The AIDA Model: Converting Leads Into Customers

If you’re interested in enhancing your sales game by adopting a theoretical framework, the AIDA model is worth taking a closer look at. This model breaks the customer journey into four distinct stages and identifies marketing and sales activities that are most effective at each stage.

While the model was introduced in the late 19th century, it’s still highly relevant today, albeit with some modifications and sidenotes. Adopting this model can help you structure your approach to sales and marketing activities.

This article will offer a detailed overview of the model and give some tips on how to leverage it in modern B2B sales and marketing.

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Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What Is the AIDA Model?
• The History of the AIDA Model
• Key Benefits of Applying AIDA
• How to Apply AIDA to Sales and Marketing
• Drawbacks of the AIDA Model
• How to Use AIDA in the World of AI

What Is the AIDA Model?

One of the many marketing models, AIDA, was developed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898. He made several contributions to the marketing field. He established The Advertisers’ Agency and was employed in a range of marketing roles over his career. 

AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action, which are the four key cognitive stages a customer moves through before making a purchase. 

The framework is useful because it encourages marketers and sales professionals alike to acknowledge and cater to every stage of the lead funnel.

Here’s a brief overview of each stage:

• Awareness is when a potential customer first learns about your brand. 
• Interest is when the prospect becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL) because they start engaging with your company, for example, by browsing your website or contacting a customer service representative.
• Desire is when the MQL turns into a sales-qualified lead (SQL) because they show signs that they seriously consider making a purchase.
• Action is when the SQL either signs a contract or makes a purchase.

The History of the AIDA Model

As mentioned before, Lewis came up with AIDA in an age when customer journeys were linear and the number of marketing channels was rather limited.

Over the years, AIDA evolved to align with the major transformations in buyer behavior and the technological advancements in the marketing industry. 

For example, AIDAR stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, and Retention, catering to the fact that a vast majority of B2B sales are no longer about one-time purchases. There’s a proliferation of pricing options, including monthly payments. Hence, the B2B sales funnel needs to incorporate post-purchase support.

Other variations of AIDA are AIDCAS, REAN, and NAITDASE. Here is a brief overview of each.

AIDCAS

The AIDCAS mode takes into account the following stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Attention: Capturing the target audience’s attention through marketing efforts.
• Interest: Generating interest by showcasing the value or relevance of the product/service.
• Desire: Creating a strong desire or emotional connection to the product.
• Conviction: Building trust and credibility to convince the customer of the product’s worth.
• Action: Encouraging the customer to take a specific action, such as making a purchase.
• Satisfaction: Ensuring post-purchase satisfaction to foster loyalty and repeat business.

REAN

The REAN model helps optimize digital marketing campaigns by emphasizing the need for the following actions:

• Reach: Attracting a broad audience through various marketing channels.
• Engage: Capturing the audience’s attention and building an emotional connection.
• Activate: Encouraging conversions or direct actions, such as signing up or making a purchase.
• Nurture: Maintaining relationships with customers post-conversion to ensure retention, upselling, and advocacy.

NAITDASE

The NAITDASE framework maps out the customer journey and corresponding marketing and sales initiatives in the following way:

• Need: Identifying and addressing the customer’s pain points.
• Attention: Capturing the customer’s attention through targeted marketing.
• Interest: Generating curiosity and interest in the product/service.
• Trust: Building trust to reduce purchase barriers and increase confidence in the brand.
• Desire: Strengthening the emotional or practical desire for the solution.
• Action: Motivating the customer to take the desired action (purchase or conversion).
• Satisfaction: Ensuring the customer is satisfied with their experience.
• Engagement: Fostering long-term engagement.

Key Benefits of Applying AIDA

Adopting the AIDA model can be useful in both startup sales and well-established businesses because it provides a checklist that helps ensure customers are taken care of at every stage of their experience with your company’s brand.

Structured Approach

AIDA model facilitates collaboration between marketing and sales departments by equipping them with a shared understanding of how to segment the company’s prospective customers based on their level of engagement with the brand. This shared foundation is useful for collaborating on designing various materials, such as sales collateral and marketing content, to cater to every segment.

