You probably didn’t know you needed a strategy for Alexa B2B Marketing
Unlike paid search on Google, advertisers currently cannot purchase any real estate for voice search.
The way many B2B companies have been able to leverage voice has been through Alexa Skills.
What’s an Alexa Skill?
Skills are voice driven Alexa capabilities. They function similarly to mobile applications on your phone, you need to enable them to work and they have functionalities that are built by developers through the Alexa Skill Kit.
Developers can use the Alexa Skill Kit and develop skills for their customers and this can help in B2B Marketing.
When developing a skill for your audience remember, it has to be conversational. Making your skills more human is going to lead to your users enabling your skill for longer, and will reduce the churn for your skill.
How can Alexa Skills help B2B Marketers?
Reaching Your Audience Through Content Marketing
Gary Vaynerchuck’s Alexa Skill gives you motivational and startup advice every morning. Neil Patel and Eric Siu have their own podcast, which has an Alexa skill for people to get a morning dose of marketing advice.
Neil Patel and Gary Vee are content creators to their audiences and have used Alexa as an additional platform to reach their users.
B2B companies can do the same. If you’re creating content through your a blog, whitepapers, or any content marketing then creating an Alexa Skill is a platform to explore; this becomes a lot easier when you’re already creating audio content.
People who enable your skill are people who you can look to sell to in the future, and can nurture through providing value through content before making the sell.
This is also a great way to retain customers in B2B by becoming a thought leader in your space and having a role in the everyday life of your audience.
Managing Leads
Voice recognition technology can improve a host of products already on the market and make information more accessible, processes faster and repeatable tasks obsolete.
2017 was the year of conversational UI, industries all around are going to use echo to provide data to employees and customers.
With the Alexa Skill Kit you could link your Salesforce to your Echo and get information through voice, look at how Jeff Douglas, Director, Trailhead Developer Advocacy at Salesforce tried this out.
YakStak is a skill that allows you to connect to your CRM. They have an integration with Hubspot that allows you to use voice to get insight to how your leads are doing.
Apart from checking in on leads voice features like hands of data entry for sales reps, and getting data on the fly about how how many opportunities a sales rep has contacted is where we’re heading.
Be On Top of Marketing Automation & Analytics
Marketing Automation being a must for any organization managing their marketing.
Constant Contact which is an email marketing provider created a skill to be on top of campaign metrics by telling users how their email marketing was performing.
The Google Analytics Alexa Skill works by telling users how traffic and performance on their website is doing.
Pro Tip
If you’re a B2B company creating content through your a blog, whitepapers, or any content marketing, then creating an Alexa Skill is a platform to explore; this becomes a lot easier when you’re already creating audio content.
Early Days for Voice technology in B2B
We’re still in early days for marketers to make the most of Amazon voice but marketers need to stay on top of trend.
You can check out the Alexa Blog to be up to date on new announcements by Alexa on what the future beholds for marketers & the developer community to create new integrations to scale their marketing.