Make Your Own Amazon Alexa Skills: Just The Facts

Amazon is broadening the Alexa Skills Store to let everyone share skills they’ve created for the Alexa voice assistant. Developed just last year, the Skills Store hosts more than 80,000 skills. With more than 8.2 million people using the Amazon Alexa, incorporating Alexa Skills into marketing strategies may help content creators reach more consumers.

How Can Brands Add Skills To The Alexa Skills Store?

With no coding necessary, brands can use Amazon’s Alexa Skill Blueprints, which enable marketers to create and share their Skills by filling in templates.

The Alexa Store offers templates curated specifically for content creators, bloggers and organizations. In a blog post, Amazon disclosed Skill Blueprints include personal trainer, flashcards, facts and quizzes, flash briefing and fable templates.

How Can Amazon Skills Benefit Marketers?

Content marketers can use the Blog Skill Blueprint to get ahead of the game and give their blogs extended reach, according to Amazon.

Plus, marketers who use WordPress can install the Amazon AI Plugin for WordPress and easily translate their content to audio on Alexa. The AI plugin for WordPress allows WordPress bloggers to easily convert their web content using text-to-speech software. Content marketers can create audio feeds for their blogs and add them to the Blog Blueprint, intuitively publishing their own skills.

Considerations For Developing Amazon Alexa Skills

Like all marketing initiatives, Amazon Skills only make sense if they help achieve your marketing objectives. It may be easy to produce stellar content and give consumers everything they need in one easy Alexa response, but this could result in consumer disassociation with your other branded content. If your objective is to lead prospective consumers to your website, you’ll need to draw them in, using the Alexa Skill only as an appetizer, not the full meal. Be sure you don’t give too much away in your Skill, and always tie your Skill content back to your brand.

With no limit on the number of skills one individual or brand can create, the new, inclusive Alexa Skills Store holds incredible potential for marketers as they produce innovative content to engage their ideal audiences through new channels, like voice assistant.

Read more about optimizing your SEO and content for voice search here.

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About the Author

Victoria Pallien is a Marketing Communications Writer at Digital Media Solutions (DMS), the fastest-growing independent digital performance marketing company. DMS helps its clients accelerate growth by deploying diversified and data-driven customer acquisition solutions that deliver scalable, sustainable and measurable marketing results. DMS performance marketing solutions connect the right consumers with the right offers at the right time to achieve the marketing objectives of our clients. DMS is continually innovating to provide new and emerging media and technology solutions that minimize waste and maximize results across the most competitive industries. Since its inception, DMS has demonstrated incredible year-over-year growth which has earned recognition on the Inc. 5000 list in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

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