:55
So about a year or so ago, I googled, um, how to build an Alexa Skill without coding. And so that's when Voiceflow came up on a medium article - although it was Storyflow at the time. And so from there it was just checking back in on Voiceflow and very quickly Voiceflow was at a point where it became a tool that can lower the cost of what it takes to build a voice app for any business. No coding solution that deploys phenomenally to the Amazon developer console and has a nice instructional template for how to make it come to life on the Google Actions console.
It's just fascinating to see how Voiceflow added blocks, added features, and hasn't lost a step in terms of reliability. So I look forward to continuing to use Voiceflow for everything that we do at Data Driven Design related to voice.
