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Intelligent Personal AssistantAs an Android person, I missed the Siri boat. I constantly forget Cortona exists, but it's a thing. Then when Alexa came around, I held out because it wasn't Google. Okay so maybe I'm a Google snob. But now I've had a chance to play with all four as well as develop apps for both Alexa and Google Home (aka Google Assistant). Although Google Assistant is the clear winner for me going into 2017, I'm going to keep this post about Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) in general and the opportunities they present to both marketers and consumers.

Two trends I've continued to follow throughout the years are the need for deeper connections and control without confusion. I believe these two needs have driven technology to this point. The move from text chat, to video chat to VR/AR, is logical in this context. With more technology comes more things and with more things more confusion. I think we're still in the beginning phases of an IoT revolution but the technology to properly manage and control these experiences was not ready, until now.

What Is An Intelligent Personal Assistant?

Right now I'm focusing on the big 4; Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. IPAs are conversational bots that help you complete tasks. The bots offered by each of the big 4 have slight differences between them, however, I think they compliment each other well. We're also slowly starting to reach a point of stabilization where functionality is relatively similar across each platform.

IPAs at the most basic level allow you to get answers to questions very fast.

"How cold is it outside?"

"Who is the oldest person in the world?"

"Why do people still use QR codes?"

Now give your assistant access to things like your phone and calendar, and it becomes a powerful tool to keep yourself organized. Add your credit card, and you can buy toilet paper in fewer words than a haiku. The more it knows about you, the more helpful if becomes.

How Should Marketers Approach Intelligent Personal Assistants

There is a lot of movement in the space right now, so the most important thing you can do is pay attention. Privacy concerns are still top of mind with reports of IPAs ordering things because the TV told them too. The IPAs are also getting new features daily with services popping up to do everything from order Ubers to Pizza. You may have heard a lot about Alexa coming off CES this past year but did you know Google just automatically enabled Google Assistant across all Android phones running the most recent version of the operating system? This is a huge move and instantly brings Google Assistant up to Alexa's level although Alexa has had a huge head start to get up and running.

But in case you missed the boat, I'll do my best to get you up to speed on the things Marketers should be paying attention to.

Being First To Market

The most obvious one is the massive opportunity this new marketplace presents. First, to market services will enjoy the luxury of claiming their turf for premium user queries related to their industry. Getting a ride and ordering pizza were two of the first services created by Uber and Dominos on Google Home when it finally added the option for third party integrations.

Although at this point, Domino's can't claim "pizza" as the keyword trigger for the app and instead has to use the more direct "Domino's", It won't be long before your Intelligent Personal Assistant remembers that Domino's is your favorite place to order from and allows you to use "Order me a pizza" as your trigger phrase. This is why being first to the marketplace is incredibly important as your Intelligent Personal Assistants learn more about you and your needs.

Deeper Connections

Another great thing about Intelligent Personal Assistants is the fact that they are conversational. Some are better at this than others, like Google Home for example. As artificial intelligence and machine learning become more ubiquitous, IPAs are starting to set new standards for what consumer facing AI might look like in the future. IPAs remember your habits and your interaction history which make it possible to ask contextual and follow-up questions in a very casual manner.

Now imagine in the case of conversational commerce, an IPA that helps you do your grocery shopping. This could be core functionality of the IPA or a third party service you can install. Based on previous interactions with your brands, the IPA could favor your products over the competition.

Furthermore, IPA's become their own channel with unique opportunities to engage users and create memorable experiences. Maybe the pizza brand also helps you make your own pizzas with step by step recipes and alternative ingredients recommendations. Because the platforms are truly mobile and circumstantial its possible to create some of the best contextually relevant experiences we've seen to date. Now instead of catching them before or after they've done the task you'd like to associate your brand with, you can catch them in the act. Doing laundry and can't get that annoying stain out? Just say out loud "How do I get pumpkin spice soy latte stains out of white t-shirts" and your favorite detergent company might respond with answers in that moment.

The lines will continue to blur as brands become companions in our lives instead of just packaged goods.

