Skill Delivery Framework

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Alexa Marketing Guide

How to Market Your Alexa Skill

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If you *only* build it…they won’t come.

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What to Expect from this Guide

When building an Alexa skill for your client or brand,

there’s more to consider than bringing the skill to

life. The right measures must be put into place to

bring the skill to your intended audiences, too. There

are many avenues for driving your audience to your

skill; it’s imperative to plan for these.

This Alexa Marketing & Advertising Guide walks

agencies through what should be considered for skill

marketing and promotion across channels. Through

upfront planning, the go-to-market plan, and

potential opportunities with Amazon, this guide will

help drive engagement goals with strengthened

strategies for driving skill discovery and usage.

The guide contains the following sections:

Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Creating Your Go-To-Market Plan

Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon

Examples & Cases

Evaluating Success

How to Get Started

Refer to the Amazon Echo/Alexa Brand Guidelines for guidance on

appropriate usage of Amazon Echo and Alexa brand assets. TV commercials,

film, video advertising, radio broadcasts, packaging, sweepstakes, or

contests will require Amazon review. Please reach out to ae-skills-

[email protected].

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Skill Creation with

Marketing in Mind

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Marketing your skill is not only about ensuring

promotion at launch. It starts from the beginning.

HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER IN THIS SECTION:

Asking the Right Questions

Optimizing the Foundation

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Asking the Right Questions

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An Overview Of Building a Skill

Asking the Right Questions

Don’t wait until your skill is ready to launch before planning your marketing.

You should begin planning your marketing as soon as your skill is being

defined. By keeping marketing (or what will be “news worthy” about

your skill) in mind when the skill is being defined, it may lead to

ideas for changes or enhancements in the

skill experience.

Take the time to thoughtfully consider answers to the following

questions. These answers may shape your skill and are what you

should highlight in your marketing.

1. What makes your skill different than the others

already available to customers today?

2. What advantage does voice give your service

or experience? Does it save time? Is being

“hands free” enhancing the customer’s day to

day life? Is it fun? Is it personalized?

3. What will customers expect your skill to do

for them? Can you fully complete the task for

the customer?

4. What about your skill will entice customers to

use

it regularly?

5. Can your skill function independently of an app

or website?

6. Does your skill represent your brand and your

brand messaging?

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the

Foundation

After identifying the motivations for customers to

habitually use your skill, the next step is to optimize your

skill features toward fulfilling these.

These best practices for this stage are detailed over the

following slides:

• Optimize your skill name and invocation name

• Add an eye-catching skill icon

• Choose stand-alone example phrases

• Write a clear, value-rich description

• Refresh content regularly and often

• Maximize discoverability with keywords

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

OPTIMIZE YOUR SKILL NAME AND INVOCATION NAME

Be sure your skill has a clear and intuitive name that speaks to its

purpose and value. The name should set clear expectations of

what your skill can do and what the customer experience will be

like. Also, make sure your skill name doesn’t over promise and

set

false expectations.

If you are expanding a well-known brand to the Alexa universe it

could be as simple as, “Alexa, open X.” For skills with a brand not

yet part of customers’ daily lives, it is important to keep the skill

name short, direct, and easy to remember.

A new skill with no existing branding needs to think about the

skill name the same way you would think about naming a new

company, product, or service. All the basics still apply: keep it

simple, short, unique, flexible, and easy to pronounce. Think

about whether or not your skill’s name will be part of a broader

brand. Will it allude to what the skill is about or what the skill

does? It is entirely your responsibility as the developer to make

sure your skill name does not break any legal trademark laws.

Find additional guidance on requirements for your invocation

name here

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Your skill name should also be easy to remember so customers

can recall it when they are ready to activate your skill. Avoid

names that are long or hard to pronounce. Think through what

variations customers may use and select the most natural, easiest

to remember phrase (“Alexa, open Flightchecker” versus “Alexa,

open Flightchecker the Flight Time Authority”).

