I’m finding AMP: Audience. Message. Platform. to be a great way to talk about marketing communication. To give you a concrete example, this email is going out to my email list (audience). I know that you’ve all opted in and are interested in learning about marketing in general, as well as about me and my offers. That means that my message can be more direct and more personal than it would be if I were invited to speak at an event where people had never met me before.Email is a good platform for this as it allows you to read it when it’s convenient for you and also allows for a slightly longer format than some other options (140 characters on Twitter anyone?)
Hopefully, you can see how all three are inter-related and that they need to ‘match’ up.
So back to audience. Who are your audiences?
Marketers ask this question a lot. Often times, we ask about the audience that buys your products or services, but that’s not the only audience that matters for most marketers. There are a few different ways to slice, dice and describe the audiences that will matter for your business.
We can think about them in terms of prospects vs. customers vs. potential partners vs. influencers. We could also talk about them as consumers vs. other businesses, and then who/what they are in terms of life cycle, interests, attitudes, behaviors, decision-makers, etc.
For choosing a platform, it’s useful to think about where they show up (in person and online) and in what context. So for example, I’m often asked about LinkedIn vs. Facebook for social media marketing. If you’re working with clients in the context of their personal life, Facebook is a better fit but if you’re working with them in the context of their professional life, LinkedIn is likely better.
So, who are your audiences? what message do you want to convey to each of them? and which platforms will work best for those combinations?