Amazon Alexa Content Marketing + 3 Amazing Voice Content Tips

Amazon’s Alexa-controlled Echo speaker, now in its second generation and with countless derivative variations available, continues to increase its musical, smart-home, and digital-assistant offering.

It’s a wireless speaker first, but capable of a whole lot more – including content marketing. Using nothing other than the sound of your voice, you can play music, search the web, create to-do and purchasing lists, shop online, get immediate weather reports and manipulate popular smart-home products—all while your smartphone stays in your pocket.

Alexa (named after the historic library of Alexandria) is Amazon’s voice-control system.

It lets you communicate your commands to an Echo smart speaker and see them fulfilled—at least simple ones – an example would be dimming your lights or playing music tracks.

This article covers how it all works, what it’s capable of doing and its shortcomings. We’ll then move on to the potential of Amazon Alexa content marketing.

How Alexa and Echo Differ from First Generation Voice Assistants

What sets the Alexa and Echo audio system apart from first-generation voice assistants is their responsiveness.

There’s no activation button to press. Simply say the set-off phrase (either “Alexa,” “Echo,” “Amazon,” or “Computer”) followed by what you want to happen, It will generally be done—as long as you’ve set up everything correctly and are the using the right command.

Once you get used to the quirks, the use of Alexa feels an awful lot more natural and responsive than speaking to a phone-based voice assistant like Google Assistant. As a result, you’ll probably find yourself using your smartphone much less regularly when you’re at home.

Alexa is especially beneficial for smart-home customers. It lets you manipulate your Alexa-compatible devices without having to take out your smartphone and launch an app.

What Can Alexa Skills Do?

What’s an Alexa Skill? In the Echo-Alexa world, a skill is like an app. It’s a little application you can add to your Echo to allow a new ability. There had been more than 25,000 capabilities in the ability menu of the Alexa app, with more launching each and every week.

Amazon released the Alexa Skill Kit to the public. This makes it easier for absolutely everyone with fundamental programming chops to create capabilities and add them to Alexa. Once you add an ability to your Alexa account, it will work with all the Alexa gadgets in your home.

Like apps for phones, there are a lot of throwaway skills, but there are lots of useful ones as well. The first that any smart-home fanatic will desire to add is the IFTTT skill.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a website and app that lets you hyperlink one of a kind units and services in the cloud with what the app calls recipes.

Some abilities let you buy things or offerings outside of Amazon. For instance, there are competencies for Uber and Lyft to order rides, a Domino’s Pizza skill for ordering a massive pizza with extra pepperoni, a talent for ordering plants and more.

Users can find skills for a range of hobbies and interests. There’s a tide of information for surfers and homework helper skills – you can also find recipe skills and traffic document skills.

Among the less practical, but possibly fun, abilities are DrinkBoy (for finding drink recipes), Cricket Facts (for statistics about, well, cricket), and Daily Affirmation (to make you feel better about life’s top notch struggle).

You can also find unicorn trivia, and at least two competencies to deliver “yo mama” jokes.

There’s no restriction to the number of abilities you can add to your account. However, sorting through them on the app and remembering the voice commands to make them work can be challenging if you have several.

Amazon Alexa Content Marketing: What Apps and Services Work with Alexa?

Numerous businesses offer partnerships with Amazon Echo devices, as you will have seen in some of the questions above. There are lots of skills on-hand, but right here are some of the services that work with Alexa – the apps also suggest what you can do:

• Just Eat – The Just Eat partnership skill you can get Alexa to order you a take away from one of the heaps of restaurants it has available.
• Uber – Need an Uber from home? No problem. Just ask Alexa to request you one and you will have a driver on its way.
• The Guardian– For those that read The Guardian, Alexa will give you a rundown of the paper’s top stories; you can find out which ones you’ll prefer to read before your commute.
• The Telegraph– Like The Guardian, the partnership with The Telegraph allows users to ask Alexa for this paper’s top stories.
• Jamie Oliver – Need a recipe from the Jamie Oliver app, but have your hands full? Just ask Alexa and she’ll find it for you so you can carry on with the meal you are doing.
• Fitbit – Want to understand how you slept or how many steps you’ve done? Fitbit’s partnership with Echo skill you can simply ask Alexa and she’ll let you know. No need to open the Fitbit app.
• Spotify – The Spotify partnership allows users to request songs, artists or playlists via Alexa, which she will then play through Echo’s 360-degree omni-directional audio.
• Any.do – Any.do is one of the few capable to-do listing apps for Alexa. It integrates with Alexa’s shopping and to-do lists. It additionally has mobile apps for iOS and Android. They all sync together.

