048 - Dave Isbitski - Power of Alexa for Marketing - Pt. 1 of 2

Beetle Moment Marketing Podcast

Dave Isbitski, Chief Evangelist, Amazon Alexa, on the power of Alexa for marketing, part 1 of 2.

Dave and Emily talked about why voice is a departure from previous technology (leaving Tap, Type, & Swipe - entering Voice First) and how you can harness Alexa to learn more about your customers. Plus: how you can use voice as the ultimate frictionless up-sell.

Full show notes and web player here

We also answered a top question among marketers: how do you overcome discoverability challenges with early voice to get your Alexa skill found?

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SHOW NOTES:

2:05: Dave has worked in web and mobile for decades: what is different about voice?

3:40- “Voice cuts across all industries. From finance to CPG…” You’ll see people talking about voice in finance, then doctors and healthcare professionals about what does voice mean for patient care? And you’ll see others ask what does it mean for shopping and pay? Brand ask what it means for them and customer?

3:32 “Every technology I’ve ever talked about has always had training, we had to teach customers how to do this first before they can tell us what they want.” - Dave

Dave Isbitksi, Chief Evangelist, Alexa - Amazon

4:00 There is no learning curve with voice: it’s natural for everyone to speak

5:54 Inclusivity:

It’s not about how well you can code, it’s about how well you can converse

(Dave mentioned this in his keynote at VOICE Summit 2019)

7:10 The marketer’s bottleneck with IT - this is less a problem with voice (Emily)

7:50 Ruder Finn / PR Week event where Dave made a point about organizational education about voice - how it’s not really new but is easier:

8:30 “There must be a doc somewhere in your organization that can help you with voice” - a group is still responsible for teaching new tech (like with cloud) but getting people up to speed now is much easier

9:40 Alexa can learn easily - these are just restful web services passing JSON across SSL request - which we are already doing on mobile. It calls the same API. The magic is that Alexa is taking normal human language and figuring out which function to call, vs you hitting a button or tapping a screen to trigger that call.

10:25 Alexa stands on the shoulders of all the tech waves that came before

11:00 Let's have a discussion about your customer who engages not in a silo but on phones, tablets, social, and other on-ramps

11:10 Alexa Skills Kit enables you to teach Alexa how to have a conversation about things. “Set up parameters of a conversation our customers have with us.”

11:45 Alexa Voice Service is why you see Alexa in cars, radio services, Windows desktop, and other mobile devices

12:30 Upsell- with voice, this is the moment where your customer essentially already has their money out (movie theatre popcorn and Coke analogy). They’re already logged in. Brands can use their own POS like Domino’s does, or Amazon Pay - so it’s just very simple and natural in the moment to get an additional sale

13:00 The real difference with voice is being in the moment. We process sounds differently than other senses - it is in real time

14:00 Carl Jung reference - the subconscious collects 11 million but we can only process about 40 things in our conscious despite thousands of inputs coming into our brains at all times

16:00 Four years ago, Dave said "Get in early now to figure out what people are asking or saying"

16:42 Discoverability: how can marketers get their Alexa skills found?

17:00 When you first launched your brand's mobile app what did you do, just submit it to the App Store or Google Play? No! Let customers know it's there and why it's faster or better.

17:20 Banking app example - when it went mobile customers would choose that bank for its ease of use

17:50 MyFitnessPal Alexa skill - track calories by voice (Dave found out about it through another marketing message on the mobile app)

18:40 Remember that customers are multimodal - silo launches don’t work

19:00 If you already know the top three things your customers do on your mobile app (via analytics), those are your three functionalities to start with in voice

20:00 Reviews - flywheel of customer feedback on Alexa skills for usability studies

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