After deciding on the perfect invocation phrase, make sure it also

makes sense in a single interaction intent. For example, “Alexa,

open Daily Horoscopes and give me the horoscope for Taurus.”

Remember that people don’t always speak in grammatically

correct sentences and you shouldn’t expect them to change. Be

sure your invocation name and follow-up intents allow for

natural language, mistakes

and all.

Be sure the invocation works. Test it before submitting your skill

for certification. Customers are unlikely to try a skill a second

time if their initial experience was broken.

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https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/choose-the-invocation-name-for-a-custom-

skill.html

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

ADD AN EYE-CATCHING SKILL ICON

Along with a description, your skill icon is important to your

overall brand. Every skill in the Alexa Skill Store has an icon to

help the skill stand out, and multi-modal devices can display

your branding or complementary imagery when a customer is

using your skill. Use your skill icon as another opportunity to

grab customers’ attention.

As the graphic representation of your skill, think through what

you want customers to see. If you have a well-known brand

already, this Alexa skill logo is likely a reformatted version of

your logo you already have for the dimensions and purposes of

Alexa. If your skill is a new concept or brand to customers, you’ll

need to think through what you want your skill logo to be and

how it represents your skill visually.

Keep in mind the skill logos are sometimes small and appear

mostly on white background and you will not be able to fit

much

text comfortably.

Your icon doesn’t have to be flashy; in fact, some of the best

icons feature thoughtful and intuitive design that visually speak

to what the skill is all about. As you’re designing your skill icon,

keep in mind a few design best practices:

• Keep It Simple. Avoid cluttering the icon with fine detail,

which will be hard to see in small sizes.

• Keep Text To A Minimum. If you have to include text, make

sure it fits in the boundaries of the icon frame, and make it

big enough to be legible even at the smallest sizes.

• Avoid Using Detailed Photographs. Unless cropped, they

quickly become hard to see at smaller sizes.

• Make It Recognizable. Customers should be able to identify

your icon at a glance and have some idea what the skill

represents.

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

ADD AN EYE-CATCHING SKILL ICON (EXAMPLES)

Established Brand Examples

Skills with New Brands

“Alexa, open The

Tonight Show”

“Alexa, start

Call of Duty”

“Alexa, ask U.S. Bank to

get my checking

account balance”

“Alexa, Open

Prudential

Retirement”

“Alexa, open

Doubles Trouble”

“Alexa, start

Chompers

from Gimlet”

“Alexa, ask

Jurassic Bark

to bark”

“Alexa, open My

Beauty Chat”

Try out the Alexa icon builder for your skill here.

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

CHOOSE STAND-ALONE EXAMPLE PHRASES

In the developer portal, you have the option to add up to three

example phrases for your skill. When completing this step, only

include the invocation phrase or a single intent utterance as

your example phrase. These examples are important as they

are displayed on your detail page, on the landing page of the

Alexa Skill Store, and (if your skill is selected) on any marketing

sent out by Amazon.

Notice that there are a variety of utterances in the above

example. As a best practice, this utterance should always be

the phrase that will invoke your skill or is a single interaction

phrase (“Alexa, open My Horoscopes.” and “Alexa, open My

Horoscopes and give me the horoscope for Taurus.”). Sharing

an utterance out of context is frustrating to customers, even if

your skill has conversational capabilities. For example, do not

include “How do I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” in

your example utterances if the customer needs to state “Alexa,

open Easy Recipes” first.

”Alexa, open My

Horoscopes.”

”Alexa, open My

Horoscopes and give me

the horoscope

for Taurus.”

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

WRITE A CLEAR, VALUE-RICH DESCRIPTION:

When customers visit the Alexa Skills Store or ask Alexa about

skills, they have tens of thousands of skills to choose from.

Along with an intuitive skill name, a well-written skill

description for the Alexa Skill Store and a short first-time voice

introduction will go a long way in drawing customers’

attention and convincing them to give your skill a try.