Control Without Confusion

As technology continues to evolve there is a lot more to keep track of in our lives. Navigating the mess is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people. IPAs, however, solve a lot of the problems traditional tech has created. You no longer have to remember the "right" way to do something but just that you can do it. Your assistant is smart enough to figure out what you want to do and guide you along the way. This is an incredibly powerful tool for brands to help consumers navigate their complex digital web. IPAs serve both as their own channels but also as a one-stop access points to more traditional channels.

I've already seen this trend on websites using Intelligent Personal Assistants as customer support tools. It's certainly a balancing act as we advise clients to carefully approach automated personalized communication but when done right it can streamline incredibly complex user journeys. This makes things like identifying more qualified leads before connecting to sales and getting quick answers to common questions painless and easy. More importantly, you can do this all in your brand's voice. API.AI, which is what I used to create my own Google Home app, allows you to give your custom IPA personality right out of the box. It can even have a favorite color.

The Entry Point to IoT

Consumer based IoT is still in its infancy with products like Hue and WeMo currently dominating the space. Managing an app for each device becomes too much to manage once you get beyond 2 or 3 apps. The IPA eliminates the need to ever open those apps again. "Hey Google, turn the lights on and lock the front door". What would previously take the opening and closing two separate apps becomes a seamless phrase you might have yelled out to a family member anyways. In my opinion, besides privacy concerns, managing your IoT infrastructure had previously been too cumbersome a task to warrant the investment. Why pay for light bulbs that add an extra step to use when the switch on the wall is much easier? That's an oversimplification but for your average consumer, it is not far from the truth.

Brand's should be jumping at the opportunity to integrate their IoT tech with Intelligent Personal Assistants. We're still in the beginning phases and similar to how first to market services are going to win, first to integrate tech will also have a huge leg up.

This Is Just The Beginning

I've only glazed the surface here. We've gone from keyword search with website results to conversational search with immediate answers. This affects every facet of the digital agency from Search to Creative. UX will start to encompass voice design while our Ecomm team is developing out conversational commerce experiences. Your website will start to act more like an API and developers will need to make sure information is structured in ways that play nice with our new artificially intelligent friends.

Artificial intelligence in its current form is very cool. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are making big investments in this space and alongside the IoT revolution, there is a big opportunity to create a deeper connection and more engaging experiences. It feels like the pinnacle of the inbound marketing movement where search is literally sitting on the mantle above my fireplace. Not only are Intelligent Personal Assistants incredibly fun but they are incredibly useful, and they're just getting started.

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This post is part of our ongoing blog series highlighting our CMS practice at AMPXD; learn more about how we select CMS solutions through our other stories. As a large worldwide enterprise software organization with multiple product teams, marketing teams, customer communities, and outreach programs; VMware knows the daily challenges of managing a robust blog ecosystem and its content.. With over 40 different corporate blogs, VMware tasked our CMS experts at AMPXD with creating and managing a centralized authoring environment. Before our engagement the VMware teams had disparate blog instances in multiple platforms which made both content and user administration difficult to coordinate and manage. The organic growth of the various blog platforms also created the situation where they lacked brand consistency with various blogs’ look-and-feel resembling different brands. This lack of cohesion resulted in end users browsing between properties having jarring experiences as brand assets and user interface elements were unique to each blog. The AMPXD team in coordination with VMware stakeholders audited their internal workflows and business needs and identified WordPress Multisite as the ideal platform to enable blog authoring for the entire organization. The extensibility and control features of creating a WordPress Multisite network allowed for consistent user interfaces via brand controlled themes, a centralized user repository integrated with SSO, and one true dashboard to manage content and sites across the organization. AMPXD completed the migration of the existing VMware corporate blogs to the WordPress platform and, as part of the work, unified all of the disparate user interface elements of the blogs into one true corporate blog theme. The VMware blog network now has consistent styling elements whether you are browsing content from VMware Latin America or reading about the latest tips for utilizing vSphere The flexibility of the WordPress platform and the ability to create multisite blog networks has enabled VMware to create a robust blog ecosystem with over 40 blogs specialized to VMware products and disciplines. Utilizing content syndication mechanisms, VMware now has one blog space that is an aggregate of all corporate content across the blog network, giving customers one portal to discover and consume corporate content from across the whole ecosystem. By centering on the authoring workflow and optimizing the WordPress platform, the VMware team’s ability to easily manage authors, themes, system integrations and plugins has allowed the enterprise to focus on creating rich content and communities. Over the course of our ongoing series of posts around technology, we will share stories of uniquely different CMS solutions in practical implementations. If you have an upcoming CMS project or need to discuss content management strategies, the team at AMPXD would love to assist you with your needs. Reach out to us via our Contact Us form. You can also read about our entire suite of Experience Design and Website Development capabilities on our Services Page.

