The Game Changer for Skill Developers on Alexa — Voice Ads
This July Amazon pushed a new Alexa upgrade including 31 new features with the stated objective of enabling skill developers to create natural and immersive conversational experiences that “allow customers to interact with your skill in an unconstrained way, while freeing you to focus on the highest value parts of your experience”.
While Alexa is becoming a truly massive ecosystem, where customers now have hundreds of millions of Alexa devices including smart speakers, smart TVs and headphones, and interactions with Alexa are now in the billions of times a week — the million dollar question is — how consumers can discover your Skill?
To this day, if you are a skill developer your marketing opportunities had been limited to: a) sending an email to your network, b) featuring your skill on your website and c) promoting your skill on social media — but what if you’re thinking much bigger?
There is now a comprehensive solution to the skill marketing challenge, and here it is:
- Strategic decision on technology enabler.
Among the new features added to this upgrade, Amazon has now added its beta version of Quick Links for Alexa — the effective equivalent of the mobile app deep link. Now Amazon will allow you to add a link from your mobile app, website, or online ads that customers can click to launch your skill, as well as a quick link from within a skill so if a listener activates the link the user is able to open a skill at the beginning of the experience or any other point of their experience.
This makes it easy for customers to access your skill, and easy for you to track conversion from online ads. As we know the deep link, a link that contains all the information needed to take a user directly into an app or a particular location within an app instead of just launching the app’s home page, has allowed marketers to push users directly into the install page of a mobile app. Before the deep link was introduced, marketers had to rely on search and brand awareness 😢. Today, it’s a ubiquitous piece of every marketer’s jargon and attribution stack.
It would not be a great leap of faith to expect that Amazon’s Quick Links, Google Action Links, and similar capabilities on other similar voice platforms, will be for voice marketing what the deep link is to mobile app marketing — a staple for monetization.
2. Skill developer’s tools for marketing.
For skill marketers there is no better solution addressing the skill discovery challenge than voice marketing in voice-enabled media. The leading mass market media with voice-enabled capabilities include some of the largest players in digital audio and online radio, which have been assembled by Instreamatic, already representing the largest global voice-enabled ad network.
Instreamatic remains at the forefront of voice marketing infrastructure providing an all-in-one solution for voice advertising, live in the US and other markets globally, featuring a dedicated Voice Ad Network, Ad Exchange, AdVibe client dashboard for real-time voice campaign management and analytics, and its True Voice AI Core including proprietary NLU technology dedicated to voice-enabled marketing — making Instreamatic the most effective marketing tool for the skill developer’s marketing needs.
This is what Instreamatic’s voice ad creative looks like:
So, with Amazon’s Quick Links beta, skill marketers can use voice dialogue ads to solve the discovery challenge as QuickLinks now allows voice-activated ad user response to open any skill directly on a mobile device.
And with campaign performance results that speak for themselves, skill marketers can now leverage the power of voice advertising –delivering average engagement rates ranging 5–15% and interest rates of 3–5%, providing an order-of-magnitude improvement in CTA over mobile CTR and social media marketing. 😊
3. The Target Audience
The Voice landscape is growing at a faster clip than prior paradigm-shifting consumer tech including smartphones, PC and internet penetration. Adoption of smart speakers is drastically changing our media consumption habits — people are listening more to audio on smart speakers, and within audio to more podcasts and news.
The shift in behavior is driving a shift in ad products which will fundamentally change how we plan and buy media, one in which the innovative voice dialogue ad format is set to be a big game changer in the marketing landscape. The question is how effective are voice-enabled ads compared to traditional digital assets?
According to a recent study, early campaign results with Tier 1 brands show that voice ads by Instreamatic, are more effective than traditional digital advertising on key parameters including Ad recall, Persuasion, Endorsement and Qualitative feedback.
Higher brand recall in Voice ads is due to voice’s interactivity which is largely combined with the predominantly millennial users who came of age with Siri, representing 39M voice-enabled digital assistant users in this generation in the US alone, over 2X the Gen X’ers and Boomers, 17M and 19M (source: Statista, 2019), respectively. Audio creates more emotional intensity than visuals alone, but commodity-type products and services require a hook to be memorable — this is where voice dialogue outshines as it creates an emotional bond between brand and consumer. Sociological studies show that voice is not just significantly more memorable than all other human communication mediums, in fact when we commit to something verbally, studies show that consumers tend to align their behaviors with what they say verbally.
The skill marketers’ most relevant target audience for their use case is apparent — it’s predominantly millennial consumers that are already talking with voice ads on various voice-enabled media mobile apps powered by Instreamatic such as freemium on-demand music and online radios like Pandora, iHeart, etc., whereby with high probability these users have a smart speaker or device at home/ in car, and with high likelihood their smart speaker is an Amazon product.
It’s fair to say that Instreamatic is the skill marketer’s one-stop-shop for skill discovery marketing efforts serving the most relevant target audience and leveraging innovative voice ads. So, if you’re a skill marketer — this is the game changer you’ve been waiting for.
4. The Economics:
Voice Dialogue Ads powered by Instreamatic are a performance-based marketing channel format, and as such, Instreamatic prices on a cost-per-voice engagement basis where impressions are free.
Advertisers pay only when a user engages with the voice ad, and Instreamatic attributes an engagement as any intelligible user voice response, whether positive or negative. Now even a no interest response is valuable as we can learn why it’s a no now and what might be needed to convert that to a yes in subsequent ads — ‘no’ can be just the beginning of a conversation.
