The AIDA model is one of the most common and widely used marketing models.
AIDA is an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is a model that illustrates what a customer goes through in the process of purchasing a product or subscribing to a service.
Customer journey the sum of all the steps that a customer goes through in the process of buying a product or service & AIDA model illustrates the customer journey in a beautiful manner.
If you are in sales, marketing, advertising, or digital marketing then you must know about this model. Understanding the AIDA model will help you develop better sales & marketing funnel.
The AIDA model was developed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis (American Businessman) in the year 1898. This indicates how old is AIDA.
In this age of digital, people are talking about buzzwords like Digital Marketing, AI/ML-based marketing, Influencer Marketing, Marketing Automation, etc. You might learn all the modern age tools or techniques.
But your learning is incomplete without the knowledge of the marketing concepts, models and techniques that form the basis of modern age marketing.
Learning digital marketing without learning the basic marketing concepts is like building a skyscraper without a strong foundation.
I believe that AIDA, STDP, 4 Ps of Marketing, Ansoff Matrix, GE Matrix, BCG Matrix, etc. are the few most basic marketing concepts that must be known by every aspiring digital marketer too.
Understanding these concepts even theoretically will widen your thought-process & help you become a better digital marketing professional, a better sales-person or a better marketer.
Let us understand AIDA model in detail.
Understanding the stages in AIDA model
AIDA is not a rocket-science.
We all know about it. Yes, you read it right.
We all know about AIDA. We all have been through it & witnessed it very closely. It’s all around us. How?
Let’s see it!!!
Attention Stage
Imagine yourself in the market. There are a lot of shops around you. You are walking & all of a sudden, you see some very good t-shirts on display.
The shop’s display is so creative that it grabbed your attention.
This is the Attention stage of AIDA model. It is also known as Awareness stage.
This is the stage where brands create awareness about their products/services & grabs the attention of the audience.
Advertising & messaging plays a crucial role in this stage.
Interest Stage
After you found those beautiful t-shirts hanging on the display, would you directly move towards the shop?
You would move only if they appeal you to an extent. Factors like a sign-board 50% Off or Buy 3 get 1 free, brand names, your favorite color t-shirt in a particular design, etc. will drive the interest further.
This is the Interest Stage.
A lot of people who would be out in the market for buying t-shirts would pass by this shop. They would see the display too. By seeing the display, they would become aware of the fact that this particular shop sells t-shirts.
But not all of them will walk towards the shop.
The process of making them walk towards the shop falls in this stage.
Interest stage aims to keep the audience engaged & curious about the product or service.
Desire Stage
You walked in the shop & saw a t-shirt in your favorite color. The brand is good. The design is good. The t-shirt is available in your size too.
Now, slowly you will develop a desire to purchase it. And the factors like color, quality, fitness, etc. will fuel your desire.
How effectively the salesperson in the shop attends to you & explains to you about the t-shirt will play a vital role in leveraging your desire.
The desire stage is very important in the AIDA model as the customer is just a step away from the purchase. The audience already knows about you & is interested in your product/service.
So, now this is the stage to take them towards the purchase, not by pushing the product aggressively but by ensuring you communicate value to them & build trust.
Action Stage
As the name itself speaks, here the audience acts (Makes the purchase)
You would have loved the t-shirt, but if you don’t purchase it then the shopkeeper looses an audience that actually was at the final stage of making the purchase.
The shopkeepers might offer some discount or make you realize the fact that you need to make the purchase immediately. Driving a sense of urgency is needed in this stage.
The ultimate goal is REVENUE & the action stage brings in the revenue.
I hope the t-shirt shop example helped you understand the stages of the AIDA model in a better way. But this example was about a physical offline store.
How does AIDA works in the digital age?
It becomes quite essential to understand the fact that the same model works pretty well both in offline & online world.
AIDA model in the age of digital marketing
The customer journeys in the digital world are impacted a lot by the touchpoints in the digital world.
In this age of eCommerce, when customers have a lot of options, a lot of similar products, competitive pricing, etc., the customer experience plays a vital role in driving sales.
Let us try to understand how AIDA is mapped with each stage of the customer journey in this age of digital marketing.
Seeking “Attention” using digital marketing
The attention span of people is reducing day by day and it becomes very important for brands to create content that grab their attention in this digital age.
The digital world has several touchpoints and it becomes essential to understand which is the most used platform by your audience.
A few digital marketing techniques that are used to seek attention or make people aware are SEO, SEM, Social Media, Digital PR, etc.
