Tips: Marketing Your Alexa Skill with a Voice Hub Page - Industry Examples
What should you put on your Alexa Skill landing page or voice experience information page? You have to educate your audience on how to use something new, like an Alexa Skill or Google Action.
Your voice hub page is the perfect place to showcase any voice marketing you’re doing, whether it’s an Alexa Skill, Google Action, Flash Briefing, or podcast.
Why you need a voice hub page:
You’ve heard of the Marketing Rule of Seven: it typically it takes seven exposures to incite a purchase or new behavior in someone. Clear messaging and a single hub page explaining a new service is key to adoption when it comes to new technology like voice.
Imagine you post on social, send an email, tell someone verbally, and then post a few more times on Instagram or Twitter about your Alexa Skill. You will need to “Link in bio!” your audience about seven times til they finally act. Make sure when they do, you have the clear actionable info for them to enable your voice experience or subscribe to your podcast wherever they listen.
Amazon Alexa has about 70% market share for smart speakers and the number one category for requested content is music, news, and weather (including podcasts). Watch Emily Binder’s 60-Second Definition of Voice Marketing
Uber was an early adopter of ordering a rideshare through Alexa. They feature these commands to educate users on how to get a ride using Alexa.
We rounded up several good examples of voice hub pages from different industries. These should inspire you to create your own page that serves as a home for your voice app(s) whether it’s an Alexa Skill, Google Action, both, or other. Whatever you have going on related to smart speakers and/or podcasts or flash briefings, you need a hub page. You should throw your podcast subscribe widget in there too (like right below). If you want a tool to make sharing your podcast easy and 1-click, check out Plink.
We picked pages that make it clear to a new user how to access and use the voice experience. They don’t have to be super stylized or complex. Simple works.
Key components of your voice marketing hub page:
TD Ameritrade’s voice hub page features an effective button to enable their Alexa Skill. The green button is eye catching and the simple button text “Ask Alexa” lets users know where the button will take them: the Alexa Skill page on Amazon.
Clear buttons to enable the voice app (links are good too, but make sure you include a colored button with a 1-3 word CTA that the eye is drawn to, such as “Enable on Alexa”)
Feature your Alexa Quick Link for 1-click skill enablement from any device (example: Plancorp Perspective - Alexa Quick Link)
Sample commands or phrases to navigate the voice app, such as “Alexa, ask Onramp Invest for the latest update.”
Pleasing graphics (smart speaker stock photography or branded graphics using non-photograph imagery)
Bonus tip: Create and embed a Spotify playlist of your or your team’s podcast appearances: watch video below to learn how.
Example Spotify podcast playlist embedded:
Learn how to create and embed a Spotify podcast playlist to promote your content:
This is such an underutilized marketing tool!
Alexa Skill or Voice Hub Page Examples - Inspo
🍕 Food/QSR:
Domino's Anyware hub page
Grubhub Alexa Skill hub page
💸 Financial services:
Plancorp, an RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) with over $4 billion AUM (assets under management) built their custom Alexa Skill with WealthVoice. Plancorp Perspective’s voice hub page makes it easy for clients to enable the skill with their Alexa Quick Link. Suggested commands make it easy for clients to interact with their voice experience and get hands-free updates.
💄Beauty:
📰 News:
NPR: Listening to NPR with Alexa
Featuring this handy PDF of phrases - you should consider creating one like this
Note on language: In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page", "single property page", "static page" or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an organic search result, marketing promotion, marketing email, or an online ad. What you want to create is a regular page on your website, but we know people often call these “landing pages” so that’s why it’s in the title. You get it.
How to create your own Alexa Skill and send hands-free updates:
Want to create a custom branded Alexa Skill like this and send your audience voice updates anytime? Request an invite to WealthVoice. It’s a voice CMS (content management system) and we can build skills for any industry. It’s like Wix or Squarespace, but for Alexa skills. Watch demo video.
Learn more about our voice marketing and podcasting services:
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Top Three Brands with Alexa Skills - Voice Marketing
Which companies have the best Alexa skills? Which brands are succeeding with voice marketing?
It’s the ones who understand that voice is all about enhancing or improving the customer experience. Keep it simple. Make things easy on people. That’s the “killer” app.
Your customers want convenience. The best voice apps offer it. It’s that simple. The Starbucks Reorder skill and Domino’s Pizza Alexa skill accomplish this.
By 2021, the number of US voice assistant users will reach 122.7 million, representing 42.2% of US internet users and 36.6% of the US population (eMarketer). Digital voice assistants in use will triple to 8 billion by 2023 (Juniper Research).
