On this episode, we have our creative assistant Derek, and we're going to be talking about voice posting
on Alexa. Thanks for having me, Joe.
So, um, you're pretty familiar with Alexa skills and dealing with Alexa skills with our clients. Yeah. So I want you to talk about what's the difference between how we used to do a lot of our voice posting, so to speak, and how we do it now with our new platform that we're using. Yeah.
So the new platform that Joe's referring to is called be heard. It's a new app that you could access on mobile device, iPhone and Android, right? Yep. And that just Oh,
I'm sorry, I lied. It's not available for Android yet? Not yet. On iOS? It will be that right? Yes, it will be in the future. So
um, what that does is it just kind of creates a lot more fluidity in an Alexa user to update their Alexa skill with a message or broadcast that they want their audience to hear. So what we were doing before for our clients is that we were creating messages that would play in an Alexa flash briefing. So an Alexa user might wake up in the morning and say, Alexa, what's my flash briefing? And our Alexa here is picking it up.
Yeah, Alexei, the point of that was for an Alexa user to ask Alexa, what the flash briefing is, and our clients voice content would be included in that flash briefing. So that only works if the Alexa user is aware and frequently does ask Alexa for flash briefings. So we're doing that for a while. But then Joe developed to be heard and be heard, actually goes hand in hand with a separate developed Alexa skill
for that client. So once the Alexus skill is created, and our clients audience downloads that skill, the skill allows is that when there's a broadcasts that our client wants to be made, a notification actually gets sent to the user's device, and a sound goes off and a yellow ring hovers on the device. So then you're aware that there's a message, a broadcast and announcement or something that pertains to a skill that you have on your on your Alexa?
Right? It's similar to when you get a package. If a package comes to your house, you get a boo boo, and then you say, Alexa, open my notification. And she tells you, your wife ordered the 56 item off of Amazon. And it's it's on your doorstep
that Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's also similar to just getting a text message or a Facebook notification on your phone. It's just just new, a new platform for a notification. So you get the audio sound, you get the little ring hovering, in case you're in the wrong room of your Alexa and you walk in, you see oh, there must be notification. So you say, Alexa, what's that? What? What's my notification? They say, you have a new notification from whatever
the the client that used it. And then you ask Alexa water, my notice will open that that app and then that Alexa skill will open and the announcement will read itself. And we like to encourage our clients to you know, say it with their voice so that it plays with their voice saying the announcement of oh, we have a new clothing special at our store. We have a new special at our restaurant. Right?
It's more personable. Yeah. Oh, really? Because they might sit down and eat. And they hear your voice and they say, oh shit. That was the lady that was on the Amazon echo the other day when they announced the special. Yeah, so people start to get the it's almost like it's almost like they're meeting, you know, a celebrity or someone because they heard your voice at have this device, this Amazon device that just sits there. And you can actually be heard on the platform. That's the whole point.
So Joe's app, he conveniently he created a platform so that our clients can just record the audio directly through that platform, right then in there and the click of the button, it spits out to the Alexa devices, right and then for our clients that might not be as comfortable recording their own voice. You can actually text in the message that you want to be broadcast and that's going to be read out through Alexa's voice. Right?
So you someone like me, I don't like my voice on the Alexa device. I don't know why I could record podcasts all day. But when it comes to the Alexa device, I sound like an idiot. So I actually use the text feature for me. Yeah. It's not just on the on the Alexa, Joe. They're expired. But, yeah, I mean, a huge reason also, why I decided to go with something that would be more of a platform is because a lot of people aren't familiar
with Flash briefings at all. I mean, if you ask anybody on the street, Hey, did you download that flash briefing of whatever it is? They're not going to know. But you can go up to him and say, Hey, did you get Target's new Alexa skill, they hear that they hear the brand. So now, what they're going to know is they can just say, Alexa, open target, they're not going to know to say, Alexa,
play my flash briefing. And then your flash briefing, guess what, it's not just you, anyone who downloads multiple flash briefings, it combines them. So if I have a flash briefing from Reuters news network, it's going to play your audio. And then the next one is going to play as the news network. So now, it changes your focus, you pretty you pretty much lost my attention, because it played the news next, and I heard something on it already. Meanwhile, if I say, open target, it's only going to
play your skill. And then it's more engaging, because they're in there in the funnel, so to speak. So you could really put whatever you want inside of this branded audio, it's fully branded, it has your jingle, whatever audio you want to play. And there's no editing. Right. I mean, you know, from out of anyone here, how much work and editing, audio editing goes into a flash briefing? Right. There's nothing like that for be heard. Because the jingles server ready.
