If we’ve seen it once, we’ve seen it a million times. A promising, brand-new communications campaign is born in a conference room, the media budget is allocated, and it’s quickly rolled out. Then…crickets, leaving marketers to figure out what went wrong. Even the most creative and powerful campaign ideas can fall flat if they aren’t executed or supported properly.
Traditional creative briefs are often too long and lack clarity, and time pressures mean that this critical step is often skipped entirely. As most marketers have learned at one point or another, the fundamentals of marketing success are lost when we move too fast. This means a model needs to be simple, repeatable, and scalable.
We’ve found that it comes down to outsmarting — not outspending — the competition.
RocketSauce Media Labs uses a proven planning strategy that leverages available data to develop a unique view of how an audience ecosystem works. We call it the ABCDE model of marketing, and it works by helping you build and shape the audience that is most favorable to the future of your brand. This model, co-created by The Next Practice Group Chair Bob Pearson, is based on decades of experience helping non-marketers apply the art and science of persuasive communication. Following this process step-by-step is the key to market alignment.
- Audience
- Behavioral Objectives
- Content
- Design/Delivery
- Evaluation
The world’s top performing companies understand the importance of this model, and we can help your brand leverage this model, too.
RocketSauce Media Labs adds another ingredient to the mix, and that’s the “+Technology” you need to create a great customer journey and experience that builds on your marketing intelligence. Nothing negatively impacts a paid media campaign’s performance faster than a poor experience on a website or the many touchpoints a user encounters once they click an ad or search for your brand after seeing an ad or video. Your technology is an integral part of your brand.
Audience
When it comes to Audience, it’s not just about who you want to reach, but also the insights you need to pay attention to in order to make the message relevant and meaningful. Once you’ve defined your audience, you need to understand what habits, beliefs, practices, or attitudes are essential to communication success. We’ve seen many brands have a disconnect with who their audience really is vs. what their content is projecting. These insights help optimize your audience by identifying strategic targets and prime prospects.
1:9:90 Influencer Model
Pro Tip: Challenge your own beliefs and use data and analytics to dig into your customer’s behaviors and understand the landscape by listening to consumers, competitors, and influencers in your space.
Recommendation: Leverage Ringer Science’s proprietary Audience Architecture tool, Architecture Audit, to map out all these important connections and add the right ingredients to your RocketSauce Media Labs paid media plans.
Behavioral Objectives
Whether you’re creating a commercial or a social media post, it’s essential that you clearly state the specific Behavioral Objectives you want from your audience. In simple terms, you want them to stop, think, and act. It starts with clearly articulating the specific action you want the audience to take, whether that’s visiting your website for more information, signing up for a free trial, or contacting your sales team. And it’s not just about where you want to lead them, but what you want them to do. Behavior and content must go hand-in-hand.
Pro Tip: Marketing is like a courtship. Make sure to develop a full-funnel customer journey and corresponding assets for each stage of the journey. We all tend to want to skip to the bottom for the leads or sales, but if you’re audience doesn’t know who you are, why would they buy from you?
Dollar Shave Club is a great example of executing the ABCDE model. Note: They executed across the marketing funnel, not just driving conversion ads.
Content
Content is how you’ll persuade your audience. There are three key elements to the Content of your campaign:
- Benefits are functional – like whiter teeth, and emotional – white teeth make me confident in my smile.
- Reasons to Believe (RTB) provide meaningful information that helps convince the target audience to believe the promise or benefit (like an endorsement or specific product attributes like more blades on a razor).
- 3) Tone & Character are the personality, attitude, or look of the message. It’s important think about all three elements as you develop content, and to inform your content with audience insights.
Design/Delivery
When it comes to Design/Delivery, what are the best vehicles and media given the intended audience, behavioral objectives, and message? What additional events or platforms can be utilized to deliver the messages? These questions are easier to answer once you’ve considered A, B, and C.
Pro Tip: RocketSauce Media Labs uses a Paid Media Framework to map each phase of the customer journey to specific objectives, channel mix, and KPIs. Our Paid Media Audits will help uncover gaps and build a more robust and agile media plan for you. Learn more about our valuable paid media audits.
RocketSauce Paid Media Audit – Example Marketing Funnel Gap Analysis
Evaluation
And finally, Evaluation. How will you measure and evaluate success? And how will you continuously improve? For RocketSauce Media Labs, evaluation is an ongoing process of analysis and continuous improvement. Our reporting goes beyond dashboards to uncover insights that can be used to make valuable adjustments to the strategy and optimize the ABCD model.
Pro Tip: Go beyond paid media reporting by looking holistically at all channels with our proprietary PESO Integrated reporting.
When you use the ABCDE model, your campaign will be much more persuasive because you will build and shape the audience architecture that’s right for your brand. At RocketSauce Media Labs, we help you focus on what the audience finds resonating, deep dive to see what influences your audience most, clearly call out what content is most important, and understand which media channels are contributing to your business goals.
+Technology
You’ve followed every step, found your audience, built the right media mix, and have an amazing creative story to take your customers on the journey, so you’re all set, right? Not so fast. If your website, ecommerce, email platforms, and CRM are disjointed, not talking to each other, or not properly tagged, your campaign likely won’t generate the results you hoped for.
It’s critical to invest in your infrastructure. It’s equally important to align your tech stack to meet the demands of your customer journey, whether you are Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) or a B2B brand.
Recommendation: Reach out to our partners at Victory CTO for website and technology audits and Brain Trust Partners for help mapping your customer journey. Working together, we can develop the right combination of technology, data, and customer journeys to effectively activate your ABCDE campaigns.
How can you use the ABCDE + Technology model to launch a successful campaign? Contact RocketSauce Media Labs to learn more about how we can help you solve your organization’s marketing needs. Get started today.