  • 3 min read
  • September 14, 2023

In our continuing series of examining Google Search Trends to gain insights into the top keywords queried in the USA, we present our findings for July 2023. Every day, we capture the top three keyword phrases in terms of search volume as reported by Google Trends (US Only). Each term has an estimated query volume attached to it, which we also record. The number scale tops out at 10,000,000+ with a lower limit of 200,000+ (sometimes 100,000+). After the conclusion of the month, we look at the phrases we collected along with their volumes to get an understanding of what drove queries for the month. Search Is Sizzling In July Actually, the total search volumes for the phrases we collected in July 2023 were lower compared to June so sizzling may be an exaggeration. We can’t say for certain why the reported search volumes were lower. There could have been a change in the way Google Trends was reporting query volume. The team likes to think that the people are out and about and not looking at their phones as much. Oh sure. Looking across the keywords, we had several celebrity deaths that made up the most searched topics of the month. The 4th of July holiday and the guy who seems undeniably connected to it made our report. We have an understanding at what movies, TV, and music were popular last month along with how much big jackpots of money captivated the search audience. Carlee Russell was someone people wanted to know more about and there was a lot of interest in the sport of soccer. Lastly, changes at Twitter and the launch of Threads had us excited to share more from the category of social media. Here’s what we have for you in this report! We Say Goodbye Sadly, the queries with the most volume from the past month were driven by celebrity deaths: Tony Bennett - 7/21/2023 - 2,000,000+ queries Sinead O'Connor - 7/26/2023 - 5,000,000+ queries On the last day of the month, two other entertainers passed away. Angus Cloud - 7/31/2023 - 5,000,000+ queries Paul Reubens - 7/31/2023 - 2,000,000+ queries We tend not to report on the query related to celebrity deaths but last month, two of these phrases were the only ones to be reported as having over 5 million queries for the day. The Fourth Fireworks, parades, and Joey Chestnut. These are the things that come to mind when we think about the Fourth of July holiday. You may not agree with the last item in the series, but the competitive eater has made our report over the past 3 years! Joey Chestnut - 7/2/2023 - 100,000+ queries Independence Day - 7/3/2023 - 200,000+ queries Fourth of July - 7/3/2023 - 2,000,000+ queries Joey Chestnut - 7/4/2023 - 500,000+ queries Take a look at the rising search popularity of his name in this Google Trends graph! Like it or not, Joey Chestnut is becoming a regular feature for the holiday. Summer Entertainment There were a few movie titles in our list from July 2023: Sound of Freedom - 7/3/2023 - 200,000+ queries Wonka - 7/11/2023 - 100,000+ queries Barbie movie - 7/20/2023 - 2,000,000+ queries The Sound of Freedom was released in theaters on July 4 and the Wonka film trailer dropped on the 11th. What seems to be the movie of the summer if not the year, Barbie hit the big screens on July 21st. Here are the queries that made our list that are related to TV shows. Emmy nominations 2023 - 7/12/2023 - 200,000+ queries The Summer I Turned Pretty - 7/13/2023 - 200,000+ queries Golden Bachelor - 7/17/2023 - 100,000+ queries Lastly, Travis Scott released an album on the 28th and people wanted to know more: Utopia Travis Scott - 7/27/2023 - 200,000+ queries Dreams of Free Money It seems like once or twice a year we get a large lottery jackpot that stirs up search interest. In July, we had two: Powerball - 7/8/2023 - 200,000+ queries Mega Millions - 7/8/2023 - 200,000+ queries Powerball - 7/11/2023 - 500,000+ queries Powerball - 7/15/2023 - 500,000+ queries Powerball numbers - 7/18/2023 - 500,000+ queries Powerball - 7/18/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries Powerball - 7/18/2023 - 2,000,000+ queries As you can see, the Powerball lottery game was very popular in July. Even though Mega Millions saw one entry in July when no one won the $427 million prize, The Powerball jackpot hit 1 billion dollars on the 18th and there was one winner for the drawing on the 20th. The Curious Case of Carlee Russell Carlee Russell’s name was reported on news outlets as someone who was kidnapped. Carlee Russell - 7/14/2023 - 500,000+ queries Carlee Russell found - 