In his bestselling book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the “magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” According to an IBM study, mobile sales hit their tipping point in 2013 even though it took until October 2016, almost three years later, for mobile internet use to surpass desktop use. Where mobile adoption was fast by any measure, the adoption of voice has been exponentially faster. Today, 77 million adults in the U.S. use voice assistants in their cars and 45.7 million use them on smart speakers at least monthly. 55% of teens and 44% of adults use voice search every day, with 2 in 5 people already say voice devices are essential to their lives. This shift in consumer behavior has fundamentally changed how consumers and marketers interact with technology and what consumers require of companies.

Conversational search is now commonplace. 280 Million of the total 3.5 Billion Google searches performed every day are questions. Every year, between 16% and 20% of Google searches are new—they’ve never been searched before. And that number is growing because of voice. Today, 20% of searches are voice and 50% are mobile. By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice driven. Juniper predicts voice-based ad revenue could reach $19 billion by 2022 and many industry experts are predicting that nearly every application will integrate voice technology in some way in the next 5 years.

At Union Street Media, we’ve developed innovative voice solutions, such as programmatic landing pages and branded apps, to help our clients capture and monetize voice-driven user intent. Our programmatic landing pages, designed to be the top search result returned when users perform voice searches, have seen powerful results, including a 29% increase in keywords with top ranking, 153% increase in mobile organic search conversions and 50% faster growth for our clients when compared to their competitors.

Real estate brokers and agents who haven’t deployed a voice-first customer acquisition and engagement strategy are already behind. With Voice Assistants becoming smarter and smarter everyday, consumers are prioritizing speed, convenience and personalization and the experience they’re provided by brands and service providers must deliver on that.