Alexa’s Limitations

Alexa can do a lot of things, however sometimes in practice, things may no longer work precisely how you would count on them to.

For example, you can create a buying listing by telling Alexa to add firecrackers or beer to your list, but you should add each object separately. That is, instead of saying “Alexa, add firecrackers and beer to my buying list,” you have to say “Alexa, add firecrackers to my buying list. Alexa, add beer to my buying list.”

The method can get worrying if you’re creating a giant buying list, particularly for other people in the room.

Further, although Alexa properly creates a buying listing in its app (that you can access when you’re in the grocery store), you need to use an IFTTT recipe to create a version of the list for sharing or printing.

And even though one of the favorite uses of Echo audio system is to ask random questions, Alexa isn’t Google.

The system is aware of a lot, but what it can’t answer outweighs what it can. If your primary use for a smart speaker is to reply to factual questions, we advocate Google Home instead.

Owners of multiple Alexa devices have run into problems as a result of the wide variety of wake words. Again, you can change the Echo’s wake word, however you can use only “Alexa,” “Amazon,” “Echo,” or “Computer.”

In addition to wake-word confusion, on occasion Alexa can’t hear your request due to background noise or because it’s playing a song too loudly. However, the second-generation Echo is a lot better at hearing through song than the original Echo.

The new Echo can hear and understand voice commands even with tune playing at a rather excessive volume.

Amazon Alexa Content Marketing

Content advertising and marketing has undergone its most important changes in 20 years. In 1998, advertising and marketing was mainly paper-based. 

By 2008, digital equipment like blogs, podcasts, video and webinars made up a good sized element of ongoing content marketing efforts.

Now, there’s Amazon Alexa Content Marketing.

Amazon’s Alexa isn’t the only voice-interactive system available, but it provides two of the most thrilling opportunities for content marketing.

The Creation and Use of Amazon Alexa Content Marketing

An Alexa Skill is, essentially, an app customers can download to customize their Alexa’s capabilities. Commonly used Skills consist of those that allow Alexa to pair with a home’s security device or lighting.

Amazon presently estimates that tens of thousands of Skills are on hand for the device, and a growing quantity of them are developed via specific brands.

For instance, Sahail Ashraf at Business 2 Community recently praised Ask Stubb, an Amazon Alexa Content Marketing Skill designed to join customers to the Stubb’s Barbecue Sauce brand.

Users reach Ask Stubb via simply saying “ask Stubb,” accompanied by their question. Ask Stubb responds with specialist advice on a large range of cooking topics — and it does so in the voice of Stubb’s particular character, growing the influence of speaking directly to the brand as one would to a friend or a reliable colleague.

A brand’s Amazon Alexa Content Marketing allows it to form its company message and personality, construct connections and reach customers in an incredibly customized manner.

Plus, Amazon Alexa Content Marketing makes it viable to integrate this strategy directly into customers’ domestic lives in more intimate ways than ever.

How Is Amazon Alexa Content Marketing Changing the Market

While these voice-based apps are still relatively new to digital marketing, there’s no mistaking their impact.

Since their release in 2015, Amazon now has over 30,000 Skills in the US alone. Their extreme popularity even persuaded Google to adopt a similar technology, called Google Actions. We saw a similar thing happen when chat-bots hit the market.

Chat-bots gave people the ability to interact with a brand one-to-one, in the places they hang out the most, like Facebook. They could talk to brands and receive updates in a way that seemed more personal and encouraged more engagement.

It makes perfect sense, then, that with the evolving focus on voice a similar feature would be created for smart devices. But Alexa Skills don’t just mimic apps and chat-bots, they improve upon them.

One of the biggest effects of Amazon Alexa content marketing is that it introduced an entirely new way for audiences to interact with brands and services. There was no need for customers to use their hands or eyes, they simply had to ask.