Right there.
And as far as metrics, what metrics have you been able to get from a flash briefing compared to an Alexa skill built on our platform? What? What sort of, you know, how do I know a customer's listening?
Yes, so with with be heard, right, right. In the app, correct. You can see you can see how many people opened the broadcast, how many people listened to it just conveniently there on your, on your smart device and the be heard app?
Yeah, I don't know anything that within flash briefings, that would have that, I mean, you'd have to, you'd have to have a third party, create the flash briefing for you. And then to manage all of that. Whereas if you're on if you're actually on your iPhone, you can not only can you, you can actually schedule posts in advance as well. So if you have like a Father's Day special we did the other day that was scheduled two weeks ago. So all this stuff, you can just pile up. And it really doesn't
matter. Yeah. And I think what you want to broadcast, you're going to be able to do it through either text or audio.
Yeah. And I think the Alexa users are now kind of aware that Alexa skills are kind of parallel to what apps on your phone are so it's, it's now we're in a time where people are going to be looking for Alexa skills to download now that they realize that there's this whole world available of the Alexa skill, the Alexa isn't just existence, tell you what the weather is and play a song on
Spotify. And ask what what time of day it is, you know, there's there's a whole app store but skills, their their Alexa skills, so
right and what better way than with your brand than what your name? You know, because that's going to be the way people remember you. They're not going to remember you from Oh, I heard their flash briefing. They're gonna remember you from Oh, I got the target app, I got the target Alexa skill. And they're gonna they're gonna just know and even if they don't, if you actually tell Alexa, open target, and they
don't have it. Alexa is going to she's going to know to say, Hey, you don't have this skill enabled. Meanwhile, if you ask her and it's a flash briefing, it's only going to be added to your flash briefing. You can't invoke it by saying Open target, because it's inside of a flash briefing. It's got to be played inside of a flash briefing. Let's talk about the actual goal of the skills I know One of the big factors that we couldn't deliver for our clients through a flash briefing was an actual
call to action. You can't send anything through a flash briefing. And there's no real exit strategy. It's only Okay, here's the here's my flash briefing. And if I don't really put any more information in the audio, like I have to keep repeating information in order for it to appear. Meanwhile, how we're handling it with our custom Alexa skills built with the beard platform is there's a
default template. So when you're done with your broadcast, for example, this week special is, you know, pepperoni pizza, you're done, your content is finished. And the next step, Alexa takes over. And she says, To order this special call this number, and you didn't even have to put that in the audio. You know, that's huge, because now the client doesn't have to worry about oh, god, did I remember to do that in this week special? Or did I include that in the audio,
they don't have to worry? That's that's the convenience of our platform as well is the it's way more convenient for anyone. Even if it's an advanced Alexa skill, it doesn't matter because it's built on the Alexa device. It's it's you could do everything you can do an advanced Alexa skill with be heard. I mean, this is this product is brand new, I don't think anyone is really heard of half the things that we spoke about invocation rates, I mean, who was even thinking of
this stuff. So this could be something that your brand stands out with. There's people who have Alexa skills, but they might not have these metrics, this this we built off of two years worth of developing constant Alexa skills, and knowing what our limits are, this device is only, you know, there isn't really, there isn't really an app that could do the majority of the items that you want to do on your Alexa device currently, because voice is so early. We
built this market, it's gonna blow up. Oh, yeah,
it's one of those they're gonna blow up. And if people are utilizing this, now, they're gonna get used to this routine. And they might even I mean, listen, if you're somebody had to be the first to do something on Facebook that everyone else copied, or something on Instagram that everyone else copied. And now, they might be known for that or they're following blew up because of that. You could do that with you do that with an Alexa skill built with be heard.
And there's tons of remarketing, you can't, you can't remark it on a flash briefing. There's no login, you can't log in with with this platform. But huge advantage is the fact that you're able to log in, because now you have a customer list. And we're actually in the middle of building a feature where you can export those customers. And guess what? It's email addresses. So you could use those to build custom audiences
through Facebook. This is like true omni channel marketing, because now you run an ad that says, hey, we see you listen to our Alexa skill. We have more audio choices, and the customer is going to be like, Whoa, how had this guy know I listened to the Alexa skill. That's the power of analytics and data. And that's the goal to sell audio hiccup, but we're back to
normal. So as I was saying is that's the whole goal of any channel is to end up what's your end goal, you want a conversion, you want brand awareness you want whatever it is, whatever you're looking to do, you could do that with a fully branded Alexa skill. You cannot do that with a flash briefing, unless you mixed it into the audio. And it's something that has to be a manual process throughout your campaign. I think before the audio is Yeah, yeah.
