Business Communication And The AIDA Model

The business communication and the AIDA model is very important to your branding strategies in your business. AIDA, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action is a formula that has been used by copywriters (especially direct mail copywriters) for many years.

What is AIDA in Small Business Marketing ? What Does The AIDA Model Signify In Terms Of Advertising?

What is Business Communication And The AIDA Model

In businesses, it is very important to communicate with your pool of customers or clients. A good communication will get your message through to the right person and the target market, thus increasing your chances of striking successful business deals.

Since there is a diversity of products in today’s marketing, using a system like AIDA model will allows a general understanding of how to target a market effectively.

According to definition, AIDA is an acronym used in marketing that describes a common list of events that are very often undergone when a person is selling a product or service. It has even evolved into adding an S to original AIDA, with forms AIDA(S) by adding another letter.

In a very brief description, below is what AIDA model does in summary:

A - Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer.

I - Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional advertising).

D - Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.

A - Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

S - Satisfaction - satisfy the customer so they become a repeat customer and give referrals to a product.

As you can see, it is mainly consist of nonverbal communication in business, when it comes to business communication and the AIDA model implementation. There are quite some psychological element involved when using the AIDA model, and it could be viewed as a pedantic illustration about the entire procedure of how advertising effects consumer behaviour.

The AIDA model is one of a number of models of marketing communications based on a hierarchy of effects. It is assumed that learning about a product will lead to feelings about the product that result in the purchase of the product.

As we all know, when it comes to marketing you will lose some percent of prospects moving from step to step. This process is shown as “AIDA Inverted Triangle” figure.

To improve AIDA Inverted Triangle sometimes it’s recommend to split AIDA formula into two pair of promotional steps:

1) Attention + Interest
2) Desire + Action

Example of Business Communication And The AIDA Model

Let’s check out more details about each of the steps in the AIDA Model:

Step 1: A = Attention
This relates to the cognitive stage of the process, indicating a need for the marketing communicator to gain the receiver’s attention before attempting to do anything else.

For example, when it comes to email marketing, it must grab the attention of the reader so that it could be opened and read. This could be done when the sender is important to the receiver, or because the subject line is intriguing or of particular interest to the recipient.

How do you get your customer’s attention? Do it by generating an emotion and setting up a situation.

Step 2: I = Interest

Interest can be built by understanding the audience: What do they want to know?

In the email marketing example, do you know what words will keep the audience reading through the email?

The keys here are benefits, emotions, benefits, and emotions! (NOTE: one way of building interest is to include sub headlines throughout your copy.)

Step 3: D = Desire

The desire phase is a theoretical manifestation of the consumer’s active buying behaviour. The model assumes that the buyer will develop a strong desire prior to purchase; yet there is little evidence to support that this arises in the case of at least inexpensive products.

At this stage, the desire section really turns on the charm. It is written to tug on the heartstrings in order to create that final desire to buy.

Using the email marketing selling an ebook, you may notice that the first is the desire to succeed, not just to run a business, and the second is the desire to obtain more freedom, which is the most common reasons sited for starting a business. The content should speak to the joys of being able to leave work and run an errand in the middle of the day, and talk about not having to put up with odd looks from the boss every time you need to leave early because your child is sick, and other things that would-be entrepreneurs may dream of.

As a friendly reminder, always, ALWAYS being truthful, the desire aspect of your copy should portray the best and biggest benefits your customers will receive. The key is: make their mouths water!

Step 4: A = Action

At the moment we get to this point, the customers should have all the information they need. As what you studied in marketing, all marketing communications should include a ‘call to action’. Invite the reader to take an action and if possible, add urgency too to help ensure that action is taken immediately.

Below is a short movie clip that was released in the internet recently, which is a very good reference to study the business communication and the AIDA model.

The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.

In conclusion, the business communication and the AIDA model can be used when composing any email as part of a business email marketing campaign to help all small businesses be more effective.

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