7/15/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries Carlee Russell - 7/19/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries The Alabama woman admitted later that she staged her own kidnapping and turned herself in and was charged with making false reports. Some Keywords Related To Politics Here are the phrases that made Google’s Daily Trends top 3 last month. Cocaine found in White House - 7/4/2023 - 100,000+ queries Student loan forgiveness - 7/14/2023 - 200,000+ queries Mitch McConnell - 7/26/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries Besides all the holiday festivities, people wanted to know about the cocaine found at the White House. We guess we’ll never know. On the 14th, the Biden Administration announced it would forgive the loans for 804,000 borrowers and on the 26th, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell had an episode where he stopped talking while being interviewed by reporters and was escorted from the podium where he was speaking. Soccer Keywords We are going to call it soccer in this report, but the sport better known as football around the world drove many people to search last month. The USMNT was involved in the CONCACAF Gold Cup tournament. Here are some queries that were related to it that made our collection. USA vs Trinidad and Tobago - 7/2/2023 - 100,000+ queries Mexico vs Costa Rica - 7/6/2023 - 200,000+ queries USA vs Panama - 7/12/2023 - 200,000+ queries The USWNT played in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup and search interest in that team and their matches was strong and they also made the list. Women's World Cup - 7/19/2023 - 500,000+ queries USWNT - 7/20/2023 - 100,000+ queries U.S. Women's Soccer - 7/21/2023 - 200,000+ queries USA vs Netherlands - 7/26/2023 - 200,000+ queries Women's World Cup - 7/27/2023 - 200,000+ queries It figures that after a world famous player joins your club that suddenly the team name is getting queried every time you play. Inter Miami - 7/21/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries Inter Miami - 7/25/2023 - 500,000+ queries We’ll keep an eye on how many times this team makes our list for the rest of the year. Major League Baseball There is another major league playing games in the summer. MLB had their All-Star game in July but searchers mostly cared about the Home Run Derby. Home Run Derby 2023 - 7/9/2023 - 200,000+ queries Home Run Derby - 7/10/2023 - 500,000+ queries The trade deadline for the league actually occurred on the first of August but people still wanted to see the flurry of trades. MLB Trade Deadline - 7/31/2023 - 200,000+ queries Sorry Mets fans. Interest In Other Sports Too Queries related to big events in Tennis and Boxing made our list. Carlos Alcaraz - 7/14/2023 - 200,000+ queries Wimbledon - 7/16/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries The Wimbledon tournament was played in July 2023 and Carlos Alcaraz was the Men’s Singles winner. Spence vs Crawford - 7/28/2023 - 200,000+ queries Crawford vs Spence - 7/28/2023 - 200,000+ queries Errol Spence Jr vs Terence Crawford - 7/29/2023 - 200,000+ queries The boxing match between Errol Spence Jr. and Terrence Crawford was fought on the 29th. As you can see, there were many ways to search for this bout. On the 29th, Crawford defeated Spence via TKO. Prime Day Amazon had their big deal day for Prime members as they typically do in July. Amazon Prime Day - 7/10/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries The search volume is almost back to pre-pandemic levels but not quite where it was in July 2019: ‘ Twitter, Threads, and X We finish up this edition of our search trends report with all the big happenings with social media platforms. Here’s a timeline of all the things searchers wanted to know more about with the changes at Twitter (X) and Meta: Rate limit exceeded Twitter - 7/1/2023 - 200,000+ queries Threads - 7/5/2023 - 1,000,000+ queries Twitter rebrand - 7/23/2023 - 200,000+ queries For some reason, there were limits put in place for the number of tweets users could view in a day, with different limits for verified and unverified accounts. Meta launched Threads on the 5th, much to the surprise of social media managers everywhere. We shall see how this new platform evolves as we have been viewing Twitter’s many changes over the course of 2023, which includes its rebrand to X. Update all of your social icons! Thanks for reading. If you liked this article, we utilize search trends data for all of our clients and we invite you to learn more about our SEO services.

