The AMA Strategy Workshop: What Is It and Why Does Your Business Need It?
It is not unusual for us to have clients that have many audiences that their website and marketing material needs to speak to. Over our 22+ years in business, we have learned that often there is a focus by our clients to craft messages that work for all of their audiences, but the problem is that often this approach leads to a message that doesn’t appeal to anyone.
At Media Genesis, we believe that the “one message for all audiences” approach is ineffective. Because of this, we have developed the AMA Strategy Workshop.
The AMA (Audience/Message/Action) Strategy Workshop is a process that will, first and foremost, give you an understanding of all of your audiences, as well as identify a hierarchy to these audiences. For example, it may be that your website needs to appeal to potential new hires so they need to be messaged to, but this audience is much less important than the consumer audience.
Over a long refining process, we have broken up the AMA Strategy Workshop method into three steps: Pre-Workshop Preparation, the Strategy Workshop, and the Findings Report.
The Pre-Workshop Preparation
Before the AMA Strategy Workshop, the team of experts at Media Genesis reviews and creates easy-to-digest presentations of the current situation with your website, including an examination of the website’s metrics and online presence. If some members of the team are unable to attend the AMA Strategy Workshop a form will be provided for their input as an offline method to capture their feedback.
Also during this period, we work with you to identify and invite a group of 2-20 people that represent a broad range of your business, although we find that 5-10 stakeholders leads to the best results.
The Strategy Workshop
On the day of the AMA Strategy Workshop, we gather everyone together and begin by reviewing the previously assembled presentations. Once that is completed, the Media Genesis team of 2-3 strategists begins by reviewing the concept of the Audience/Message/Action workshop. Here’s how that breaks down:
- Audiences – A website often serves content to a large variety of audiences. In doing so, it is hard to communicate one message effectively to all audiences. We believe that it is critical to identify all prospective audiences and define their relative needs for information, which in turn becomes critical knowledge that influences layout and relative importance of information.
- Messages – The more diverse the audience, the greater need for customized messages. By defining unique messages for each key audience, the website can be tailored to those audiences’ needs much more effectively than having a general message to all audiences. We seek for users to have 80 percent page content relevance after only one click, and we do this through the defining of the appropriate messages for each audience.
- Actions – The call-to-action is perhaps the most important aspect of a website, and on many sites, there aren’t clear calls-to-action for target audiences. The more specific the action for each audience is thought out, the more likely the users are to follow that step.
Once everyone is familiar with the concept, the Media Genesis team asks pointed questions and try to draw as much useful information out of your key team as possible. The workshop typically runs for 2-4 hours.
The Findings Report
After the Strategy Workshop, the team at Media Genesis leverages the input from the workshop with our knowledge and expertise and we create the AMA Findings Report.
This report captures the key data and output from the workshop, and acts also as a road map for all your marketing. It will rank and outline each audience that the new site or marketing campaign will need to appeal to. It will also have a listing of suggested messaging for each audience and what will appeal to them, along with the call to action that will appeal best to each of these audiences, providing you with a strong foundation. This deep audience analysis is a great reference point moving forward not just for a website, but also for your other marketing, research and messaging needs.
But along with those findings, the strategists at Media Genesis will present a game plan for your website and marketing plan. This will create a unified and targeted plan of action for a wide range of online and offline campaigns and initiatives.
Want to see some specific examples of an AMA in action? Check out a few of our recent projects that had an AMA session:
If you’re interested in conducting an AMA Strategy Workshop for your company, reach out to our team at inquiry@mediag.com or give us a call at 248-687-7888, our staff of strategists and marketing professionals can help!
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