The AIDA Rule is used by marketers, website designers and graphic designers who know what they are doing. It is an acronym and stands for: “Attention”, “Interest”, “Desire” (or “Decision”) and “Action.” It is a series of steps that help potential new customers evaluate your business, to decide if they might like to do business with you. For your website to be successful, the AIDA Rule (methodology) needs to be used.
Properly trained professional website designers who know how to include the AIDA Rule into your website make the process easy.
If used correctly, your website, marketing and advertising activities have a far greater chance of being successful. Those who use it well, use it in just about every marketing activity type. This includes but is not limited to:
- TV Commercials
- Radio Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Websites
- Billboard Signs
- Flyers/ Brochures
- Magazine Ads
- Blog Posts
- Public Speeches
- etc
It is very important for the performance of your website to use the AIDA rule. Information about what a ‘performer website‘ is, is here.
The AIDA Rule is part of an effective website strategy. We use it in ALL websites we create. To demonstrate this, I am going to break down how we use it in our own website home page.
Before I do this, I have to mention another part of ‘website strategy’ which relates to ‘people are time poor‘. This always needs to be considered when creating a quality website, and/or when adding content to it, and/or creating visuals for it, etc.
By using the AIDA Rule on your website you are also making your website easy to scan-read and understand. The more information your website visitors can easily and quickly understand, the more information they will retain, the more educated they become and the more they WILL feel your business might be the right fit for them, which translates to: MASSIVELY increasing the chances they will do business with you!
Here is the basic equation to website success:
A great website + good/ great volumes of website visitor traffic each month = massive increases in business sales.
[Of course, you also have to offer great value, have a great sales pipeline, provide a great sales experience, offer prices that your target market will find acceptable (and/or appealing), etc.]
The AIDA Rule Explained:
The AIDA Rule taps into the way we all think, how we all make decisions and how we all interact with each other. As in, it relates to human psychology.
It begins with gaining ATTENTION in positive ways.
Can you imagine how many opportunities in the real world your business would miss out on if you couldn’t capture people’s attention? It’s the same thing with your website.
Your website home page, blog posts and other key pages all need to follow the AIDA Rule (in the correct order):
- Step 1: ATTENTION: Get the ATTENTION of your intended website visitors FAST!
- Step 2: INTEREST: Keep the website visitor on your website. Provide information that is of INTEREST to them.
- Step 3: DESIRE and/or DECISION: For your website (and webpages) to be successful, once you have their ‘interest’ you need to back this up with desire. Things that will emotionally compel your website visitors. Plus, you need to include ‘social proof‘ *.
- Step 4: ACTION: You need to come up with ways to let people know what ACTION’s you want them to perform on your webpages. If you don’t do this, they won’t know what they are meant to do, which will result in them leaving your website without making contact with you. If you are a service-based business wanting enquiries, the action you would want people to take would include: phoning you or filling out your enquiry form. On the other hand, if you own an online shop, the obvious action is to entice people to order products (and pay for them).
* If you are not sure what ‘social proof’ is, be sure to read this short blog post.
Desire and/or Decision
DESIRE can be achieved in a variety of ways. Understanding what your ideal customer types find desirable is the first step. Once you know this, you can pinpoint great selling points, marketing messages, etc that will match and exceed their expectations. You can also determine the best ways to make your business stand out from your competitors.
TV Ads for cars use ‘desire’ a lot. Eg. Luxury, comfort, acceleration, cornering, “toughness” (if it is a work-ute), family-friendly, etc.
In your business and your website, once you know what your ideal customer type(s) want it’s easy to add content, videos, images, etc into your website to help website visitors decide they ‘desire’ to work with you and/or to at least send you an enquiry (or call you).
On the other hand, to help people form a favourable DECISION about your business, some of the ‘social proof’ methods you can include to build trust are:
- Before and After photos
- Progress photos. I do this a lot in the blog articles on my personal website.
- Videos showing a project you have done step by step. I did this when I restored a vintage Ski Boat a few years ago. I then put the video on YouTube and Facebook. The video is below.
- Written Customer Testimonials and Reviews
- Video Testimonials
The AIDA Rule Used On Our Own Website:
Here is how we use the AIDA Rule on the home page of my website here at You Beaut Websites:
1. ATTENTION: The viewable area that appears when you click into the website is designed to capture attention. This area is otherwise known as ‘above the fold’ or ‘the Value Proposition area’. It also has other names like ‘the hero area’.
It is very important to work closely with your website designer when you get your website created. Don’t just rely on them to design your ‘value proposition area’ and write good text to include within it. If they are EXCELLENT Marketers and Marketing Writers they might do this right, but many Website Designers aren’t marketing experts.
If this ‘value proposition area’ of your website says the right things and has good visuals, your website visitors will stick around long enough to learn more about what you do… which refers to the next step: ‘INTEREST’. However, if you get this section wrong, website visitors will leave your website, which means your website will never perform well… until it is re-designed (or re-strategised and fixed) by actual website experts.
Side note: There is a video in another blog post on our website – click here to access it. Amongst things, the video refers to what type of words to include in the ‘value proposition area’.
2. INTEREST: Below the ‘value proposition area’ is where you provide key information (and visuals) that your ideal customer types will want to know about. This section creates ‘interest’ and helps initially inform them about what you do, what you offer, etc. It is the ‘who, what, where, why and how’ section of our website home page.
Below is a screenshot showing the ‘interest’ section of my website. There are also other sections that aid with ‘interest’ as well. They include the ‘Services’, ‘Why Choose Us’ and ‘About’ sections and others, though I haven’t included them in the below screenshot.
3. DESIRE: In my website, after the initial ‘interest’ section, we then display some actual examples of websites we have created for businesses (see the screenshot below). The aim is to show that we do quality work and that we can design any type of website for any type of business. We also want to show that our websites are attractive. In the near future, we will also write case study articles about each website, to prove that these websites help the businesses they represent (and therefore are ‘performer websites‘).
Over the coming weeks, we’ll also add more website examples to this section.
4. ACTION: We have green buttons on the home page that say things like ‘Contact Us’. When clicked they link to the enquiry form on the home page. Filling out that enquiry form is the main action we want website visitors to take.
We also include our phone number in the footer of the website, and in various places within the website text. That way people who prefer to call can do so.
If you own a service-based business like a Plumber, Mechanic, Doctor’s Surgery, etc, it is a good idea to ALSO include your phone number at the very top of each page of your website. It makes it very easy for website visitors to find it. We do this on many websites, including this one which belongs to a Landscaping business.
Conclusion
Knowing about the AIDA Rule is very helpful. Ask your Website Designer about it in person or over the phone. If they know about it (and can easily explain it) that is a good initial sign they are actually a professional Website Designer. If they don’t know about it (and can’t easily explain it), that is a red flag that you may not be working with a person (or team) who knows how to create ‘performer websites‘.
Trained website designers who know how to include the AIDA Rule into your website, make the process easy. They will guide you through each step of the way, so it is easy and simple. They will even help you write your website text, so it follows the rules.
