Attention to Action How Digital Advertising Uses The AIDA Model

Through a series of blog posts, I have discussed different aspects of marketing, including Hierarchies, Distribution, Market research, and the data analytics software, Tableau. Take a look at this article from last week’s series regarding website design for digital advertising. For this new post series, I am going to discuss another equally important component of marketing - consumer psychology and the AIDA Model. Specifically, this post will explore what the AIDA model is and how digital marketers can use it to partly understand the process behind getting a consumer through the attention-to-buying process. 

What Is AIDA

The AIDA model identifies what a consumer is experiencing throughout the buying process. It is a way for marketers to understand how the consumer thinks, and how marketers can use that to ideally gain a purchase from the customer. For a more in-depth description, take a look at this website that explains the model. These are the cognitive stages within the customer according to the model: 

• (A) Awareness. Gaining consumer awareness via meaningful marketing of your brand/service. 

• (I) Interest. Highlighting specific features, values, or products cultivates consumer interest. 

• (D) Desire. Creating an emotional connection with the consumer allows the consumer to experience desire for the product or service. This can be accomplished by showcasing the product as a solution to their need, or showcasing the item as a limited-time occurrence that will be gone soon, creating urgency for purchase. 

• (A) Action. Ideally, the consumer makes the purchase for the product/service and the company has successfully met the need and made the sale. 

There are components to each of the aspects in the model in order for a company to market to their consumers successfully. The marketing that occurs in the first step needs to be meaningful and clear in order to be noticed in the noise of all the other marketing happening. If the intention is not clear, your company’s message could never be noticed by your target consumers. For interest, the product/service needs to focus on what makes it special and beneficial to the lives of your consumers. If a product gets noticed, but doesn’t provide any value, the consumers will likely move on. The desire stage is where you will position your service/product as a solution to the consumer’s need. It is also important to showcase your product as the ideal choice, and create a sense of urgency within the consumer to encourage purchase. Lastly, for action, you want to guide consumers through each step in the purchasing process. This must be easy to follow and straightforward to be an effortless process for the consumer. 

Application to Digital Advertising

As we know, the AIDA model explains how a customer moves through the buying process. From first exposure to the brand to the final decision to purchase, the company is able to walk the customer through each step. This process works the same way in digital advertising, as we rely on processes such as SEO, Paid search, Social Media, and email campaigns to guide consumers through the AIDA process. Take a look at this article for a full breakdown of how this process works in digital advertising. For my example, I will use Spotify and its annual Spotify Wrapped Campaign. Let’s take a look at each step of the campaign using the model. 

• A. Spotify implements bold and flashy graphics, messages, and fonts delivered to users. This shows up as a search, email, or social media posting. This design is created to capture the users’ interest enough to click through the advertisement. 

• I. Once the users have entered Spotify Wrapped, it showcases different information about the users’ music taste and behavior on the app. This includes what they listened to the most and top artists. Spotify allows users to share this information online with others. 

• D. The personalization factor in Spotify Wrapped creates an emotional connection with the users as they are not just viewing music history from the past year, but they are seeing a part of themselves expressed by their music tastes.

• A. The final stage in Spotify Wrapped is to get users to click the share buttons and share their Wrapped results on social media. This action is encouraged through the personalization of the user’s Wrapped, but also the ability to share that part of themselves with the world. This connection encourages the user to share and ideally get other users to see their post and encourage further engagement from others. 

Conclusion

 Although there are many aspects of digital marketing, the AIDA model serves as a powerful tool for organizing your advertising strategies as you walk through each stage.  Digital advertisers can benefit from using this model by integrating it into marketing strategies to understand not only what steps a consumer might take, but also how to guide them through each step.

 Stay tuned for more marketing tips with MarketMyMedia.