Voice Device Marketing

Insert Confidentiality Level in slide footer 2 9 October 2018

Why should you listen to me?

19 years SEO experience

Search Product Owner, Vodafone Group since 2014

Manages search deployment across 26 international markets to 516m mobile customers

Why focus on Alexa?

3 9 October 2018

Google

4 9 October 2018

Understanding the voice device landscape

Echo

Alexa Assistant

Google Home HomePod N/A

Siri CortanaAssistant Name

Voice Devices

Amazon

Partnerships will disrupt market share i.e. SONOS or Beats and chip/technology integration into household devices and white goods

Apple Microsoft

OS Integrations Fire Chrome / Android OS X / iOS Windows

5 9 October 2018

Brand Term Interest: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home

VS.

GoogleAmazonGoogle.co.uk

“75% of US households will have Smart Speakers by 2020”

Growth rate is comparable to the early years of smartphone adoption

Source: Gartner, Edison Research 2017

Amazon Alexa owns 62% of the US market

What are people doing on voice devices?

Voice device skills are on the rise

Now >50,000 Alexa Skills available globally (Sept 2018) vs. 1650 Google

Actions (May 2018)

https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-alexa

https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit

020000400006000080000

No. of Alexa Skills

No. of Alexa Skills

Expon. (No. of Alexa Skills)

Will Amazon maintain their market lead?

• Amazon track record on e-commerce

• Amazon is winning product searches, with 54% vs. Google 46%*

• Prime network pushes voice device units

• Amazon is already transactional

• Although approach has been less sophisticated than Google, they have early mover advantage in owning current device environment

*Jumpshot, The Competitive State of eCommerce Marketplaces Data Report 2018

The language of Alexa

Insert Confidentiality Level in slide footer 10 9 October 2018

Anatomy of an Alexa Utterance

Alexa, ask Vodafone how much is my bill?

Wake word

Starting phrase

Skill invocation

name

Utterance

Wake word

• Currently there are only 4 options (Alexa, Amazon, Echo and Computer)

• Users are requesting custom wake words

• Custom wake words would increase security

• Paradoxically, lack of device and assistant standardisation will result in users sticking to standard brand terms

Starting Phrases

Starting Phrase Example

Ask <invocation name> Alexa, Ask Vodafone

Begin <invocation name> Alexa, Begin Vodafone

Launch <invocation name> Alexa, Launch Vodafone

Load <invocation name> Alexa, Load Vodafone

Open <invocation name> Alexa, Open Vodafone

Play <invocation name> Alexa, Play Vodafone

Play the game <invocation name> Alexa, Play the game Vodafone

Resume <invocation name> Alexa, Resume Vodafone

Run <invocation name> Alexa, Run Vodafone

Start <invocation name> Alexa, Start Vodafone

Start playing the game <invocation name> Alexa, Start playing the game Vodafone

Tell <invocation name> Alexa, Tell Vodafone

Use <invocation name> Alexa, Use Vodafone

• The language of Alexa voice devices

• This vocabulary rapidly expanding i.e. what, give and order

• You can assign several utterances to the same custom intent, in fact this is recommended in your mapping for real world language use

14 9 October 2018

Source: Study of 37,000 Alexa utterances Q1 2018

Starting phrase vocabulary is evolving so play it safe

15 9 October 2018

Source: Study of 37,000 sample Alexa utterances Q1 2018

Play it safe in your starting phrase choices

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

ask open start what's play tell launch what give how when who get begin

Starting Phrase Frequency Distribution 2018

No. of Occurances Distribution (%)

• Ask is the most popular term, found in 28% of our sample utterances

• Open is second with 21% distribution

• Interestingly, other options tail off sharply, How is only found in 2% of our sample

• As with blue-underlinedlinks, stick to common usage to improve UX

Anatomy of an Alexa Request

Alexa, ask Vodafone how much is my bill?