When you’re first starting out on social media, you may be heeding advice to “just show up” on each platform. Great advice, nonetheless, but there’s an opportunity to diversify your content and give it a more native fit for each social media platform. Establishing distinct channel strategies ensures that you’re engaging most effectively with that channel’s audience. Consumers use different apps for different reasons.Your audience on Instagram is completely different from your audience on Twitter or TikTok. More importantly, media dimensions, character limits, and the overall strategy and objective vary depending on what social media platform you’re using. Content can be repurposed to ensure it communicates the brands' message across different platforms,however, it should always be tweaked to fit the social channel’s needs and to increase engagement. Let’s take a look at a few popular platforms and how to optimize your content on each one. Instagram Instagram is a staple when a brand is trying to showcase their visual DNA. Most brands only have about 3 seconds to capture consumers’ attention, so they’ll want to get a good understanding of what you’re about from just a photo. No matter the industry, people will be coming to your brand’s Instagram profile to see what the products or services offered look like and take a peek at the aesthetics offered inside as well. Instagram is a visual storytelling app. Feed posts allow you to show the bigger picture, while story posts are where your consumers can see every step along the journey. Through story interactions, reels, and direct messages, there’s also a wide-open opportunity to develop a community surrounding your brand. X (previously Twitter) A community manager’s dream (or nightmare), X (previously Twitter) allows you to speak directly to your audience—and they’re likely to respond! X gives your brand an avenue to speak on what speaks to them, interact with consumers, and easily repost relevant content, all great ways to lean into your brand's personality. Most brands allow the witty, not-so-serious side of themselves to live on X, leaning into gifs, memes, and trends that float across the text-first platform. You could use this platform to engage jokingly with your competitors, start conversations about the products or services you offer and have a little fun. TikTok TikTok is a great platform to push your brand creativity and have your content reach new audiences using unique trends. For your brand, TikTok is a creative playground. With trending sounds, filters, and templates, there are so many ways to present your brand in a way you may never have before. The platform’s motto, "Make TikToks not Ads," is a great guardrail for developing content. Consumers on TikTok learn about hidden gem products, new recipes, or product hacks. Optimal content on this app is very immersive, so you have an opportunity to find more information and insights about your consumers. LinkedIn LinkedIn is a great place to show off some thought leadership and anything interesting you’re doing in your industry. Think of LinkedIn as your brand’s professional landing, a place to network and mingle in a more formal setting. Brands could use this to showcase their values, employee spotlights, and business achievements. This could spark an interest in future customers, employees, or investors. So, before jumping into a new social media platform, (like Threads), develop a channel strategy. If the app is primarily visual, take some time to solidify pictures and videos that will add value to your page and engage your audience, like relevant infographics or shots of real people enjoying your brand. For more text-first apps, take advantage of the opportunity to let your words do the work by starting engaging conversations with your consumers or answering FAQ. Most importantly, get to know your consumers! Understand how your audience behaves and engages on each specific channel so you can tailor your content to fit right in.