Amazon Alexa has maintained market share for smart speakers so let’s look at which brands are succeeding on Alexa and why. Note, these brands also have Google Actions but we’ll just examine their Alexa skills here.
Here are three slam dunk examples of major brands using Alexa to drive sales and/or add value through voice-first content marketing.
Which brands have the best Alexa skills?
Starbucks Reorder Alexa skill: you can:
– Reorder your Usual from one of the last 10 stores you’ve ordered from
– Check your primary Starbucks Card balance
– Switch between your last 5 previous ordersWhy we like it: This lets customers easily order hands-free. It’s convenient to do while you’re busily getting ready to head out the door. This makes Starbucks even more ubiquitous and reliable, two of their brand success hallmarks (consistency of experience, much like McDonald’s provides so well).
Domino’s Alexa skill: With the Domino’s skill, you can build a new order from scratch, place your Easy Order or your most recent order. You can ask Alexa for your order’s status with Domino’s Tracker®. Available only for orders placed in the U.S.
Why we like it: Thanks to the AnyWare suite of technology, customers can place their favorite order via text, tweet, TV, smartwatch and more. Domino’s Alexa skill is just another channel making it more convenient for people to buy pizza. It demonstrates a commitment to ease of use. This will drive sales because like Starbucks does too, this removes friction and makes Domino’s ubiquitous.
TED Talks Alexa skill: Explore TED's vast library of inspiring talks and ideas worth spreading by world-renowned speakers and thought leaders from around the globe. You can play the latest TED talk, play random TED talks, or search for talks by topic or by speaker name. You can also play talks that are funny, inspiring, persuasive, courageous, or jaw-dropping. New TED talks are available every weekday and are always free to the world.
Why we like it: This is the best example of content marketing unrelated to voice shopping or commerce. Content marketing works when it adds value and is published consistently. This checks those boxes. Read more on TED’s blog: “Alexa, open TED Talks”.
Starbucks Reorder
Reorder your usual coffee, check your Starbucks Card balance, and switch between your last five previous orders.
TED Talks
With their Alexa Skill, nonprofit organization TED allows you to play the latest TED talk, play random TED talks, or search for talks by topic or speaker name.
Domino’s
With the Domino’s Skill for Amazon Alexa you can build a new order, reorder your most recent order, place your Easy Order, or track an order using Domino’s Tracker®.
Takeaway:
Voice offers your brand an opportunity to be of service. Help before you sell.
And look, don't be intimidated by voice! You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Look how simple the Starbucks, Domino’s, and TED Talks skills are. They just voice-enabled the most common customer activities. Reduce friction, increase sales. Convenience for the win. It’s what Amazon sells, after all.
Domino’s AnyWare is the strongest example of the real driving principle behind all of this: it’s not about the specific channel (be it voice, SMS, or social media); it’s about being widely and easily available where your customers are. Voice just happens to be the fastest growing consumer technology, and an obvious and growing use case for voice commerce (AKA v-commerce), expected to be over an $80 billion market by 2023 (via Juniper Research).
What you can do:
Identify the top three or five things that your customers want or need. That could be simply re-ordering or asking an FAQ or checking their account balance. Then voicify it. We can help.
Your Brand and Voice Marketing in 2021
If you need help creating a custom voice experience, whether that's an Alexa skill or a Google Action, or adding voice or chat to your mobile app, reach out to us. Get ideas here: check out our case studies from clients we’ve helped.
Learn more:
Binge our 3-minute daily briefing podcast about voice marketing with Emily Binder:
Or hear Emily’s briefing on Alexa News (new episodes every weekday). How to listen:
Enable Voice Marketing with Emily Binder - Alexa Flash Briefing here
Then say, “Alexa, news.”
Holiday Gift Guide: 3 Best Alexa Smart Speakers: Echo Dot and Show Review
Thinking about business or family and friends gifts for the holidays? Scoop up these powerful Echo devices and share the gift of voice! Here are our top three recommendations with honest product reviews:
1) Echo Dot 3rd Gen (Echo Dot Clock) - “Add Alexa to any room”
$34.99. File under: Gifts Under $50:
Our most popular smart speaker - Now available with an LED display that can show the time, outdoor temperature, or timers.
This is the newest generation Echo Dot with a digital clock. It's a smart speaker without a screen but it can display short messages like a stock ticker crawl. This feature is going to be used a lot more in 2020, just wait for it. We'll see brands begin sending notifications from their custom skills with this LED display. Because the price point is low, this will be a top popular Echo device and now it has a visual component. I’d grab one of these to replace any clock in your house because it is a clock and so much more.
