The acronym AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This is the most simple and rudimentary of marketing models and is still relevant today when it comes to social media and internet marketing strategies.
Each level of AIDA can help you set your marketing and sales objectives, decide what to measure, and create relationships between each level of the model. Understanding the flow of activities through each level will help you align your measurements and analytics with your marketing and sales objectives.
Here’s some tips on how to apply this model to your social media and internet strategy, and how the model and measurements are evolving in the social media age.
Awareness: Awareness is social media’s greatest benefit. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and other networks are built for generating awareness. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communications portal, and lead potential customers back to your sales landing page, blog, and website, where you will be making your sales conversions. The goal of generating awareness, is letting people know about your business products or services; and that you can solve a problem or satisfy a need they may have. At the awareness level, comments, conversations, interaction and valuable content to share, are key measures.
Interest: Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product or service. You can improve interest with special offers; compelling reasons why you can satisfy their needs better than the competition; or how you can solve customers’ problems. Benefits (and not features) weigh greater at this level, and social media can help you amplify customer interest. Following a strategy of linking social media posts to targeted landing pages will provide you with metrics, such as CTR (click through rate), retweets (of content, promotions and links), and comment about your specific products or services, that you will help you refine your promotions.
Desire: Social media can help improve desire through engagement, but to facilitate someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a website that makes purchase easy. Potential new customers will give up if your process has too many steps, despite a great offer. The user interface must be built with the customer in mind. Your website makes a huge impression, people will judge your business by it, so take the time to go through your site – improve the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, information rich, and functional site. Metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.
Action: Now that your customers are ready to buy your product or service, you need to complete the transaction. While it is possible to purchase from Facebook, if you have several products or services, having a website will be your best option; and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence as your own website. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.). The action is also where you can calculate some of your final metrics, like sales conversion rate and return on investment. This is where you can see how your strategies are performing and the final impacts of your social media promotions.
AIDA’s Flaws: AIDA is only a rudimentary representation of a marketing and sales process and it’s not a perfect model. Keep AIDA in mind as you shape your social marketing strategy. It will help you focus and prioritise your marketing and sales objectives for success.
I would love to know if AIDA works for you? Please leave a comment below.
About the Author: Teresa Bassham of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing inspires small businesses to develop and use an empowering Marketing and Communications Plan for Business Profitability … see my full services at www.zenworkz.com
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Tags: Communication, Engaging Online Community, Facebook, Finding Ideal Customers, Marketing Strategies, Measurement, Social Media