Wake word

Starting phrase

Skill invocation

name

Utterance

Skill Invocation Name

• Must be easy to remember

• Cannot be changed once skill is certified and published

• Evidence of name squatting across voice device platforms, register your brand terms now

• Alexa requires brand ownership documentation for single terms but allows invocation name duplication

• Google focused on unique term registration, sparking gold rush mentality

“the first time [users] find themselves saying

something like, ‘Cortana, open x x cat facts 0178 x x,’

it’ll become clear that Google and Microsoft made

the wrong choice.”- Eric Olson from 3PO-Labs

Anatomy of an Alexa Request

Alexa, ask Vodafone how much is my bill?

Wake word

Starting phrase

Skill invocation

name

Utterance

Utterance

• Natural, real world language that is easy to remember

• Use your data to optimise these queries

– Google Search Console (GSC)

– Scrapped from Google Suggest

– SEO tool data

– Google Keyword Tool

– Internal search data

• Manual variations are required at the moment (30 recommended per intent)

• Alexa provides build-in slots and custom slots for utterance construction

• Pay close attention to comments on the Amazon platform. This feedback will enable you to refine queries

What makes a good Alexa strategy?

Insert Confidentiality Level in slide footer 20 9 October 2018

21 9 October 2018

Is Voice Search over-hyped?

• Study of 1000 U.S. consumers in May 2018 by Rich Relevance

• 70% of respondents had never used voice to search for products

• Voice search is not useful for searching for products (currently) this was a terrible study

• How can hands-free, voice first interactions work?

Source: https://goo.gl/SR2xoY

What are people doing on voice devices?

Voice strategy compliments your other platforms & activity

• Voice skills are not apps

• “Hands-free, voice-first interactions is at base-level, simply another input method ”

• Skills = convenience, usefulness and reduce friction for customers

• Quite rightly, e-commerce is still focused on mobile/web

• Voice skills should aim to compliment and augment this activity

Voice

WebMobile

Gerry White, Just Eat

24 9 October 2018

What is the key then to a good voice device strategy?

Organic

Paid Media

ATL

Email

Customer Experience

Provide user actions to ATL brand advertising

• Brands are pushing voice Skills as market differentiation to their competitors

• Low cost/effort makes this an easy content-marketing or online PR campaign

• Can be seen as content marketing exercise w/ PR or brand team support

• Voice devices will provide instant and convenient way to harvest ATL media interest

Align with your featured snippets (organic) strategy

27 9 October 2018

Using Alexa skills to connect to your audience (email marketing)

Your Brand®

• Virtual assistants will likely hit email marketing hard but also opens new opportunities

• Amazon reported 310m accounts 2016

• Alexa Customer Profile API retrieves user data, i.e. name, phone number and email.

• Only requires verbal permission, not account linking through web/app (reduced friction)

Podcasting and audio opportunities

• 96% of UK population listen to radio but only 6% listen to podcasts

• Voice device penetration will blur radio and podcast usage

• Brands can deliver their own skill but preferable to optimise content delivery through existing Skills, such as TuneIn and AnyPod

Improve customer experience and call centre deflection

Users are positive about voice skills

Source: Study of 15,230 Alexa skills Q1 2018

Inspiration from Ocado and Just Eat

Brands entering the age of data-first discovery

Only 15% of FTSE 100 companies have an Alexa

Skill

Source: Vodafone Study May 2018

• Alexa Skills marketing place is largely full of non-brand content.

• First-adopters have built games and fun skills (20% of top skills are games)

• Brands have the services and data points needed within to take user skills to the next level

• Voice will resolve data management and access issues

Does voice live up to the hype?

• 50% voice e-commerce trial success rate is promising

• Similar to early days of internet. In 2000 website success rate was 61%, in 2010 it was 78%

• Benefit of being “hands-free” out-weighs poor, current, usability (nm group 2018)

• Single action will evolve in multi-step commands, better supporting e-commerce

• Current strategy is to use voice to augment other marketing activity and improve customer experiences

Next steps and homework

Buy voice device in next Amazon sale, explore competitor Skills

Encourage customer or in-house developers to launch basic skill (hackathon)

Register your brand terms across voice platforms

Think about cross-channel marketing opportunities and reducing friction points

Develop data-first access and interactions

Insert Confidentiality Level in slide footer 35 9 October 2018

Why should you listen to me?

Thank you

What questions do you have?

@nickwilsdon