One of my favorite Super Bowl ads was the Boston 2020 “smaht pahk” ad, which announced Hyundai’s self-parking feature.
Exaggerated Boston accents by Rachel Dratch and Chris Evans get you attention. John Krasinski confidently sees a very narrow parking space attracted.
If you’ve ever squeezed into a parallel parking space, jumping back and forth a few inches at a time, this ad probably awakened you to burn. desire for your own sake, girl.
When David “Big Papi” Ortiz slides out a nearby window and sees the sedan slide effortlessly between two poorly parked cars, you’re in. prevail and pull up the Hyundai website on your phone.
Table of Contents
History of AIDA Model
Attention, interest, desire, and action: The four components of the AIDA model form the backbone of many good marketing strategies.
This advertising formula was laid out by eventual Advertising Hall of Fame inductee Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, when the fastest car in the world, a non-self-parking Porsche, reached a breakneck speed of 39 miles per hour.
More than a century later, it’s still a powerful framework for writing marketing copy that engages and engages customers, generates leads, and closes deals.
Even in the age of artificial intelligence, using old-school marketing models can help shape your marketing copy.
AIDA model
The AIDA model describes four stages that consumers go through before making a purchase decision: Attention, interest, desire, and action. During these four stages, your content will attract attention to your brand, generate interest in your product or service, create desire, and spur action to try or buy.
What does “AIDA” mean?
The first “A” in “AIDA” stands for attention. “I” and “D” mean attracted and desireand the last “A” stands for prevail.
This four-stage model is based on hierarchy of effects theory, meaning that customers must go through each stage to complete the desired action.
Like a typical marketing funnel, each stage has fewer consumers than the previous one; unlike a marketing funnel, it’s more linear and doesn’t have much flexibility to accommodate different user journeys.
How to Apply the AIDA Model to Your Marketing
The AIDA model uses the same elements as a good storyteller that makes you feel better. So, even if you haven’t heard of the AIDA model, there’s a good chance you’ve used it in marketing materials without even realizing it.
By bringing a little structure to your instincts, you can create content and design your website with more control over your prospect’s path to a buying decision.
Here’s a guide to understanding and implementing each stage of the AIDA marketing model:
Attract Attention
What words will get your audience interested in your company’s services or products? In the “attention” stage of this marketing model, consumers ask, “What is that?”
Keep in mind that this step usually follows or overlaps with your efforts to increase brand awareness.
Pro tip: I like to start small by creating a list of words — use tools like ChatGPT and online dictionaries to help, but avoid words that aren’t already in your vocabulary, don’t come naturally to your marketing copy, or just don’t. speak to your target audience.
For this article, I asked HubGPT, HubSpot’s internal AI tool, to create a list of 20 words to use in marketing copy that will pique curiosity.
It produces words like “discovery” and “exclusive,” which are generally applicable, but also suggest “mystery” and “enigmatic” – none of which work unless the service involves a magician (and maybe not. then, but you know your audience best!).
Generate Interest
You’ve attracted attention – now you have to catch it.
Your audience wants to learn more about your brand, the benefits of your solution(s), and your potential fit for them. At this stage, the goal is to use persuasive and engaging content to make them think, “I like it.”
Pro tip: You can do this with a hook. What makes your product or service different? Avoid jargon or industry cliches with specifics. People remember stories more than facts and figures, so stories are an easy and effective way to capture curiosity and find resonance with your audience.
To generate interest in my new small business, a house cleaning service provided by a magician who destroys your house with the flick of a wand (if only!), I started with a list of words that piqued my curiosity.
“Discover the magic of a clean house” attracts the attention of people with messy houses, and “magic” suggests the service.
What We Are Like
Your audience’s affinity for your brand’s needs reaches a certain threshold. The more aligned you are with your needs and values, the more successful you will be.
The tagline of the 1440 newsletter, “All your news. No bias.” speak to audiences who are frustrated with opinion-based news sources.
A brief description shows the brand’s alignment with an audience that wants to expand their news diet (“We search 100+ sources”) but doesn’t have much time (“everything takes five minutes to read”).
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Cultivate desire
The goal of this stage is to turn “I like” into “I want to.”
