Bot-to-bot marketing is coming soon. Are you ready?

Amazon Echo, housing the Alexa intelligent agent

In the past year or so, a new marketing channel has emerged around bots and intelligent agents.

This includes voice-based intelligent agents like Google Home’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, and chatbots that interact largely through text conversations. Marketers are beginning to plan their conversational strategies and logic for this channel.

But another channel — maybe it should be considered a sub-channel — is about to emerge. It’s when the bot or agent, fulfilling the needs of the human user, is interacting with another bot or agent instead of searching the web, or a knowledge base, or a profile.

Just when you thought digital marketing strategy had reached its stasis, we may be in for another major reinvention.

In a few years, ArcTouch Chief Experience Officer and founder Adam Fingerman predicted, “most interaction will be conversational.” His company develops apps — and now bots — and he’s conducting a session on “Bot-to-Bot Marketing” at our MarTech Conference in May.

In a common scenario today, you might ask Google Home to find a hotel room under $450 in Chicago near the Loop.

Google Home searches the web, possibly including reviews on TripAdvisor.

To support this user-to-agent/bot interaction, Fingerman told me, “marketers will have to spend more time on reputation management” to ensure that what Google finds is generally good. Hopefully, that will translate into being one of the top results, since a voice-based agent is likely to return only a few.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.