Amazon and Yext: What to Know about Alexa’s Expansion

Whether with Alexa, its new wardrobe service or Prime Day, online retailer Amazon is constantly expanding its business. Most recently, Amazon teamed up with Yext to expand Alexa’s knowledge and present consumers with seamless artificial intelligence (AI).

What is Yext?

Yext, a New York technology company and digital knowledge management platform, aids businesses in managing online information about their brands with consumer viewership in mind.

In other words, with Yext’s database, brands can control what their consumers see online in the Google Knowledge Panel plus more than 1,000 directories, and ensure accurate information about their businesses, like hours, addresses and phone numbers.

Directly through Yext, brands can view and accept or reject customer-suggested edits to their business information online, on every search engine, mapping service, social network and more.

If brands invest in Yext, they won’t need to update each individual search engine or directory. Instead, users update Yext and Yext funnels the data to the digital universe.

What is the Amazon Alexa and Yext partnership?

When asking “Alexa, look up Starbucks,” “Alexa, where’s the closest grocery store” or similar questions, users should now receive more robust and accurate information. Alexa’s results may increase exposure and drive revenue online and offline, all thanks to Yext’s data.

Previously, Amazon Alexa was pulling data on local businesses from Yelp, but Amazon will now switch to Yext’s extensive database. Yext has hinted at expanding data fields, which could aggressively make smart speakers better search tools, helping more businesses reach consumers through Alexa voice search.

According to Bloomberg, “the effort [between Amazon and Yext] emphasizes material based on the user’s location after they enter an address in their Alexa app.”

How does the Amazon and Yext partnership change the marketing industry?

With Yext knowledge supplying data for Alexa, is Amazon positioning itself to compete in search?

As of June 2018, Google’s search engine controlled a 90.3% share of worldwide search traffic. With voice search growing exponentially, a large proportion of people using voice search for common tasks and Alexa’s results enhanced via Yext data, Amazon is positioning themselves to drift into the competitive waters of Google’s search engine.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Amazon hint that they’re preparing to break up the Google-Facebook duopoly. Signaling their intentions, in May, Amazon stopped buying shopping ads on Google. And last week, Amazon reported 132% growth (up to $2.2 billion) in their “other” earnings segment, which is known to be comprised predominantly of advertising sales. With 61.9% of the smart speaker market share in the U.S., Amazon is poised to dominate voice search. (Not that we believe Google will go down without a fight.)

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About the Author

Jonathan Katz is the Chief Media and Product Officer of Digital Media Solutions, LLC (DMS), an industry leader in the world of customer acquisition and retention that helps clients maximize their digital marketing to beat the competition and accelerate growth. In this role, Jonathan provides technical direction across the company in areas of marketing automation, machine language learning, architectures and software technology. He leads the team that works across the firm’s diverse set of divisions to drive new product innovation and strategic positioning. Jonathan also leads customer acquisition teams across all media channels. Since its inception, DMS has evolved into an award-winning, full-service performance marketing company demonstrating incredible year-over-year growth which has earned recognition on the Inc. 5000 list in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. An experienced serial entrepreneur in mobile and digital marketing, Jonathan’s expertise consists of an extremely proven track record in search, social and programmatic media. With his 20+ year career scaling start-ups and brands across health insurance, government services, automotive, careers, education, consumer finance and politics, Jonathan is now charting a new path via artificial intelligence marketing in performance media that will revolutionize the industry. Jonathan studied computer science at Florida State University and lives in Clearwater Beach, FL.

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