Alexa, tell me more about smart speaker marketing.

If you’re part of the 1 in 3 consumers who have asked their smart speaker about product information, you already know there’s potential for businesses to capitalize on this opportunity. If you’re not, we’re here to tell you that smart speakers are quickly revolutionizing the way we search for products and services. Instead of browsing pages of Google results, we ask a question and hear one answer from the speaker in return; instead of browsing stores aisles, we ask our speaker to order toothpaste and it picks the brand we ordered last time.

Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, smart speaker use has been surging even more in the US. So far this year, 35% of smart speaker owners have used their device more often than last year to consume news and information, and 36% have consumed more music and entertainment. In addition, daily use of voice commands is up to 52% of speaker owners, compared to 46% before the pandemic.

It makes sense that usage is spiking now – since more people are staying home, we’re relying more heavily on our smart speakers to find information and even make purchases. Some audio marketers are dipping into the medium with paid ads on podcasts, while other innovative marketers have started integrating smart speakers into their strategy to reach an engaged audience in their home environment. If you’re ready to get started with smart speakers, continue reading below.

Get Discovered Via Voice Search

Most of the time, smart speaker owners use their devices to ask questions and receive quick answers. When Google or Alexa decides which answer they’re going to choose, they tend to pick the top search result, just like any other search engine. For brands, the goal is to have your website rank as one of the first answers for your audience’s questions. The best way to do that is to optimize your brand’s webpages.

Not sure if it’s worth it to worry about being found on smart speakers? Earlier this year, VoiceBot AI analyzed the use frequency of a number of different smart speaker voice commands. They found that 38 percent of all smart speaker owners had tried searching for product information via voice search. Additionally, they also found that 25 percent of smart speaker users had made a purchase via their speaker, and 5 percent make a purchase on a daily basis. The brands that are optimizing their pages for voice search are being found and earning sales.

You might already be familiar with SEO tactics, but there are some key differences to consider when dealing with voice search rankings. When people ask their smart speakers questions, they usually do so in a longer form than they would if they were typing a search into their smartphone. Instead of simply googling “Thai food,” they’ll say, “Hey Google, find a Thai food restaurant open for curbside carryout near me.”

To optimize your pages, first you’ll need to identify the long-form keywords your audience will most often use to search for your business. Once you have your keywords defined, include those phrases on relevant pages on your website. You might choose to create a FAQ page and include the keywords in your answers, or you can integrate them into other existing pages where they will still flow naturally. Just be careful about how many times you use each keyword. Stuffing them into every available spot will send a red flag to Google and other search engines, resulting in poorer rankings.

Show Your Skills (and Actions)

If you want to take a more active approach to smart speaker marketing, it may be time for your brand to get creative and create your own Alexa Skill or Google Action. Skills and Actions are third-party apps that you can install to introduce new functions and capabilities on your smart speaker. For example, if you want a quick rundown of the weather every morning, you can ask your speaker for “Fast Weather,” to hear the daily high, low and chance of rain before you head out the door. To add the function to your device, you simply need to ask Alexa or Google to enable a particular Skill, or you can even ask your speaker for a list of the most popular Actions. These apps are usually entertaining, informative or generally helpful for users. As you think about your branded Skill or Action, consider how you can create a similar feature to help users in your industry.

Allergy medicine brand Zyrtec created their popular Skill, AllergyCast, to help allergy sufferers prepare for their day. The Skill provides information each day on the pollen count, humidity, wind speed and other factors to determine an overall allergy impact score. It also allows you to record daily symptoms, and with enough data, can eventually give you a personalized report on your individual allergies.

Other Skills have actually integrated purchases into their functioning. For example, Domino’s created their AnyWare Skill to help customers order a pizza with their voice. You can place a new order, reorder a previous pizza and track your delivery. In the year they introduced AnyWare, Domino’s recorded 60 percent of its total US sales via digital orders.