Make sure your skill description clearly articulates the value of

your skill and what customers can expect it to do. Share how

your skill makes a task faster, easier, or more delightful with

voice. Include details and utterances that showcase your skill’s

key features and pique customers’ interest.

Include your refresh cadence in the description. Share how

often you plan to update your skill so customers will know to

keep coming back for more delightful interactions. Getting

customers to use your skill for the first time is only the

beginning.

Skill Value

Expectation

Feature Showcase

Utterance Samples

Refresh Cadence

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

REFRESH CONTENT REGULARLY AND OFTEN

The launch phase of your skill is only the first step. You should be

actively planning what updates you will be making to your

content and/or product. There are lots of skills out there. What

will make customers keep coming back to yours?

If the skill is content based (trivia questions, news headlines), you

should have a plan to update the content at a cadence that

provides fresh content as appropriate for your category, and you

should tell the customer when they can expect updates to be live.

If the skill is not content based (skills that turn on/off lights,

create a to-do list, etc.), you should be thinking about how to

innovate on behalf of the customer.

Once you have launched, read your skill reviews and see what

updates customers are asking for.

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Skill Creation with Marketing in Mind

Optimizing the Foundation

MAXIMIZE DISCOVERABILITY WITH KEYWORDS

Keywords help your skill surface when customers search in the

Skills Store and explore skills via voice browsing. Adding

keywords to your skill during skill creation in the Developer

Portal is one of the easiest marketing steps to take and should

not be overlooked.

You can add up to thirty relevant keywords to help customers

find your skill and to stand out from the rest of the catalog.

While your skill name should be pithy, you should add as many

rich keywords as possible. For example, you name your skill

“Beauty Bests,” but keywords may include: beauty, makeup,

skincare, advice, tips, hacks, expert, morning routine, nighttime

routine, beauty trends. This will now help your skill surface when

a customer asks or searches for: “beauty hacks,” “skincare,”

“makeup advice,” etc.

Keep in mind that your keywords will be reviewed and

monitored; you shouldn’t add “video game” to a beauty skill. You

can continue to update skill keywords in the Developer Portal.

“Beauty Bests” keyword examples:

beauty

beauty trends

makeup

skincare

advice

tips

hacks

expert

morning routine

nighttime routing

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Creating Your

Go-to-Market Plan

It is important to invest in a go-to-market plan for your

skill just as you would for any other new brand initiative.

HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER IN THIS SECTION:

Begin with a Funnel

Channels to Consider - Owned, Earned, and Paid

Creative Inclusions

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Begin with a Funnel

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Begin with a Funnel

Understand your customer, where they are in their journey, and what value your skill provides.

Where can voice play a role? The answer won’t be the same for every brand, so it’s important

you look at your specific business case and customer to find where voice can best fit in – and

make waves.

Note that first adopters of your skill will likely be existing brand loyalists.

Awareness Consideration Purchase Retention Advocacy

Y O U R S K I L L ?

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Channels to Consider

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Channels to Consider

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to promote your skill. This will

ensure your intended users show up. Consider owned, earned, and

paid channels in your go-to-market plan, such as: a dedicated

webpage with detailed information about the skill, TV, radio, print

&/or OOH campaigns or placements, online display, email marketing,

SEO & SEM, social media, packaging, and PR.

Across marketing, always lead with your invocation name in the form

of an utterance and use Alexa branding to leverage customers’

awareness. Among your content, consider creating a demo video to

use across your channels for customer education.

There is a possibility your skill may be featured in Amazon owned

marketing. We’ll go into more details on that in an upcoming section,

but you shouldn’t solely rely on these channels as there are many

skills and limited placement opportunities. Take control of growing

your skill customer base and market it regularly to help it stand out.

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Channels to Consider

Here are examples of owned, earned, and paid channels to consider

in your skill’s go-to-market plan.