In short, it’s natural. A user can say whatever they want or think, and Alexa’s user interface can understand them.

Because it’s powered by automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU), Alexa can understand conversational language – and the meaning behind it. And because it uses this AI, it’s constantly learning from new interactions.

To guarantee your Amazon Alexa content marketing expertise is of top quality, measure your aptitude with an Alexa ability investigation.

How Brands Are Using Amazon Alexa Content Marketing

There’s an excellent example of how brands can use Amazon Alexa Content Marketing to increase their voice and additionally supply content material through the Ask Purina skill.

The fundamental concept is an extension of a site, or a part of a site. Users ask Purina about canine breeds and the great breed for their lifestyle.

For example, a condominium owner may additionally ask which breed is best acceptable to the smaller living space. And a family might also ask which breed is nice with children.

Ask Purina comes back with the answers. It’s not perfect, in that it doesn’t do more than a web page could do. However, it does illustrate the future position of content.

By selecting to have a skill based totally round its information, Purina is showing how the future should look.

So, where are we headed? Are we looking at more than one gadget being controlled by means of Alexa?

Yes, that’s on the cards, and has been for some time. But the exciting phase is the opportunity of asking gadgets for specific content that will assist a user, and that’s where manufacturers find the gap that needs filling.

How Can My Brand Work with Amazon Alexa Content Marketing and Other Emerging Technologies

Of course, Alexa isn’t the only participant in the game. Siri and Cortana are both well-established. However, Alexa appears to be making a large distinction in the home. If brands prefer to master the voice assistant, they have to think about a few factors:

• That company voice that you’ve been cultivating and strengthening for your customers has to be to the fore in voice assistant content. If you’re going to strive and make an impact on users, it’s nearly like going back to the days of radio advertising. No pictures are available, so your client’s content material has to be ideal for audio. Music and real human voices that sound useful as nicely as authoritative are what’s needed.
• Search is shifting toward voice. Think about what your target audience will say and how they will say it – and also how the company will ‘talk’ to them.
• The human brain has a problem with voice as well. At first glance, it seems a little terrifying. Humans can’t take note of what they hear as nicely as they can what they see. So construct on branded music, language and repetition of key points.

It’s all new, but we can wager that each and every brand, as science turns into even extra oriented in the direction of voice technology, will locate itself having to work with that new technology. If your purchasers aren’t ready, you might also desire to begin preparing now.

Who Is the Ideal Amazon Alexa Target Market

Current Amazon Echo demographics suggest that most customers (57%) are male.

That said, the two top-used competencies are unisex in their usage: setting timers and listening to music, respectively. The Amazon Alexa target market favours easy interactions, along with capabilities with fewer conversational steps or those that offer a single, clear function.

While the most common location to discover an Alexa system is in the living room, a stunning quantity of customers (51%) keep one in the kitchen. Why? Because voice interfaces are ideal for when your hands are full, which skill that voice app makers may also desire to target these in want of hands-free multitasking.

As far as age is concerned, the ideal person is under forty four years old. The biggest Amazon Echo market segmentation is 18-29 years old at 24%; 30-44-year-old’s make up 20% of the user base.

A Fast-Emerging Amazon Alexa Target Market: Kids

In the past year, Amazon has been making a push for child-focused Alexa gadgets and skills. From the Echo Dot Kids Edition to upcoming Alexa Gadgets designed for kids, Amazon is hoping to enlarge its user base to youngsters with safe, child-compatible products and skills.
Just take a look at the Alexa ability and you’ll discover that among its largest categories are video games and enjoyment skills.

Alexa Skills are exceptional for young people due to the fact they bring characters to life. Brands and groups that are focused on children’s entertainment can immerse their audiences in fun, new methods and maintain a regular place in the home.

Of course, growing an ability directed at youngsters is a huge responsibility, which means there are a few more hurdles to soar in order to get your ability certified by using Amazon.

Why Build an Amazon Alexa Content Marketing Skill?

There are many valid reasons why an increasing number of businesses are adapting Amazon Alexa content management to their marketing strategies.

Firstly, it is evident that voice search is a trend that is not going away. Studies state that about 20% of searches come from voice searches and the numbers are expected to increase 50% by 2020.

