The AIDA model is a simple but effective model in leading your customers to buy your products. If you don’t know what AIDA is, read more to know what the AIDA model is and how you can apply it to your business.

What is AIDA?

The AIDA model is a marketing and advertising model that shows the stages of a customer’s buying decision. By knowing the AIDA model, you can structure your marketing under this model to guide your customers to purchasing your products.

But why AIDA? AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Here’s how the flow works:

Attention – the customer notices the business through marketing efforts or other medium such as through word-of-mouth.

Interest – if interested, the customer may show interest to the business. He or she may check out the business’ website and scan its products or learn more about its services.

Desire – if hooked, the customer may show a desire to taking the product or service offered by the business. This is not yet the final stage of the buying process, but if things go accordingly, the customer will eventually go to the last stage: the Action stage.

Action – at this point, the customer wants to buy the product or service and hands out his or her money to the business.

In short, AIDA is a flow – starting from Attention and ends to Action, where the customer buys the product or service.

Now that we know what AIDA is, it’s time to learn how you can apply it to your business.

How to Apply the AIDA Model to Your E-Commerce Business

What we have mentioned above is the AIDA model on the perspective of a hypothetical customer. Now, it’s time to learn how we can structure our marketing efforts using the AIDA model.

Attention

The first thing you need to do is to attract your potential customers’ attention. This is mainly done through a variety of marketing campaigns and tactics such as social media marketing, e-mail marketing and influencer marketing.

At this stage, your main focus should be on getting your potential customers’ attention. But aside from that, be sure that your marketing campaigns are interesting enough that your target audience will be interested in your business.

Interest

At this point, let us assume that your marketing efforts generated some interests on the part of your potential customers. Maybe, they got hooked by your product or offers such as discount. But while having interest is a good indication that your audience would want to buy from your store, it’s far from the actual sales yet.

At this stage, now that you’ve gathered some interest, your focus should be on making your potential customers stick around to your business – or better yet, make them desire the product that you’re offering. For example, you can generate desire by showing the key benefits and features of your products. So, from mere interest, your potential customers may now desire the product that you’re selling.

Desire

Desire is simply a deeper level of interest on your potential customers’ part. At the Desire stage, your potential customers may already want to buy your product, but not yet ready to take on the final action, which is to buy your product.

The most common way to generate desire, as already mentioned above, is to emphasize the key benefits and features of your products. This may make the customer switch thoughts from “Hmm, I like this product” to “Wow, I need (or want) that!”

Once a mere like becomes a need or want, the customer expresses desire. This may not mean that the customer will buy already, but the chances of them buying your product is already high at this stage.

Action

Once the customers have the desire for your product, the final stage is to simply make your customers to actually buy your product. In sales and marketing, this is called CTA or “call-to-action”.

In e-commerce websites, this is typically the “Buy” button at the bottom or side of the product. Once the customer realizes that he or she needs or wants the product, all he needs to do is to simply click the “Buy” button and the sales is complete!