2) Echo Show 5 - “Compact smart display with Alexa”
At 5.5 inches, it sits compactly on a nightstand, office desk, or book shelf with a handy clock face whose appearance you can customize from several artistic visual options. The smaller size means it’s not obnoxiously large or a big space commitment. Good for a smaller kitchen or limited desk or counter space. However, it is a bit small if you intend to watch video.
The speaker quality is not fantastic but it’s good enough for the average person. It’s about as good the quality as playing music straight out of an iPhone, but louder. The Echo Show 2nd Gen (see #3 below) has even better sound if you are looking for a high quality speaker. If you’re not a major music aficionado and not buying it for primary use as a music playing speaker, the Echo Show 5 is FINE.
Bottom line: If you want a smart speaker with a screen (known as multimodal) to start using Alexa, grab the Echo Show 5. It’s perfect to: hear Flash Briefing news and weather, to set timers, to play Spotify or Pandora or Amazon Music etc., to control your smart home, Roomba, smart plugs or Philips Hue lights, to cook simple recipes by voice, or as an additional device in another room of the house, and more.
3) Echo Show (2nd Gen) - “Premium sound and a vibrant 10.1” HD screen”
10.1 inch screen. Buy this for your favorite friends, family members, or clients. It’s really nice.
Premium speakers with Dolby processing let you stream music and books in crisp, stereo sound. With a vibrant 10.1" HD screen for watching videos, movies, and TV shows in a new fabric design.
Ask Alexa to see lyrics and album art with Amazon Music. See weather forecasts, calendars, to-do lists, and your favorite playlists.
Disclaimer: We post these types of links a couple times a year to get a bit of listener and reader support for producing all the free content we provide on shows like the Voice Marketing Flash Briefing. It’s a win-win since you may have wanted to buy this stuff anyway. Thank you for supporting our shows by shopping through our links!
We use Amazon Associate links which help cover hosting costs for our blog and podcast. This means if you click through and end up buying, we will get a small affiliate commission. It’s really small, but it helps a bit. Details are in our disclosure.
Voice Marketing Success Metrics - Alexa Skills ROI
ROI: How do you measure your voice marketing efforts? Four ways to determine success in the voice space, focusing on Alexa Skills.
Amazon dominates the smart speaker market and is predicted to easily hold onto its top spot through 2021, when nearly 70% of total U.S. smart speaker owners will continue to use an Amazon Echo device. (via eMarketer, 2020)
What metrics should your company or brand look at to determine success in voice marketing? Let’s focus on Alexa first. Beyond the stats available for Alexa Skills (including Flash Briefing) in your Alexa Developer Console, you have ratings (how many reviews, how many stars your skill averages). But what else matters and how do you know your voice marketing efforts are paying off?
First, remember that on an early platform like voice, you won’t see direct ROI as quickly or easily as on more established platforms. That’s fine. You’re not doing voice to increase sales 50% this year. You’re doing voice to get in on the fastest growing consumer technology since the smartphone. You’re here to learn, set your product or service up for longterm success, and avoid falling behind. In two years, everyone else will be playing catch-up.
Why voice analytics are distinctly powerful:
70% of online carts are abandoned. If someone leaves your website without buying anything, you can often only speculate as to what went wrong (or try to learn after the fact, via a survey for example). You can email them coupons to try to lure them back to complete the purchase. And many users are savvy to this automation so the exit the site to simply wait for your “Come back!” coupon email. It’s an ecommerce rat race.
With voice, the customer has literally told you what they’re looking for, even if your voice app (Alexa Skill, Google Action, or Siri) wasn’t able to handle it. You get that human insight. That’s a win.
Voice Marketing Success Metrics
1. If success is defined as Alexa skill use/engagement:
The obvious metrics in Amazon Developer include:
Customers
Plays (for a Flash Briefing)
Sessions
Lifetime enablements
But go further and calculate stickiness. I.e., of total enablements, how many return to use the skill more than once?
Metrics available in Alexa Developer Console - Analytics for custom Skills
Figure out how many people come back vs enable once, use, and forget. Some skills should have higher retention than others; for example, Tide’s Stain Remover should be invoked a few times a year at least, or however often you stain your clothes. Get Urgently’s frictionless roadside assistance Skill may only be used about once a year or less - it would still be successful though. It depends on the functionality and use case.
2. If success is defined as showing up when people search for your brand name, product, category, or service (SEO):
Figure out the top 3-5 essential phrases your customers might use to search for your brand or type of product with voice. Are you showing up based on those voice queries? Example: “Alexa, show me the best running shoes.” (Note - as of this writing, Alexa on the Echo Show 5 shows men’s Nikes no matter the gender of the person who searches. This is a miss because Amazon has the user and shopper data to show a personalized result. That will come.)
