A.I.D.A is an acronym in the marketing world that refers to Attention (or Awareness) , Interest, Desire, and Action. Its the process of generating leads and converting them into clients or customers. So how can we apply this strategy in online marketing? What is the process by which you can bring attention to your potential leads and eventually turn them into long term clients?
Firstly, we have to address how to create attention. Attracting potential leads from the internet can be a difficult task. You will want to consider using SEO and Google Ads campaigns to ensure that your website is easy to find. Optimization methods are used to make your website easy to find in search queries such as Google or Bing. Remember, SEO is a very tricky, expert driven business involving optimizing for keywords and learning Google’s best practices. It’s generally recommended you seek professional expertise to get your listings to the top of search engines. Google Ads is another way to get yourself listed, these are campaigns where you bid for listings usually found to the right and at the top of Google searches.
The second step is creating interest. We all know the attention span of internet browsers and the inundation of advertisements that we all receive everyday. Attracting leads is one thing, but keeping their interests is something entirely different. Once you’ve landed them on your web page, the next step in A.I.D.A is creating interest. When thinking about branding your internet marketing campaign it’s important that your web pages are visually appealing and easy to use. If your web page isn’t yielding the results you’re looking for maybe it’s time to take a look at your branding. Your brand is vital to attracting interest and is essentially your first impression on browsers.
Working with qualified web designers and comparing pages with your competitors, allows you to gauge what’s out there and the budget needed to achieve a quality and easy to use design. How many times have you gone to a website that looks cluttered or outdated, causing you to instantly bounce from the page? Your visual aesthetics are crucial in establishing your brand and attracting interest.
The third step is desire, now that you have an engaged audience how can a desire to act to push your leads through the sales funnel? Achieving this task can be done
in a variety of ways, including creating quality content and using inbound marketing techniques. Provide your audience with engaging material such as blogs, eBooks, videos and quality social media campaigns to move these leads into conversions. Remember, it’s important to convey your expertise in this material and establish a trust level with your leads. Once you’ve established interest within your site you can begin to garner more quality leads as they will flock to your business for information within your industry.
The fourth and final step is action, bringing all your hard work to fruition and accomplishing a conversion. This can be done by demonstrating your results. What does your company provide the user? In essence a call to action is created by leads understanding your service will be monumentally beneficial to them. You need to answer the question every buyer asks themselves, “what’s in it for me?” Every industry is different, but you want to be transparent with your customers. Show them results! Testimonials, case studies, portfolios are great ways to convey value to your customer. An educated customer or client can know what to expect and will make your working relationship that much better.
Using A.I.D.A can help your internet marketing strategy to set goals and achieve success in a variety of different arenas. Remember, get yourself seen high in search engines, provide visually pleasing and easy to use interfaces. Educate your customers through blogs, eBooks and social media and demonstrate value in a call to action. Following these steps can provide you with winning marketing campaigns and utilize your web presence to the fullest.
Nice article! Personally I’ve always found the last step (action) to be the most difficult – it’s always hard to convince people to give up their money or time, no matter how interested they may be in the service you’re offering.
I feel like I need to print out that AIDA graphic and hang it over my desk as a daily reminder. This post is just inspirational and gives me the last ‘push’ I need to get this marketing thing going…
One of the most basic exercises I use to introduce people to the AIDA concept is to take a bunch of posters and get them to highlight where each part of AIDA would occur.
Where the Attention is drawn, where the interest is to the reader, where desire is and finally where the action is.
After about 5 or so posters the usually get it. AIDA is a great structure but there are other iterations as well such as the 6+1 method which is great as well:
http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/11/introducing-6-1-model-for-effective-copywriting/
Internet marketing seems really confusing at first. People everywhere all have different opinions about what works, and of course, that info stands in direct contrast with what the Guru’s are recommending. Confusion Central. It seems so easy when you spell it all out like that.