Again, treat this as you would any other new brand

initiative in terms of strategically conveying a message

across mediums relevant for your targets.

Owned

Website,

Dedicated Landing

Page(s), Email,

Social Content

Paid

TV, Radio, Print,

OOH, Online

Advertising,

SEO & SEM

Earned

PR, Social,

Reviews

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Creative Inclusions

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Creating Your Go-to-Market Plan

Creative Inclusions

Here are three main suggestions for what to include in the creative you distribute across channels:

ALWAYS LEAD WITH YOUR INVOCATION

NAME IN THE FORM OF AN UTTERANCE.

On all marketing material, include the

utterance to invoke your skill. It is best to

include the full phrase in quotes (e.g.

“Alexa, open Big Sky.”). This quickly and

easily lets the customer know how to

interact with your skill.

No matter how beautiful your marketing

material is, or how engaging the skill

experience, customers need to be told

how to open your skill. They will want to

try your skill the moment they hear about

it and attention spans are short. If they

have to guess how to invoke your skill and

they get it wrong, they are unlikely to

come back later to try again.

USE ALEXA BRAND AWARENESS.

The Alexa branding is instantly

recognizable and using it boosts your

credibility. Think of it like an app store

icon, or social icons. The Alexa branding

should become part of the channel

branding you utilize for your existing

services or products.

For guidelines on using the Amazon Echo

and Alexa brands in your promotion

material, as well as downloadable “Just

Ask” badges, check out the Alexa Skills

Marketing Guidelines.

Today, seeing and hearing is

understanding when it comes to voice

technology. To

create a more enticing social media post,

try to take a short video of your skill in

action

and post it on Twitch, Facebook, Twitter,

YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, or any

other social network.

Make your video short and engaging;

highlight the most compelling ways

customers can use your skill and how to

invoke it.

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Potential Marketing

Opportunities with Amazon

While it’s imperative to think and execute beyond

Amazon in marketing your skill, there are potential

opportunities with Amazon, too.

HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER IN THIS SECTION:

Amazon Paid Media Opportunities

Best Practices for Amazon Promotion

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Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon

Amazon Paid Media Opportunities

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Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon Advertising*

Amazon Paid Media Opportunities

Boost discovery and awareness of your skill by reaching Amazon customers and Alexa users through a suite of exclusive paid media

opportunities.

AMAZON MUSIC AUDIO ADS ON ALEXA

Reach Alexa users with your key messaging points via a 10-

30 second audio spot that you can run during listening on

Amazon Music’s free streaming tier on Alexa. Highlight your

Alexa enablement utterance and listeners can instantly take

action to experience your skill.

VIDEO

Utilize video to show your skill in action and engage Amazon

audiences across Amazon’s video inventory spanning OTT on

Fire TV, Amazon, and Amazon DSP.

REACH ALEXA USERS ON OTHER CONNECTED AMAZON

DEVICES

Fire Tablet and Fire TV are enabled with Alexa voice, which is

why there is strong correlation with Alexa users. Display

media across Fire TV and Fire Tablet also provide a beautiful,

sizable canvas through which you can deliver a memorable

and educational message.

UNIQUE AMAZON AUDIENCES

Combine Alexa and smart home audience behaviors with

unique Amazon shopping and entertainment insights to find

the right audience to reach for your skill. Options to

incorporate your own audience information as well.

REPORTING

Full funnel reporting on media (impressions, reach,

completion rate, click-through-rate, etc.) including related

product searches, purchases, and more.

See metrics on “unique customers” and “utterances” in the

Alexa dashboard. Historical performance sees lifts in these

metrics while media is live.

*Please check with Amazon Advertising to confirm availability of paid media opportunities by territory

Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon Advertising*

Amazon Music audio ads on Alexa

Amazon audio ads provide a seamless path to deliver a message to customers during breaks when listening to Amazon

Music’s free streaming tier on Alexa enabled devices.

