AIDA: A 100-Year-Old Formula That You Can Use to Make More Money

If you’re an entrepreneur, CEO, public speaker, author, or information marketer, you owe it to yourself, your business, and your lifestyle to take a closer look at the revenue-generating potential of teleseminars – even if you’ve never listened to one.

One of the most profitable teleseminars I’ve ever conducted took place on the evening of December 4, 2008. It was a “Preview Call” to help find buyers for my Teleseminar Secrets training series.

More than 255 prospective customers ended up making a $2,500 purchase.

If you’re counting, that’s over $637,500.

How can you achieve results like these with your own teleseminars? (Or with practically any other form of promotional communication?)

One of the best sales-making techniques I’ve found is called the AIDA Formula. It’s been proven to work for over 100 years, and involves only four simple steps.

The four steps are simple to remember: First, you grab your prospect’s Attention (A) about your offer. Second, you elicit their Interest (I) about your offer. Third, you amplify their Desire (D) to purchase your offer. And fourth, you influence them to take Action(A) with their wallet.

Easy, right?

Unfortunately, many marketers don’t understand exactly how to implement this powerful technique.

I’ve observed dozens of veteran marketers make the mistake of moving too fast to the second half of the AIDA Formula – the Desire and Action part. And that often results in losing the sale (and the prospect) for life!

This mistake is easy to avoid. Here’s how…

Picture the AIDA process as an inverted triangle, like the one you see here:

As you can see, the inverted triangle has four sections. Each section (from the top down) becomes smaller, representing the percentage of prospects you’re likely to influence at that point in the AIDA process.

The section at the top (Attention) is the largest, because getting a prospect’s Attention is easier than eliciting his Interest to continue watching, listening, or reading more about your offer.

The second section (Interest) is larger than the third section (Desire), because it is easier to elicit a prospect’s Interest in your offer than to amplify his Desire to buy.

And the third section (Desire) is larger than the fourth and final section (Action), because it’s easier to amplify a Desire to buy than to influence Action.

A problem arises when the marketer makes the mistake of expecting one promotional communication – such as one e-mail message, one teleseminar, or one direct-mail letter – to do all the heavy lifting and capture the sale.

It IS possible to do that. A powerful sales letter, for instance, can grab a prospective customer’s attention and move him through the entire four parts of the triangle to take action. However, it can be easier to convert even your most skeptical prospects into buyers just by splitting the AIDA inverted triangle in two parts instead of four: Attention-Interest and Desire-Action.

Let’s use a teleseminar as our example. (But this technique works with practically any marketing medium.)

Teleseminars work wonders in grabbing Attention and eliciting Interest from prospects to learn more about your offer. But it takes a website to amplify their Desire and influence Action.

Remember the teleseminar I told you about earlier? I was able to get more than 255 people to make a $2,500 purchase. Yet, if you listen to the call, you’ll notice that its purpose was to simply grab Attention and elicit Interest from my listeners.

Where Desire and Action came in is when I referred the 1,600+ listeners to my website TeleseminarSecrets.com. It was at the website that most of the promotional heavy lifting was done. We included video testimonials, frequently asked questions, success stories, irresistible bonus gifts, and a solid money-back guarantee.

The people who visited my site after the teleseminar were already Interested in what I was offering. My site just amplified their Desire and got them to take Action – and become customers.

[Ed. Note: Alex Mandossian knows a thing or two about marketing. He has generated over $233 million in sales for his clients. And in the past three years, he increased his own revenues from $1.5 million to $5 million. You can get Alex’s advice and practical marketing tips for info-publishers, small-business owners, and entrepreneurs for free at http://www.AlexMandossianToday.com]

Comment on this article