AMO a three-letter word that means love and a single framework to think about how to engage your customers. Why is this important? Because your customers are not interested in what you sell, they are more interested on how you made them feel.
Yes, you read correctly – how your product or service make them feel. People buy products or services to help them get something done. For instance, a smart phone helps to do several things, contact people via voice, email, video, social media, do research, play games, watch videos, and/or take notes, etc. These are the functions the smart phone provides and helps to get a job done.
If you dig deeper, what emotions these functions provide to you? Do you feel more connected, smarter, more productive, belonging to the creative tribe (in the case of iPhones), on the cutting edge, more successful, or a better parent, son, daughter, friend, etc? These unspoken feelings are the benefits why people buy products or services.
Every decision is emotional. In his book, Descartes Error, Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, argues that emotion is a necessary ingredient to almost all decisions.”These emotions create preferences which lead to our decision.
If you still in doubt, think about water bottle. Water is a commodity that once was free, now ranges in price from $1.25 to $3.00. Have you asked yourself why? Water is water, right? However, people self-identify with a benefit that helps them feel better about themselves. They might justify rationally, but made the decision emotionally. Thus, the diversification of water bottle options.
Emotion, the benefit of how your product or services makes a prospect feel is important for engagement.
With this in mind, the AMO framework can help you think how to win hearts and minds of your customers in any initiative. By the way, an initiative is not confined to marketing communication, it could be service improvements, product developments, internal communications, etc.
AMO: Audience, Message, and Outcome
Audience: When thinking about your customers, think about them as your audience. Imagine you are a movie director producing a story about your product or service, where your product or service helps the hero (your customer) conquer its challenge. How does your offer help him/her overcome the challenge? How will it make him/her feel? What one key benefit does he/her gets from using what you offer? In other words, your value proposition.
Message: Based on the key benefit and emotions that your offer brings about, you can start developing a message that resonates with your audience. Messages encompass visual (video, photos, graphics, etc) and words. To keep it simple, let’s focus on word message. The message can be a one sentence tag line that helps you position your product or services in the minds your customers and/or a guideline on how to communicate with your customers.
Outcome: At the start of any initiative don’t forget to delineate what outcome you want to accomplish. Attract, convert, or delight your customers. Having an agreement on the outcome upfront, will help guide the development of a strategy and message to accomplish your goals.
The beauty of this three-letter word is that it helps narrow down where you should be focusing your strategy and marketing efforts to give you shot at achieving a meaningful customer engagement.