Customer-Centric

The model gives tips on what type of messaging is most effective at every stage of the customer journey. When sales and marketing are on the same page about brand voice, the chances of misalignment between the two teams are minimal. 

For instance, by adopting AIDA, sales and marketing professionals can discuss what sort of messaging they will go after while engaging prospects at the awareness stage. Humorous? Shocking? Catering to the target audience’s values is integral to attracting leads, converting prospects, and earning returning customers.

Optimized Conversions

When sales and marketing teams design coherent and non-contradictory sales and marketing strategies for engaging prospective customers throughout the entire sales funnel, they make the transitions from each stage organic and smooth. 

In the current society of short attention spans and busy schedules, frictionless experiences boost revenue growth. When sales and marketing share a game plan for how to move prospects from awareness to interest to desire and to take action, they are unstoppable. 

How to Apply AIDA to Sales and Marketing

Let’s take a look at a case study of CIBC’s Youth Black Friday Offer that promotes their CIBC Smart™ Start account to see how sales and marketing teams can leverage the AIDA model in real life.

Attention

CIBC’s marketing team captures leads’ attention with an enticing offer of $100 with CIBC Smart™ Start. Getting one hundred bucks without lifting a finger is something that students and young professionals are unlikely to disregard.

Additionally, CIBC’s landing page is equipped with images that speak to their target audience. It prominently displays the Skip the Dishes logo, promoting a referral campaign and speaking to the fact that students and young professionals often have too much on their plates to fill their actual plates with homemade meals.

Furthermore, the landing page features scenes that any student can relate to:

While CIBC’s sales campaign isn’t open knowledge, it’s not hard to imagine how their sales team can complement marketing efforts at the awareness stage by conducting cold emailing and performing sales calls. 

Specifically, sales professionals can use prospecting tools to identify individuals who qualify for the offer. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help find recent university graduates and young professionals to target with the offer.

Pro Tip: Yesware’s Prospector boasts a dataset of 100+ million business profiles, while its email campaigns with dynamic fields facilitate the process of orchestrating personalized sales outreach at scale.

Interest

Bringing awareness to a brand or a new product is just the first step. Awareness doesn’t equal interest. There are so many things we are aware of, but only so few that engage our thoughts. 

Always in a hustle, students and young professionals might easily forget about CIBC’s Black Friday offer, especially if they already have a bank account and don’t want to spend time diving deep into all the features of the CIBC Smart™ Start account. How do marketing and sales teams capture their interest?

CIBC’s marketing team does a great job of engaging the young demographic. For example, on their landing page, they offer free resources that cover topics that range from getting better at managing budgets to finding ways to secure some cash:

In a leap of imagination, it’s easy to come up with ways CIBC’s sales team can facilitate building interest. One way is by asking prospective customers open-ended sales questions such as:

• What are your current financial goals?
• What are some of the features of your existing banking account that you aren’t happy with?

By practicing active listening skills and helping students and young professionals feel heard, sales professionals can build rapport and facilitate genuine interest in CIBC’s offering by making prospects feel that opting for a new bank account can really solve their pain points.

Pro Tip: How do you know what questions to ask? Yesware’s attachment tracking feature empowers you with knowledge of what captures your prospects’ attention, helping you cater the sales conversations to topics that matter the most to potential customers. 

Desire

One of the most effective ways to convert prospects into customers is by making an offer they can’t refuse. The marketing team can enhance the offer by leveraging social proof and highlighting limited-time sales promotions. 

For example, CIBC’s $100 Apple Gift Card is a Black Friday sales promotion that leverages urgency-based buyer behavior.

In our hypothetical scenario, sales professionals can further amp up the desire for CIBC’s product by leveraging the fact that storytelling drives sales. They can relate stories of customers who have successfully switched to CIBC Smart™ Start account. 

Additionally, having sales battle cards ready is useful for handling sales objections, highlighting how CIBC’s offering surpasses that of other major players in the financial industry, like RBC and Scotiabank, for example.