So that's something we're talking about how um, so every every Alexa user is required to have their email attached to their you know, their Amazon account. So with that is a data point that you can capture you can you generate an email list of all the users who are engaging with your Alexa skill? Use that to retarget them with with Facebook ads, just pour that into your Facebook ad
manager. And then you you have an audience now to retarget more things on social media and create a custom look alike audience to that and then the perfect way to grow your brand.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's fun. Coming, Alexa really now will become a channel, another yet another channel for your brand to establish a presence on because it's not going away, you know, and and Alexa is not getting any dumber. So you might as well hop on board now, while the water is still beautiful.
And US marketers haven't ruined it yet, because you know, Damn straight, whether it be next year, the year after whether it be five years from now, Alexa invocation rates are not going to be as high because there's going to be advertisers on it. Heck, I might even add that to the platform is to have advertisers have a marketplace for advertisers. I mean, this is this is all stuff. You know, it's all stuff that marketers think about. And what better way to establish a presence than
right now. I mean, it's not, it's really not too early because people are using Alexa skills. There's over 100,000 Alexa skills right now. The app store it took, it took a few years. But when it got to 100,000, I mean, that's when the Facebook started emerging. That's when the Instagrams started emerging. So this is prime time to establish your brand, you could be the next, you know, you could be the next Facebook or Instagram have a platform if you build your audience, and you have to start
building your audience now. So yeah, that's a that's pretty much the gist of where voice is now where it's heading. And this is why we built this platform. We have the data, we have the engineers, we have the marketers who know and knew what the pain points were for customers. There's tons of Alexa skill building apps out there, there's a ton of them. Matter of fact, we we partnered with one of them, so that we can discuss what our pain points are. Because we all want the same
thing. We all want voice to exceed and, and to really establish a presence, we want it to be as easy to do things as it is for social media. So we know, we know what the pain points are. That's why we built this. And this is why our customers are going to have a better. They're the ones that are going to succeed here. They're the ones that are going to have the best experience because we've been there done that and we want it this way. So we built it this
way. Derek, you gotta You got anything else for us?
You know, we could pull a Gary Vee and look at the camera and say, you know, three years from now? Everyone is going to have one of these in every one of their rooms. And
that's it. We got it. Yeah. 24th date where Derek? Boss? He said it there will
be more Alexa devices on people.
Yeah, it's already happening. I mean, I and you just you literally just reminded me that we're talking about the Alexa device in your home, we haven't even began to discuss the classes that Amazon announced, what, six months ago, they have classes coming out, you're going to be able to speak into people's ears using this platform. This is not even, I can't even say it's not even the beginning. I mean, this is like a concept. And it hasn't even
become mainstream yet. So if you want to get your feet wet with voice and you want to be on like really bleeding edge technology. This is how you do it through Alexa skills, not through flash briefings. And I raved about flash briefings last year, six months ago, I raved about it because it was the only option we have. We all really have too many options right now. So I got a little fed up. And I said, You know what, I'm building an option for us. Because voice is here. We just need the tools to
do it. And this is going to be one of the tools. We're in a mobile world. Flash briefings are difficult to create as as a person who's not tech savvy. Some people know what an RSS feed is. And some people have no clue what an RSS feed is. People know what apps are. People know what apps are because we use them every day. So that's why I built this so that people who can just use a regular app can post the voice. You don't have to be a rocket scientist anymore to use voice. Yeah. All right.
So thanks for that, Rick. So that's it for this episode. And if you guys have any questions, please feel free to email
us in DM us
on Instagram. Everything's going to be in our description. It's just RJ Media Studios and check
out our new website. Yeah, carnuba has a lot of information on this kind of stuff. Yeah, we
recently updated it. You know, one of the COVID has been a really bad thing for everybody. But it also has freed up some time for some things to be able to be worked on. And that's literally how be heard was born. Because, you know, everyone kind of took a step back for a minute and spent more time with themselves and their families, and it gave you time to think. So this was one of the things that we thought about. So yeah. All right. Until
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