To help businesses really understand their customer journey, whether that be online or offline, the AIDA model can be applied. This traditional marketing model has been adapted across the past three centuries can be applied to help understand and guide future digital marketing strategies.
What is the AIDA Model?
The AIDA model, also known as the conversion funnel, is the process we use to slowly nurture prospective customers through every single touchpoint throughout their customer journey, with the intention of eventually converting.
It’s worth noting that each conversion funnel is likely to differ in terms of their objectives, whether they’re B2B, B2C and industry. The principle of the AIDA model remains the same and the funnel can be adapted to every single business model.
What Does AIDA Stand For?
Awareness → Creating brand awareness and gaining attention from potential customers.
Interest → Once attention is gained, sustaining that interest of your product or service by creating arousal. For example, detailing information about the product of interest.
Desire → Once the interest is aroused, at this point you want to persuade the customer as to why they should purchase your product or service. This can be done by outlining the benefits of the product to address the emotions of your target customer.
Action → As soon as the desire has been invoked, you want the customer to convert. This can be achieved by creating a seamless purchasing process, such as an online shopping cart, with no distractions.
The AIDA framework helps us to identify different cognitive stages that an individual goes through during their purchasing process for a product or service. As mentioned earlier, this traditional marketing model has been used for offline strategies, such as; billboards, print, flyering and coupons.
However, the flexibility of this conversion theory allows us to apply to our digital marketing strategies. We can use it to help distinguish users (current and potential) and encourage traffic to be driven.
How To Apply AIDA To Digital Marketing?
Whether you’re carrying out search engine optimisation, paid media marketing or digital PR activities, the AIDA model can be used to speak to your designated audience at different touchpoints across their customer journey and interaction with your brand online.
For search engine optimisation strategies, we like to utilise the conversion funnel when creating content across the site. When users are at the top of the funnel, the awareness and informational stage, they are most likely not sure what product or service they’re really looking for. They are simply browsing and gathering more information before they make an informed purchase.
But, how can we act on this with content? During these early stages, these potential customers are asking many questions in search engines. By analysing and creating content around your specific longer-tailed product or service queries, this is likely to help to funnel these customers down the AIDA marketing model, or if not, increase brand awareness for future purchases. We have seen question-based queries on the rise with the mass adoption of smart speakers and voice search.
For example, if you’re marketing a car dealership and looking to target young drivers to purchase their first car, you want to be visible in the search engine results page (SERPs) for question-based queries, such as “what is the safest car for a first-time driver?” or “what are the best cars for families in 2020?”.
As customers move down the funnel, they become more valuable as they are less likely to bounce and might consider purchasing. At this point, you’re wanting to convince the user to buy through your content. This can be delivered by adding on-site data to entice the user and distinguish you from your competitors.
On-site examples of this can include, adding a trusted review aggregator, pulling together case-studies, testimonials of previous customers and including a FAQ section for further questions they may not have thought of to help make their decision to purchase on-site.
Paid Media
When carrying out paid marketing activities, such as search ads, paid social or Google shopping, a whole host of data around audiences already exists from paid search to help target and convert prospects more effectively. These audience data sets can be strategically used to understand where the user is currently on their purchase journey and bid accordingly.
When users are at the top of the AIDA model, you want to create more brand awareness campaigns to help the user to discover more about the brand. At this point, the ads are not brand heavy as such, but visually appealing to help increase their reach. When users are in the middle of the funnel, around the informational or desired stage, this is where you want to carry out campaigns that are going to engage your target audience and drive traffic to the site. These could include retargeting ads of products or services that a user had been looking at previously.
When you’re targeting users who are at the bottom of the funnel and ready to convert, here is where you want to focus on your USPs and the conversion element of your adverts. Here you want to direct the user who clicks on your ads to the most relevant page. For example, for a lead-generating website towards the contact or quote form and for an e-commerce site, the exact product page where the user can convert easily from with a discount code.
PPC Executive, Charlie Byrne, explains the conversion funnel process in relation to social media marketing in-depth here.
Digital PR
Within traditional PR campaigns, the AIDA model is often used to support the full user journey. But this is much more difficult to measure. With the evolution of Digital PR, we can again adapt this model to accurately measure the effectiveness of campaigns, its impact on SEO goals and overview revenue generated from multi-channels.
Usually, Digital PR campaigns focus on the top-of-the-funnel activity, boosts brand awareness and stimulates users to pass through the funnel with the assistance of completing channels. In order to create a Digital PR campaign to help deliver higher return-on-investment (ROI), it’s important to truly understand what the end-user looks like for the brand. This will also benefit to deliver online campaigns that target the end-users motivations and challenges. If you’d like to find out more about tangible tips and advice for your digital PR campaign, view Laura Hampton’s webinar here.
Multi-Channel Strategies
Not only can the AIDA model be used to individual marketing disciplines, but it can also be used across a range of different channels, helping to maximise the ROI from your digital marketing efforts. This also ensures that users are nurtured at every single touch point with your brand and ultimately helps to convert.
As an integrated digital marketing agency, we work in a collaborative manner to push our digital efforts to work harder. If you’d like to hear more about how we can create an integrated marketing campaign, get in touch with our team.