Now let us understand how a few of these techniques actually work.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
You make a Google search “Best t-shirts for men”
What do you see? A lot of search results.
You usually click on the results displayed at the top of the search engine results page.
It is said that the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google. Why? Because no one goes there. So, if you have a business, won’t you like to get people to know about your business?
This can be done with the help of SEO. SEO helps you let people discover you. When you appear at the top of the search results, you grab their attention. And when you appear in the featured snippet, you get a lot of attention.
Paid Ads
SEO is organic & it takes a lot of time and efforts to rank higher on the search engines organically. What if you have just started your online business or website & want to quickly promote something?
Paid Ads comes to rescue.
When you search something on Google, you would see a lot of ads at the top and on the right-hand side of the search engine results page.
Brands utilize this technique to quickly promote themselves when they know that their competitors are already ranking organically and it is going to take them time to get on the top organically.
Now, this gives them place in the first page. An important point to consider over here is your ad quality should be good enough to appear again and again at the top.
This paid approach not only gives you a real estate at the first page of search results but it also implies you will most likely get more attention.
Imagine you searched “best hosting in India”
And you discovered a paid ad of some hosting provider that said “75% Off on WordPress Hosting | Black Friday Sale”
This will definitely grab your attention due to those catchy words.
You might have never heard of that hosting provider previously. But this ad made you aware about them.
In this manner, businesses use paid ads to grab attention & to make audience aware.
Social Media
Brands & individuals are using social media like never before.
It is much easier to tell stories and connect with people using social media platforms and businesses are doing it effectively.
Businesses connect with their audience and even nurture new audience using the power of social media. They share stories, behind the scenes, reply to fans, etc.
They leverage influencers to make people aware and grab their attention.
I guess you don’t need an example here. Just open any social media platform and you would discover a lot of brands creating awareness and grabbing attention over there.
Now you are aware about how the “A” of “AIDA” works in this digital age.
Let us move ahead to “I” of the AIDA model.
Developing “Interest” in the digital age
Once people are aware about the brand, it’s important to make them interested.
Remember the t-shirt shop example that I gave above?
The shop grabbed attention. The person became aware about the shop. Now, the display of the shop should be so nice that it develops interest in the person’s mind.
Similarly, in the digital age too, a person might become aware about your brand with the help of SEO, SEM, Social Media, etc.
But what next?
Making them aware/Grabbing their attention is the first step. Making them more curious and interested about you is another important step.
You will lose the audience if you don’t develop the “interest” in them.
We discussed about ads in the awareness stage. There would be multiple ads on the first page. Why will they click on your ad?
They would click if it’s “INTERESTING”
You need to be authentic, relevant and helpful. Develop trust in this stage. This can be done by sharing useful information, answering their questions & showcasing how your product/service can help them.
Digital Marketing tools such as e-books, webinars, how-to tutorials, blog posts, etc. can be used in this stage.
But what is the key ingredient that you need in this stage?
It is “Engaging Content”
An effective content marketing strategy is needed in order to showcase expertise and intrigue the audience.
Fueling “Desire” using the power of digital
Having made them interested in you, you have not yet closed the deal.
They came to know about you. They became interested in you. They can still go away and buy from your competitor.
The content must be so effective that their interest gets converted into desire.
Digital marketing techniques like remarketing, email marketing, personalized push notifications, etc. are used widely in this stage.
Let us understand how.
You made a Google search for some product. Discovered the product in the search results. It grabbed your attention. Clicked on it and discovered more about it. It interested you. But you left the website without making the purchase.
After some time, you opened your social media & guess what, you see an appealing Ad of the same product. Now, this is driving desire using remarketing.
Another example can be you visited some blog. Found a useful article. When you were at the end of the article, you get a popup to subscribe. You feel that you must subscribe as the content is really good. And then you start getting emails from this brand. The emails are so effective that you read them & visit the blog, again and again, using the CTA in the email.
This is another classic scenario of driving desire using effective email marketing.
Likewise marketing automation, free e-books, webinars, etc. can be used to make the audience move from the interest stage to the desire stage.
Remember the fact that you have worked hard enough to make them aware & interested. A little more effort in the right direction can make them desire & trust me when someone desires for your product, it becomes easier for you to sell.
And that takes us to the next stage of AIDA.
“Action” in the age of digital marketing
The entire efforts that we make in this AIDA model is for this “A” known as Action.
Though the audience already acted 3 times in the journey already knowingly or unknowingly. First time when they discovered about you. Second time when they became interested in your products/services. Third time is when they started desiring for your products/services.
This transition was possible only because of they acting & your effective strategy that made them act.