Audio ads run during breaks within Amazon Music’s

free streaming tier

10-30 second “in-home audio ads” that reach

connected home audiences on Alexa

Brands can utilize exclusive Amazon first-party

audiences to reach the most relevant audiences for

your skill promotion message

Amazon can produce custom audio creative

highlighting your skill’s key features and enablement

utterance

*Please check with Amazon Advertising to confirm availability of paid media opportunities by territory

Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon Advertising*

Additional Paid Media Tactics

Fire Tablet & Fire TVVideo

*Please check with Amazon Advertising to confirm availability of paid media opportunities by territory

Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon Advertising*

Educate with an Amazon Landing Page

Drive your media to a custom Amazon landing page which can serve as the home of customer education for your skill. Highlight skill

insights, video, and drive customers to enable!

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Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon

Best Practices for Amazon Promotion

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Potential Marketing Opps with Amazon

Best Practices for Promotion

Browse through the Alexa Skills Store, and you’ll see the

innovations of our developer community on display. Together

we can make sure customers know about the incredible voice

experiences you’ve built to meet their needs, which is why we

feature the most engaging skills to customers through various

marketing channels like email, social, the Alexa App, and the

Alexa Skills Store. We feature skills across all categories, as well

as skills created by all types of developers, from big brands to

hobbyists.

One of the most common questions we receive from developers

is “How can I get my skill featured by Amazon?” We review and

consider all skills. The ones that we choose have a few things

in common:

• High Customer Engagement. They are customer-focused

and keep users coming back for more.

• Great Customer Experience. They are fully functional and

user tested to eliminate friction in the customer experience.

• Fresh Content. They offer new, exciting, or up-to-date

content to keep customers coming back.

• High Reliability. They are load tested and able to handle

high customer traffic.

We look at a variety of factors including Alexa Skills Store

ratings, engagement, and repeat usage as positive signals that

skills meet the above criteria. The next slide features a few best

practices to help your skill shine and increase the chances of it

being featured by Amazon.

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Potential Marketing Opportunities with Amazon

Best Practices for Promotion

Read more on these best practices for Amazon promotion here.

DESIGN YOUR SKILL

WITH YOUR

CUSTOMER IN MIND

We want to ensure

we’re featuring the

highest-quality and

most engaging skills.

We’ve found that the

most engaging skills are

ones in which the

developer has focused

on meeting a specific

customer need. As a

result, customers

continue to use the skill

again and again.

When designing a new

skill, make sure it has a

clear customer benefit.

KEEP CUSTOMERS

COMING BACK WITH

FRESH CONTENT

When we see that a skill

is being used

repeatedly, we know

customers find the skill

engaging and are

more likely to consider

it for promotion. That’s

why developers of the

most successful skills

are constantly adding

new content to keep

customers engaged.

When building your

skill, establish a content

workflow that enables

you to quickly and

easily add new content

to your skill.

DELIVER A SEAMLESS

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

It’s important to create a

frictionless voice

experience to ensure

customer satisfaction.

Start by choosing a unique

skill name, and a

memorable invocation

name and utterance.

Optimize the customer

experience by clearly

setting expectations for

what your skill can do in

the skill description. It’s

also important to test your

skill regularly and ensure

your skill responds quickly

to customer requests,

ideally within 2 seconds.

MAKE SURE YOUR

SKILL IS

CONSISTENTLY

RELIABLE

Even the most

compelling and

delightful voice

experience won’t gain

traction if it isn’t

available whenever

customers ask. To be

eligible for Amazon

promotion, your skill

must be load tested and

capable of handling an

influx of customers

without breaking.

To have a consistently

reliable skill, configure a

professional-grade

backend for your skill.

PROMOTE YOUR SKILL

TO DRIVE

ENGAGEMENT

One of the criteria for

selection is high

customer engagement.

When you have more

customers using your

skill, we see that as a

signal that your skill

provides an engaging

voice experience.

