AMCAF stands for Audience, Message, Channel, Asset, and Follow-up. If your marketing campaign is failing, at least one of these is broken.
Read on and get your campaigns back on track!
First things first. This article is about how to market your company’s products and services more effectively. I’m glad you’re here, but if you’re not crystal clear on the difference between marketing and sales, I think you’ll get more out of this article if you watch this YouTube video first, then come back and finish reading this article.
If you’re short on time, at least watch the section of the video called “Marketing – AMCAF” and the section right after it, “Marketing vs Sales – Value First!” Together they’re about 3 minutes long and should give you all the background you need to keep reading.
Zero-Point Selling Crash Course
Zero-Point Selling is Rethink Revenue’s system for guiding a company to setting a new sales record. We talk about it all over this site and all over YouTube, but here are the highlights of ZPS relevant to AMCAF:
This whole concept is illustrated in our Customer Journey Framework (pictured below) and KITE model, which we’ll talk more about later in separate articles. For now just know that Marketing is only one piece to the Zero Point Selling puzzle.
Without further ado, let’s jump into AMCAF – Audience, Message, Channel, Asset, Follow-up.
This is where it all begins. As I said before, if you can help your customer solve their problems or achieve their dreams, you win.
But how do you know whose problems to solve or whose dreams to chase?
Most companies either a) have a product/service they’re trying to sell more of but don’t know who to sell to, or b) have a target market they want to sell to but don’t know what products and services to offer to that market.
We help people and organizations in the first category – people who know what they’re trying to sell more of, but aren’t sure how to do it.
As I said before, in the Zero-Point Selling model, we first build a list of Targets then help our clients go develop relationships with them. The natural question of course:
How do I build a list of Targets?
We strongly recommend you consider your three favorite customers (who bought the offering you’re trying to market for). Not your three biggest customers or your three oldest customers, but the people you actually like working with the most.
Why do you like working with them so much? Is it because they have interesting challenges for you to solve? Are they in a particular industry you enjoy supporting? Does the company have a culture or values you identify with? Do you share the same sense of humor with them?
Once you nail this down, start building a list of more people like those three. You can build a list yourself or you can buy a list, but you have to have a clear picture in your head of what your “Perfect Prospect” looks like before you go forward.
“Uhhh I’m stuck already”
No problem!
When our clients have a hard time defining their target Audience, we go through the Perfect Prospect Exercise with them.
Basically, we ask who their three favorite customers are and what they’re like, then we go find them a bunch more people who look just like the first three.
That “look-alike” audience goes into the client’s CRM and then they can start marketing to their new Targets!
We've opened up our Perfect Prospect to everyone! Just click the button below, fill out the form, and we'll build a custom Audience just for you!
Build Me An AudienceOne final note on audiences – if your company has multiple products or services, we strongly recommend you design your first marketing campaign to boost your top-selling product or service.
Why?
Because we want you to see FAST results and we want you to see OBVIOUS results. If you see your lead count go from 10 to 15 a month after you start your marketing campaign, that’s a pretty obvious increase.
If your lead count goes from 1 to 2, sure that’s a 100% increase but that’s still not a very significant increase in most industries.
Picture yourself at a networking event. When you meet someone new, what are the first words out of your mouth?
Option one is the obvious answer here. It’s easy to fall into “sales mode” when you’re working on a marketing campaign, but people REALLY don’t like being sold to and most people can smell a sales pitch coming from a mile away.
People don’t like being marketed to either. In fact, we’re so used to being marketed to these days, that we pretty much automatically tune out most marketing message when we see or hear them.
For that reason, you have to work hard to stand out. How do you stand out though? Easy. Focus on providing value to your audience without any kind of bait and switch or underhanded sales pitch and eventually they will see that you’re one of the “good guys.”
In order to craft a marketing message that is genuine, conveys value, and actually resonates with people, we use the “Hook, Story, Offer” method.
☝️ Remember when you're writing your marketing campaigns, you're writing to real people with real feelings!
Rethink Revenue Tweet
Hook, Story, Offer is a great way to increase marketing engagement. We didn’t invent it and while you can see Mark’s full explanation of Hook, Story, Offer here, here’s what it boils down to:
“But Phil! How can we help our audience if we don’t sell them anything?”
Just because you’re ready to sell, doesn’t mean your audience is ready to buy! You’ve got to warm them up first. Give people a reason to like and trust your brand.
For now just focus on offering value in the form of Assets and I’ll describe below how you get “paid” for it.
This is the last thing to nail down in your Message. Your Offer has to have a strong Call To Action (CTA).
Ask yourself: “What is the desired outcome of this marketing campaign?”
Newsletter sign-ups? Whitepaper downloads? Booked meetings?
Whatever you’re trying to get from this campaign, you need to make that goal CRYSTAL CLEAR in your Offer. Here are some example CTAs:
Try to make sure each marketing message has only ONE CTA. Don’t include other links or offers in your message or people might get distracted from completing the one desired action. A landing page on your website should be very simple and it should drive users towards just one clear action!
There are many ways to market your products and services these days – digitally through Facebook, Google or LinkedIn ads; in-person through door-knocking, attending networking events or tradeshows; remotely through letters and postcards, phone calls, email, smoke signals, trade journals, TV, radio and more. The list goes on and these are ALL valid marketing channels.
The challenge is to choose the right Channel for your audience. Facebook’s two billion users and strong ad targeting are definitely alluring, but I know sales professionals still have great success with cold calling and cold e-mailing also. Choosing the right channel all goes back to knowing your Audience! Find where they congregate and advertise there.
Just keep in mind where people are in their buyer’s journey (perception of your company) when you choose your Channel. Nobody likes getting unsolicited telemarketing calls or spammy junk email. A better idea would be to try reaching out to someone on LinkedIn before calling or e-mailing. Perhaps you could send them some marketing collateral to educate them on your company and help them see your value. Be smart and remember you are trying to build a relationship with a human being. Treat them like one!
Once the campaign is running, you need to follow up. What’s this follow-up look like?
In a perfect world, your CRM includes marketing automation so it’s doing your follow-up for you automatically – it “knows” who’s opening your emails and who isn’t, who’s clicking on links and who isn’t, etc.
If you’re just building your very first funnel, you’ll probably be following up manually via phone or email, which is fine. Everyone has to start somewhere and we’re glad you’re here!
If your marketing worked, congratulations! As many will tell you, this is quite an accomplishment but the work is only beginning.
Generally our clients are marketing to people who have never heard of their companies before. Getting the first campaign running – to drive newsletter subscriptions for example – is just the first step.
Now it’s time to build another campaign that will continue to nurture the relationships you began in your previous campaign. Continue to establish your brand, build trust, and trade value for value so you can get to know your audience(s) even better.
The beauty of AMCAF is that it can always be improved so if your funnels are all done, you can always go back and test new ideas to make them more effective, more automated, or less expensive!
If you’re still getting no results from your Marketing campaign, then investigate any available analytics. Most digital marketing platforms (Facebook, Google, Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc) have detailed analytics to find out what’s working and what’s not.
If you’re using a CRM like Hubspot to drive your marketing efforts, then you should be able to diagnose most of your funnel in one place – from email open and click rates to ad performance, landing page performance and more.
If all else fails and you’re still stuck, feel free to contact us. We love building funnels and we’d be happy to help you get yours all tuned up.
This is such a good article. I still refer back to it today, three years after it was originally written. Steve is a genius!!!