3. If success is defined as increased interaction outside voice (multi-channel):
If you have any sort of CTA inside your skill, whether that is to visit a web page or comment on Twitter with a certain hashtag, track it. Use a specific URL or hashtag that you only share on your Alexa skill or announce in your Flash Briefing. Drive customers to your other channels if it’s valuable for them. If your Skill provides appointment booking or location information (such as for a local business) then track how many users found you this way.
4. If success is defined in terms of revenue:
Caveat: revenue as a KPI for voice is a simplistic view that doesn’t account for the value of being early to a new platform. We don’t focus on revenue yet. However, voice commerce is expected to be an $80 billion market by 2023 (via Juniper Research). Hold on.
Incremental sales: what revenue have you driven that you can attribute to voice search or voice commerce?
Marketing Tip: how to promote your Alexa Skill or voice experience
When you run surveys in your general marketing practice, whether those are on a sales receipt, a website pop-up / survey form (“How did we do?”), or a thank-you email post-purchase, include a question or two about whether your customers are aware of and have used your Alexa skill.
5. If success is defined as insight that will inform your strategy:
Look at Alexa as a way to learn from your customers - what do they ask? What do they try to accomplish? Use Amazon Developer to begin understanding what users want and like based on utterances. If you gain insight, that is success. Consider:
What is the ROI of voice marketing? It’s hearing what your customers want in real time. Click here to retweet this image
How many utterances users make in a typical session with your Skill?
What percentage of user interactions with your Skill result in a successful outcome?
Which of your Skills’ capabilities are being used the most and the least? What does that tell you?
Cohort analysis: see whether people acquired during a given month (e.g., after you launched a new feature) behave differently than those who joined prior
Retail: See where in the sales path customers are having to ask for help (note: transcripts aren’t available for voice assistants like Alexa at this point, but you can still identify friction points by volume of questions and the answers your skill is called on to give).
Want more?
Get short daily tips and insights on voice marketing:
A) On Alexa Flash Briefing (enable here then say “Alexa, news”)
B) Stream in your favorite podcast app:
Alexa Conference 2019: Live Stream, Takeaways, and Most Requested Chart about Smart Speakers
The Alexa Conference just wrapped. Get top takeaways, Emily’s short livestream interview with VoiceFirst.FM, and the most popular chart of the conference.
Smart Speaker Penetration - Most Powerful Chart
Several people have asked me for this chart from my presentation, How to Crawl into Your Customer’s Ear - The Alexa Conference 2019. Bret Kinsella’s opening keynote included it too, as did a few others. I did not create the chart but I’m sharing it from the publicly available Activate Tech and Media Outlook 2018 Slideshare. If you need to convince your boss that voice is a thing, send them this:
Smart speakers are the fastest growing consumer technology of all time, forecasted in 2018 to reach nearly 50% penetration in the U.S. in less than five years. This chart is tracking to be an accurate prediction. Chart courtesy of Activate, U.S. Census Bureau, World Bank.
Livestream - Emily Binder interview with Ian Utile for VoiceFirst.FM
Click to watch (01:39 minutes) or press play below:
Best takeaways from The Alexa Conference 2019:
#AlexaConf2019
Tweet from Brian Roemmele about my best voice marketing advice: you need a sonic brand ASAP.
Katie McMahon from SoundHound shared some great info about the power of Houndify and the connected car.
Our friends from Nebo Agency came up from Atlanta. Read Founder Brian Easter’s article: The Next Disruption: Voice Tech and the Buyer Journey
“When we have diverse tech teams, racial profiling and gender bias won’t even make it to production.” -Kesha Williams, Senior Software Manager, Chik-Fil-A (overall keynote speaker)
Brielle Nickoloff with Witlingo gets it: we have a pristine, quiet place with voice right now - so take advantage with marketing your brand early. It will get crowded like the bloody red sea that is the rest of the internet - fast. Brielle and I did a live audio Castlingo from the conference - enable the Emily Talks skill then say “Alexa, launch Emily Talks” to hear it.
Jen Lehner shared one of my favorite pieces of content via Brian Roemmele: David Bowie predicting the future in 1999. Powerful.
Notice that Alexa (Echo) isn’t the center of this photo. It’s in the upper corner. Peripheral. That’s where we’re headed: ubiquity of voice assistants. (My reflection on this slide from Paul Cutsinger of Amazon at The Alexa Conference 2019 - Chattanooga, TN).
#VoiceFirst Community and Thank You
It was great meeting so many of the smart, forward-thinking people who make up the #voicefirst community. It is one of the most exciting, supportive, diverse, and pro-women communities in tech. Thank you to Bradley Metrock, Peggy Kilburn, and the VoiceFirst.FM and Score Publishing teams for putting this event together. See you soon!
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