Promote your skill to

eager Alexa users and

generate a baseline of

customers to enhance

your promotion

eligibility.

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Example Case

Let’s look at a real-world example to provide a clearer

picture of possibilities and inspiration.

HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER IN THIS SECTION:

An Example Activation:

Jurassic World Skill for Alexa

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Example Case

Jurassic World Skill for Alexa

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Example Activation

Jurassic World Skill for Alexa

Please share if so and we will incorporate.

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Evaluating Success:

KPIs and Reporting

Once your skill and its marketing is live, you will want to

measure — and optimize — the success of your

promotional efforts. And you’ll be able to evaluate the

skill itself, too.

HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER IN THIS SECTION:

Reporting for Marketing Optimizations

Reporting for Skill Optimizations

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Evaluating Success: KPIs and Reporting

Reporting for Marketing Optimizations

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Evaluating Success: KPIs and Reporting

Marketing Optimizations

After trying any marketing tactic, you will want to measure the impact it had

on your skill. This will enable you to garner learnings that can

optimize the marketing efforts to be most effective.

The following metrics are available in the developer portal. Note

that permissions from the skill’s brand must be obtained for access:

• Sessions

• Unique customers

• Utterances

• Intents

• Retention

• Interaction path

There will, of course, be many factors that influence skill usage, but

look at these before and after marketing your skill to measure

impact. What metric you hone in on will depend on what action

you were hoping the customer would take. Most marketing

campaigns focus on unique customers, sessions, and retention

(though you may not accomplish these all in one campaign).

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Evaluating Success: KPIs and Reporting

Reporting for Skill Optimizations

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Evaluating Success: KPIs and Reporting

Skill Optimizations

You can also garner learnings for optimizations to your product

itself. With every request a customer makes of your skill, you

have an opportunity to make your skill even better. The key to

all of this is to manage and keep track of those requests, and

then use that data to make improvements to your skill.

For common data points, like users, intents, sessions, and

utterances, the Measure dashboard inside the Alexa Developer

Console can help you collect and visualize engagement data for

your skill. If you’re trying to improve a published skill, you can

look at these numbers at least once a week to see if any user

behaviors are trending since your last release.

More on using analytics to make skill enhancements can be

found here

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as well as in the Skill Delivery Framework guide.

Check out the Skill Delivery Framework guide for more details on skill

analytics.

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https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/e2fa7472-a529-40e3-b35e-53af602e72ab/things-

every-alexa-skill-should-do-use-analytics-to-make-enhancements

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How to Get Started

Now it’s time to put this guide into action.

HERE’S WHAT WE’LL COVER IN THIS SECTION:

Resources

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How to Get Started

Resources

Prior to submitting your PR and/or marketing materials using the Amazon/Alexa brand for approval (must

be submitted a minimum of 7 days prior to release), make sure all of your materials are in compliance

with the Amazon and Alexa Guidelines.

GUIDELINES RESOURCES

Be sure to familiarize yourself with the Amazon and Alexa

Marketing Guidelines. Failure to use the Alexa brand or

Amazon trademarks accordingly may result in loss of

permission to use either.

Alexa Brand Usage Guidelines

Amazon Trademark Guidelines

Alexa Skills Marketing Guidelines

TEMPLATE RESOURCES

We have also created several templates that you can

use to create your skill marketing materials.

PowerPoint Templates

Photoshop Templates

Alexa Speech Bubble Template (be sure to review the

Co-Branded Utterance Bubble Guidelines)

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You are now ready to market your Alexa skill.

You know how your skill will surprise and delight customers, you

have optimized your invocation name, added keywords, and have a

robust marketing plan that includes frequent updates.

All of your marketing material includes your invocation phrase, and

you know how to properly utilize the Alexa brand and trademark.

Any collateral that you already own is updated (current email

newsletters, website, etc.) and you have researched paid

advertising.

In time, your skill will engage your target users, and it is well on its way to

fulfilling your brand goals.

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