Does Alexa or Google win with marketers?

Amazon’s Alexa is emerging as the voice platform of choice for marketers at small-to-medium sized businesses.

That’s according to a report from location marketing company Uberall, which surveyed 300 marketers at businesses with fewer than 500 employees.

Nearly half of respondents (48%) believed Alexa will be most useful for marketers, followed by Google Assistant at 29% and Apple’s Siri at 17%. The report pointed to Alexa’s higher name recognition and growing suite of services compared to Google as the reason for the preference. However, it also points out that Google’s leadership position in search could be lending to a belief among some marketers that it is more able to close the gap between voice platforms and commerce.

Voice is not a priority for many small businesses, with 38% saying they don’t do anything on the platform. However, among those that do, the investment is growing: 35% of respondents say their investment will increase, compared to 24% who say it will stay the same and 4% who say it will decrease.

While a significant number of respondents aren’t getting involved with voice, that may be due more to budget than seeing a lack of opportunity. Only 11% said voice platforms were not valuable, while 28% said they were slightly valuable, 25% said they were somewhat valuable and 24% said they were very valuable.

If they were to increase their investment, 53% of respondents said they would require better insight into campaign success and ROI, while 47% said they’d need more data for campaign targeting and personalization and 33% said they’d need a lower barrier to entry.

Most of the respondents want to maintain control of content created for voice platform, with 40% saying it should be created in-house and 28% saying it should be developed by a creative agency.