But the ultimate goal is revenue & here we will talk about the ultimate goal.
Now, in the digital age the ultimate goal can be making them subscribe to your YouTube Channel or making them click on some affiliate link.
Brands must achieve that goal in this stage.
In the example of offline world, we had the salesman to sell the product. There is a different level of human touch and the involvement is quite high.
In digital world, the involvement is lesser and there are a lot of distractions. The hero of this stage in digital marketing is a highly effective CTA (Call-To-Action)
I told you about a blog on which you subscribed for newsletter in the previous stage. You are getting the newsletter, you are interested in the product or service & you also desire to purchase it.
But you will not purchase unless something triggers you to click on the “Buy Now” button. The purpose of the action stage is to make you click on the button and complete the purchase.
Still unclear how this works?
Let us understand it with a scenario. You discovered about a very good digital marketing course on Udemy. You followed the instructor, subscribed to his blog and YouTube & whenever you think about enrolling for a digital marketing course, you think about this course.
You have not yet purchased the course yet. The reason can be high price or maybe you have also one more similar course in your mind or anything.
One day, you get an email from the instructor that it’s his birthday and he is running a 24 hour discount offer on that day. The course will be available at 50% of it’s cost if you make the purchase within 24 hours. As you are making the purchase on his birthday, he would also give you other content like his e-book, strategy templates & a 30 minute 1-to-1 consulting for FREE.
Now that sounds a great combo. Right?
You’re definitely going to click on the purchase now button.
But wait? You also had other course that you were exploring. You won’t go ahead with the similar other course with the similar content because here you would get a lot of value.
Maybe, the content of the other course would be in actual 2x times better than this one.
But human psychology says that you are going to purchase this one because you see a lot of VALUE over here.
That’s the point.
A lot of value makes the audience act.
If you would have received a simple email that describes the course content and have a “Buy Now” button, you would have probably unsubscribed or marked it as a Spam after you repeatedly received it a couple of times.
The personalized message & the offer made you act.
I guess now you have imagined this scenario and have a clear understanding of the Action stage of the AIDA model.
In this way, AIDA works along with digital marketing.
Till now, we have seen how AIDA works in traditional marketplace and in digital world.
I actually gave you some real world scenarios to help you navigate through the funnel. Yes, funnel is a word that is used quite often by sales and marketing people.
That’s not a rocket science again. You actually read about funnel above. But I didn’t use the terminology “funnel” over there to not make it complex and confusing for you.
Now that you have a clear understanding of what AIDA is, how it works in offline and online world, let us map AIDA to a typical sales funnel.
The AIDA model and the sales funnel
The sales funnel is your customer journey. I already mentioned the stages that a customer goes through while purchasing.
Technically, those stages are a part of this funnel and we can map AIDA to sales funnel.
A lead is at the top of the funnel and a hot prospect is at the bottom of the funnel.
They discover you. That’s the Attention or Awareness Stage. You did a keyword research using Google Keyword Planner and found that 10K people search for a particular keyword related to your business. Also, you are ranking on page 1 for that keyword.
Are those 10K people your leads or prospects?
They are your leads as they haven’t shown any interest. They are unknown.
From those 10K leads, 1K clicked on your website. These 1K people actually got interested & clicked on your search result. They entered in the Interest stage of the AIDA model and they are your cold prospects.
Going further, out of those 1K cold prospects, 500 subscribed to your email newsletter and are actively engaged with you. These 500 are now your warm prospects & in the desire stage. Why desire stage? As they subscribed for the newsletter, they want to stay engaged and updated about your offerings.
Not all 500 people would be opening all the emails that you sent. A few of them would drop off after a few days while a few will become passive reciepients.
But let’s assume that 100 of them are actually opening most of your emails, clicking on the CTAs, participating in the contests/surveys, visiting the product page and spending some time there. These are the hot prospects and they are in the action stage.
And you cannot afford to lose them when they are ready to act!
In this way, we actually mapped the AIDA with a typical sales funnel.
Attention/Awareness Stage – Leads
Interest Stage – Cold Prospects
Desire Stage – Warm Prospects
Action Stage – Hot Prospects
Now different people might have different theories about this. I just did a simple logical mapping.
I hope that now AIDA is pretty well clear for you.
Conclusion
That was quite a lot on AIDA. Thank you for being a patient reader and if you learned something new then try implementing it & practice. Let me know if you discover any other interesting things about the AIDA model.
Also if you want me to write on any such basic marketing or sales topic of your choice, let me know in the comments section. Alternatively, you can also drop a message to me on LinkedIn.