You can do this in the same way as social media influencers: by building trust with your audience. You are more likely to want a product if you believe the influencer actually uses it and likes it.
Align with your own brand on your website, newsletters, downloadable offers, and social media, and keep providing content that’s engaging, accurate, and connects with your audience.
For my magical house cleaning service, I can build trust through empathetic content that doesn’t alienate my potential customers.
Download now: Free AIDA Model Templates
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The prospects you are most likely to cover are consumers who envision a future with you – they have enjoyed consuming your content and think your product or service will be even better.
Therefore, you need to demonstrate the gap between now and where your solution is. At the same time, you need to create social proof with case studies and testimonials.
Pro tip: The “before and after” style content is a great example of how to create desire while gaining confidence.
What We Are Like
Check out the headline on this case study by Calendly: “How one college saved $170K last year with Calendly.” This helps the prospect envision a future with this product (“What would my life be like if I got the same results?”).
Before is the current prospect stage, and next is the vision of saving almost $200K for the business. Then, if they read the full case study, they’ll see social proof from customers like them.
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Spur Into Action
Once you’ve generated enough desire for your product or service, give your prospect a chance to take action. The goal is to turn desire into action and force them to respond with low friction but with high incentive.
You want “I want” to convert “I got it.”
Pro tip: No matter how close your prospect is to a buying decision, you need to provide a meaningful demonstration of how you will help them.
If I offer a free cleaning to start a miracle house cleaning business, “Don’t wait for a miracle to happen – call for your free cleaning today,” determine the results and value of my offer.
CTAs should be important, clear, and uncomplicated, such as buttons or banners that explain what action is required and what to do.
What We Are Like
Eliminating friction increases the likelihood of success. Nerdwallet, a site that provides resources on personal finance topics, has a CTA for a credit card comparison tool.
The button is simple but descriptive: “Compare credit cards.” It’s highlighted on Nerdwallet’s homepage with a clever title and a concise, value-based description. The setup is uncomplicated and friction-free, and can generate leads while empowering and entertaining those leads with valuable information.
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Lack of AIDA
The AIDA framework has limitations. Not all purchase decisions are linear, and the AIDA model does not account for the increasingly common non-linear funnel. It also doesn’t account for post-action strategies like customer happiness.
Prospective customers may be looking for a solution to a problem and find your company in the “desire” stage of the model. Additionally, more informed and more engaged consumers are setting a higher bar for brands to clear in order to attract attention and interest.
Although we have broken down the AIDA model into four distinct stages, it is important to remember that it is part of a holistic growth strategy. Applying one letter from the model to one tactic in your marketing strategy will leave you with a short-sighted plan.
An effective ad, like Hyundai’s 2020 Super Bowl ad, may lead to three or four stages of the AIDA model and stimulate potential buyers to action. A flywheel-like model may be more fundamental to the overall strategy.
Using the AIDA Model in the AI Era
Because the AIDA model is so linear, and because emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) can feel chaotic by comparison, there is no reason to question the relevance of the AIDA model in 2024.
AIDA and AI/ML models are not mutually exclusive. 2022 papers in peer-reviewed journals Big Data and Cognitive Computing makes a compelling case for retailers to use the AIDA model to understand consumer data captured by AI/ML.
The author of the paper, Dr. Yang-Im Lee and Dr. Peter RJ Trim, uses the AIDA model to focus and interpret customer data captured by AI/ML. In the consumer’s “interest” stage, the retailer shows the brand’s personality and characteristics.
At the same time, AI/ML chatbots, live language translators, and others are collecting key demographic data on consumers.
Understanding the latter through the lens of the former – stay with me here – opens up new opportunities for AI / ML, such as defining customer groups and sending “personalized messages based on the results of combining various data sets and interpreting market and consumer intelligence.”
The paper goes on to explain how the interplay of AIDA and AI/ML models can lead to better marketing policies that build trust and prioritize online security, and is free to read.
Using the AIDA Framework
Even in 2024, 126 years after Elias St. Elmo Lewis developed the AIDA model, which is still a powerful framework for understanding the buyer’s journey.
Whether you’re using AI/ML data or using it as the cornerstone of your marketing strategy, you’ll be using time-tested formulas to engage, persuade, and convert your audience into customers.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.