Pro Tip: You can ensure that the sales promotion doesn’t slip from your prospects’ memory by creating an automated email campaign with Yesware that will send out follow-ups to your leads and prospects if they leave your initial outreach efforts without a response for three days. 

Furthermore, Yesware’s Meeting Scheduler makes scheduling a meeting with you a breeze because it gives your prospects immediate access to your calendar and lets them choose the time that works best for them.

Action

At the very last stage of the integrated marketing and sales strategy, professionals from both departments face an important task. To push the lead to convert. Marketing achieves this by creating appealing CTAs. For example, CIBC’s landing page has a clear-cut action button that entices prospects to “Open an account.”

Sales professionals can adopt one of the effective sales call closing techniques, such as assumptive closing, direct closing, or scarcity closing.

Pro Tip: Practicing your sales call closing lines in a mock call can boost your confidence and facilitate quota attainment.

Drawbacks of the AIDA Model

As discussed above, the AIDA model doesn’t account for the major transformations in the customer journey. It’s no longer linear. Let’s take the CIBC bank account as an example. A customer’s journey with respect to the CIBC Smart™ Start account might not start with the awareness stage at all. 

Rather, an existing customer might get a desire to open this account thanks to the Black Friday sales promotion but then start doubting their choice due to a competing offer from RBC. In this case, the AIDCAS version of AIDA might be a more fruitful approach.

The AIDCAS framework demands that marketing and sales professionals invest efforts into not only growing customer lists but also making CIBC irreplaceable. How? 

One of the ways in which CIBC ensures customer satisfaction is by sending out review requests after their customers have meetings with financial advisors. Also, CIBC offers various financial perks to those clients who choose to store all their money with the bank. 

By implementing these sales and marketing techniques, CIBC makes sure that even if RBC targets their existing customers with a Black Friday sales promotion that seems to be more enticing, the customers still choose to stick with CIBC in the end. This is because CIBC adopts a flywheel model to visualize their client management efforts and creates a well-rounded frictionless client experience, rather than opting for a more old-fashioned sales pipeline.

How to Use AIDA in the World of AI

AI marketing and sales tools revolutionize how sales and marketing professionals engage with prospects and customers. Every stage of the customer journey can be so much more personalized and effective thanks to AI solutions. 

For example, AI web chats facilitate the awareness stage by giving real-time answers to potential customers’ FAQs and capturing their contact information to update CRM records on the fly. 

AI-powered CRM can facilitate the process of setting priorities for engagement with leads by performing lead scoring. For example, AI can assign 50 points to a lead who has just downloaded a case study from your company’s website and flag this lead as a “hot” opportunity. 

AI-powered social media management platforms and email automation tools eliminate human factors, such as forgetfulness or mood swings, from delivering engaging content non-stop, bolstering interest in products and services, and helping companies stay top-of-mind for prospects.

AI algorithms excel at analyzing massive amounts of data in seconds and identifying patterns that might escape human eyes. This creates ample opportunities for upselling and cross-selling recommendations, as shown in Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” section. Thus, AI tools enhance customers’ desire to buy products and services by enticing customers to buy everything they will possibly need at once, saving on shipping costs and taxes.

Human forgetfulness can also result in leads slipping through the cracks because a sales professional doesn’t follow up due to a tightly packed schedule. AI solutions solve this problem because AI never forgets to send a follow-up email or text message, enticing prospects to take action.

Pro Tip: Ready to start drafting your automated sales email campaign? Don’t forget to grab our ebook to help you with this process:

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Your Path Forward with AIDA

As a word of caution, while AIDA is super useful for structuring the sales and marketing processes and ensuring alignment between teams, you should always stay on top of the trends. It’s no longer possible to ensure consistent revenue growth by launching one-size-fits-all marketing and sales campaigns. 

As a sales professional, you should opt for AI-powered solutions, such as Yesware, to collect valuable insights about your leads’ pain points, preferences, and interests. You should leverage this information to customize your sales engagement materials.

Yesware, which is a beginner-friendly sales enablement platform, is here to support you in aligning your sales and marketing with the demands of our B2B market, where companies capable of offering hyper-personalized solutions reign supreme. Sign up to try Yesware for free!