AIDA Copywriting Formula

What is the AIDA Copywriting Formula?

AIDA is the acronym for: Attention Interest Desire Action The AIDA copywriting formula is a well-known formula used by copywriters and marketers to create effective copywriting that gets results. It\’s important to apply the AIDA formula because it creates a psychological \’slippery slope\’ with your readers. Grabbing their attention, keeping them interested, creating desire for your offer, and then motivating them to take action! In this blog post I\’ll explain how you can use the AIDA Copywriting Formula when writing online copy.

1. Attention

The first thing you need to do is get your visitors attention. You need to grab their interest with a compelling headline. Once you\’ve gotten their attention, you need to maintain their interest, then create a desire for your product or service, and eventually motivate them to take action. So how do you get attention?  There are 3 ways to capture your visitor\’s attention.

• You can get their attention with a headline
• You can get their attention with a video
• You can get their attention with a hero image

 

2. Interest

Remember, most visitors have short attention spans. You need to keep them interested in reading your copy. There are two ways to maintain your visitor\’s interest.

1. 1. Make sure that you\’re writing for the scanners and the scrollers. For example, what do we do when we first arrive at a website? We decide if we want to stay there past the first five seconds. It\’s important that you\’ve written your copy and formatted the page to appeal to people who scan and scroll the page.  

1. The next important element is the opening paragraph. How many times have you read a newspaper and the headline catches your attention? But what happens if the first paragraph is really boring and full of facts and data that is not interesting?

I\’ve seen articles where it says sex scandal and you\’re thinking, \”oh what\’s this about?\”. You read the first paragraph and it\’s something from the eighteen hundreds, is not interesting and there is too much data. You eventually tune out and turn the page.

When you\’re writing copy on your website, you want to make sure that you\’ve captured your visitors attention.  But to keep their attention and interest, the first 300 words need to be really interesting.

3. Desire

There are three ways to create desire in your copy.

• Show your products benefits
• Explain how your product can change their life or how it can solve their problems.
• Show the results other people achieved (testimonials)

For example, in the weight loss industry you will see before and after photos. In cleaning websites, they will show the dirty carpet versus the clean carpets. What you want to show is some kind of proof that your product actually works. If you were selling travel, you might want to show desire through luxury images, images of people traveling or enjoying their vacation.

>> Learn Copywriting Tips For Beginners <<

4. Action

Now there are three ways to get your visitors to take action.

1. A clear and obvious call to action. It is usually a bright colored button with some action orientated copy that is going to get people to click on it. You might have a subheading and a paragraph that talks about all the reasons why they need to take action.
2. Urgency is important. How many of you have bought a product that was on sale even though you didn\’t really need it?But it was on sale and other people were probably going to buy it. There was an urgency to purchase it and it\’s urgency in action. 

Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. In this book he talks about the six elements which can all apply to copywriting. One of them is scarcity and when something is limited or scarce, it invokes a fear of loss in us even if we don\’t really need it. If it\’s scarce, we see it as more valuable than if it\’s in abundance.   When you\’re writing a copy, you want people to take action. Sometimes just having a countdown timer for a sale or an offer, can increase your sales dramatically. The reason is because people feel like they\’re going to miss out. It\’s the fear of loss. So if you include that in your copy, then you\’re going to see improvement in people taking action.

3. You can also add incentives, bonuses or premiums. It is what you call the law of reciprocity.

Just a quick story about this. I was at Office Works looking to buy a new laptop bag. And if you go to Office Works, there will be 50 different types of laptop bags in an aisle. So I\’m looking through them with different prices and I ask myself this question \”I don\’t know which one to buy?!\”.   So I\’m looking and pacing around, and one of them captures my attention. I eventually bought a laptop bag because it had a free mouse pad, shoulder strap and some other gimmick that I didn\’t really need. But because it offered all of those things, I felt that it had more value and I purchased it.

If you want to stand out, you can you add on bonuses as an incentive in order to get more people to take action.

5. Proof

Proof is really about getting people to believe your claims. There are just so many websites making outrageous claims. So what you can do to differentiate yourself between them and what your offering is that you can back up your claims with proof. Copywriting in the smallest definition is making claims and proving those claims to be true. You\’re going to create a desire and if you can prove that what you\’re saying is true, people are going to want to purchase or take action. There are three ways to demonstrate proof and the first one is demonstration.

1. How can you demonstrate your product in action or your product being used by a customer? You could demonstrate it with video, like they do in informercials.
2. You can do it with testimonials which is a great way to show other people have used this product and are getting the results that your visitors might also want.
3. The last way to demonstrate proof is by credibility indicators. How can you show that you are credible and you are someone to listen to? Or how can you show you\’re an authority in your space? You might want to show a qualification or an award that you\’ve won in business and show that you\’re an expert in your field. You can also show before and after images that\’s going to give you credibility and proof that invokes desire.

Summary of the AIDA Copywriting Formula

In summary, here\’s how to use the Aida copywriting formula:

• You need to get their attention with a headline, video and a hero image.
• Maintain your visitor\’s interest by making sure that the first 300 words are really interesting or engaging.
• Create the desire by showing the benefits of your product or service, how it can change their life and improve their problems.
• Use a clear and obvious call to action 
• And lastly, show proof by demonstrating your product or service in action using before and after photos or videos, infomercials and testimonials from other customers.