The first AIDA diagram… still relevant today?
The purchase funnel feels like it has been around forever. It is in every marketing 101 course book and is mentioned at least once in every client meeting. So when a client exclaimed, “it feels like we’ve used this thing for 100 years,” I decided to check.
Turns out, we have! Well, marketers anyway. 111 years to be exact. Whether you call it the customer funnel, sales funnel, marketing funnel, AIDA or just funnel, each serves the same purpose. The funnel shows how a customer ultimately makes the decision to buy a product.
But before it was a funnel, it was a scale. This is what it looked like:
The diagram shows that every sale is offset by attention, interest, desire, and conviction. From Frank Hutchinson Dukesmith, editor of 1904 Salesmanship
Ric Dragon provides more detail about how Frank Hutchinson Dukesmith was the original creator of the AIDA model here, whereas Elias St. Elmo Lewis republished it 20 years later (but is actually the one who gets all the credit).
A scale! Showing that the right weight of attention + interest + desire + conviction = a sale.
With a funnel, I feel like we naturally think about moving from one step to another. Once we have any level of attention, we can move on to capturing interest. But not all engagements are created equal — which this diagram shows well.
What if the weights represented time?
From a customer’s perspective, there is a light level of awareness to grab their attention. Maybe for only a few second with a banner ad or a sponsored facebook post. Then they might spend a little more time engaging with content — maybe a few minutes watching a video or five minutes reading an article. Desire would be measured in the amount of time they spent discussing a product or exploring beautiful product shots. We could think about conviction as the amount of time someone spent validating their purchase. This might be time in store holding the product and talking with a sales representative or reading every product review available.
Could you make an argument that the amount of time someone spends researching a product most often correlates with how much time they will spend with it after they buy it? I spend less time deciding weather to buy a coffee and much more time deciding what pair of $100 shoes to buy. Although anyone who has recently bought a car within 10 minutes at the dealership would prove me wrong.
What if the weights represented dollars?
Should we as marketers spend more money on the tactics that drive conviction rather than the ones that drive attraction? We often use banner ads and paid social to do the “heavy lifting” and attract new consumers to our brand, so I don’t know if that makes sense. But it’s interesting to think about.
This scale shows that we don’t necessarily need to build attraction, desire, interest and conviction is a specific order, but that you do need the right combinations of “weight” to make a sale. And yet, how often is it not used today?
We receive facebook ads for products that cost over 50$ that we have never heard of.
Banner ads that have a link to find out more take someone directly to the purchase page.
For the first time as marketers we have the ability to measure a person’s desire and conviction before trying to make the sale, but how often do we do so? We could theoretically measure the dollar values needed on each weight of the scale to make the corresponding or higher value sale.
How can we better build user journeys to track when a person needs great content to increase their interest or more information to solidify their conviction. How can we measure when a person is at the optimal state to receive a promo code versus when they will buy something a full price.
Sometimes you have to go find out how something got started. Hats off to Frank Hutchinson Dukesmith.
___________________________________________________________________
Danielle helps LIFT’s clients connect with their customers acoss digital and mobile. LIFT delivers better marketing results in today’s hyper-connected world.