Though the technology is relatively new, it is a great platform to reach new users and open new markets.

With businesses taking up Amazon Alexa content marketing, it is best for your business to add it to your marketing strategy. As there is a bit of a learning curve, the solution is to get ahead of the game before your competitors.

A perk of the freshness of the technology is that it is still free to join the party and with its expected growth to appear, many companies will be paying top dollar for Amazon Alexa content marketing. Not only that, but with skills and actions increasing, Amazon and Google are most likely to speed up the process of monetizing the features and services.

The idea of getting ahead of the game right now is beneficial because you can build your audience and testing at the early stages, as opposed to pouring money into the discovery stage. Also, being one of the pioneers of Amazon Alexa Content Marketing, you will gain more authority in the field and to your audience.

Amazon Alexa Content Marketing is just one feature to reach your audience. It is a reliable method of providing tips and advice to your audience, allowing them to engage with your brand.

How to Give Voice to Content

Here’s how to help your brand rise to the top.

When creating the content for Amazon Alexa, the best practice is to write like you talk. Users of Alexa use more casual key phrases than text searches. Content with this in mind will provide better results.

Another practice would be creating an FAQ as most users are more likely to search with a question. Amazon Alexa Content Marketing is based on questions and long-tail keywords rather than short keywords, so keep your users’ experience in mind.

The more FAQs you have—and the more specific they are—the better. By having different categories that are specific to particular topics, users can find better results whilst also engaging with your brand.

Grab position 0. Ever notice how, on some searches, Google pulls up the answer to your question directly from a website? For example, type “How do I shop for a mortgage?” and the top search result (below the paid search ads) is an actual list of tips from investopedia.com.

That’s called position 0 or a featured snippet. And it’s the result a virtual assistant will read in response to a voice search—so you want to get it.

If you’re ready to make the leap into voice but worried about the time and resources it will take, relax. You don’t need to overhaul your content department or even create new content for voice: Simply re-purpose and tweak what you already have.

Make it voice-friendly, the same way you made your content YouTube friendly or Twitter friendly. For example, you might go through old blog posts and optimize them for voice by adding featured snippet copy or re purpose content from your newsletter into FAQ pages.

Using Amazon Alexa Content Marketing: 3 Tips for Success

Fortunately, Amazon has made it fairly effortless for businesses of any measurement to interact with customers through the company’s range of voice devices. Here are a few key points to think about when launching into the Amazon Alexa content marketing.

Rethink Your Keywords

Humans use language in different ways when conducting textual content searches versus voice searches.

When the same question is introduced to Alexa, however, it gets longer. The person has to get the device’s attention, then phrase the question in a way that tells Alexa what is needed.

Brands and entrepreneurs have been engaging with Amazon Alexa content marketing. Think about how customers would possibly ask the device to get admission to your Skill, and then how they would possibly ask that Skill precise questions.

Make Existing Information Easier to Access

Many climate apps consist of pollen measurements, air first-class indicators and other tools that allergic reaction victims can use to decide how (un)comfortable they’re likely to be on any given day.

Enter Johnson & Johnson, makers of allergy medication brand Zyrtec, which created “Your Daily AllergyCast.”

This Amazon Alexa Content Marketing skill gives information about weather, pollen counts and unique allergens in response to a single question, saving customers time and making them more likely to access information.

Above All, Be Useful

After all, the power of Amazon Alexa content marketing lies in its use. Customers who download your company’s Amazon Alexa Content Marketing but by no means use it aren’t engaging with your enterprise or brand. Make your content useful as well as accessible – it pays to do this from the beginning.

Amazon Alexa Content Marketing: Final Thoughts

As rivalry gets tougher in Amazon Alexa content marketing, it will  cause businesses to re-evaluate their marketing strategies and business goals. Voice bots and search are all the rage right now.

Voice controlled gadgets are forcing businesses to rethink how they communicate internally and also externally with their users.

The voice search business is expected to increase dramatically in the near future. Currently, it brings in $2 billion and is expected to reach up to $40 billion by 2020.

In view of this information, it is obvious that more brands will make use of Alexa strategies. In this manner, don’t hold up until it’s past the point where it is possible to begin considering having Alexa content for your image or business.