Are you spending a large percentage of your marketing budget on digital advertising but you just aren’t generating the ROI and deals your organization needs? For many organizations with this challenge, the answer is simply that they aren’t following a few very important steps. These are the steps that make all the difference and that many advertisers trip themselves up on. When processes are not adhered to by advertisers — which is, unfortunately, very common — faulty ad campaigns ensue and hurt the bottom line.

Why Following a Process is So Important

Best practices dictate that you need processes in order to get results. That’s why laying out, following and sticking with all of your processes is so important — processes reliably net results every time. 

Before you even begin the planning of your digital advertising campaign, three crucial process steps need to be taken:

Get Inside the Heads of Your Audience

You need to know who you are advertising to. By researching who they are, you’ll have a better understanding of how to appeal to their needs.

Create a Campaign Brief

Before you create a single ad, you must fill out a campaign brief. This is where the “process” begins. Here, you’ll lay out the campaign summary, goals and objectives, targeting and messaging and personas of your buyers. You’ll also want to define the pain points you’re solving for your customers, your key messaging, timelines, marketing channels you’ll use and marketing assets you plan to leverage.

Build an AMO Framework

AMO, which is short for “Audience, Messaging, Offer Framework,” is the crux of following the right process. Yes, of course, there are already too many acronyms in the marketing space, but this one is especially important — a secret key code, if you will. It’s important because if you’re not aligning your advertising into an AMO framework, you are most certainly missing leads and wasting your money. 

It’s critical that you know who your Audience is, what the Messaging is and what your Offer is that compels them to want to buy your services or goods.

AMO: Audience

Understand your buyer personas. Knowing who they are will inform how you will frame your approach to target them effectively. Here’s a great HubSpot article that will show you how to create detailed buyer personas. You also need to complete a digitalization of your audience, meaning, you need to know where they live and what they do. For example, on LinkedIn ads, you can target by job title, organization, interest groups, seniority and even more parameters. Hyperfocusing on these details helps you hit the right targets.

AMO: Messaging

What are the pain points of your buyer personas? How are you addressing them with your product or solution? These are the questions you need to ask when assembling your messaging. You always want to speak to the pain points of your buyer personas and highlight the value proposition instead of listing out a litany of features. In other words, you need to place an emphasis on answering the age-old question of a prospect: “What’s in it for me?”

You need to also remember, you’re not just speaking to the buyer, but you have to align with the best practices of the platform you are using. You have to consider your medium. For example, if you’re advertising on Facebook, you can be a little more playful with your tone; if you’re advertising on Twitter Ads, brevity with the right actionable, persuasive language is key; if you’re advertising on Google Ads, you have to make sure your ad copy is aligned with the keyword targets in order to maximize Quality Scores. 

AMO: Offer 

The offer is the action you want your prospect to take and what you are offering in return. This offer framework should be very accessible, visible and clear. Don’t make prospects click through too many hoops. A good offer will have a lead-up that will speak to their pain points or their goals. You have to provide value before asking for anything in return. The offer should be time-sensitive, unique and aligned with the buyer personas and what they want.

When these three components of A, M and O align,  you can confidently begin your digital advertising because you now have the right audience that cares about your product, and you have something that can help them and something they care about. These are the types of audiences you can actually convert to customers.

A Sum Much Greater Than Its Parts

So, why are the sum of AMO’s parts working in sync perfectly so important? Well, why are the little gears behind a watch face important? It’s the little gears behind the watch face that keep in perfect alignment and tell you the time. Without them working behind the scenes, carefully constructed with a plan before assembly, you would have no idea what time it was. When the second hand doesn’t tick because some new guy at the watch factory fails to follow the proper assembly protocol exactly when installing the gears, that watch will fail and be tossed in the trash as a waste of money. The same can be said for a digital advertising campaign that doesn’t follow the proper steps. When all of the gears of a campaign are working perfectly in sync, your digital advertising generates quality leads, which you can then convert to customers and clients.

All too often, digital advertisers target the right audience and use the right messaging but don’t follow through with the right offer. They have the A and the M but their O is maligned. Establishing a smart process and seeing the steps through gives your advertising efforts the upper hand; having an experienced team to show you the way they make the gears turn properly behind the scenes ensures results and ROI.

See how GMG takes an informed and pragmatic approach to digital advertising and how our expert processes can deliver measurable results for your business. Schedule a consultation today!