In a world where, every day, we are bombarded with attention capturing headlines every message has to work extremely hard to get noticed.

The acronym AIDA is a tool to help ensure that your copy, or any other writing you may produce, grabs the attention of your audience. The acronym stands for;

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

How to use this Tool.

• Attention (or Attract)

In this media-central time, your message needs to be quick and grab people’s attention in order to be successful. Using powerful words and imagery may be an effective technique to catch the eye of your audience and engage them with your content.

• Interest

Gaining the reader’s interest is a much deeper process than just grabbing their attention. They will give you a little more time to do it, but you must stay focused on their needs. This means helping them to pick out the messages that are relevant to them quickly. Using bullets and subheadings to break up the text on the page and make your points stand out may aide with this.

• Desire

Whilst you’re building your audiences interest in your product or service you need to help them to understand how what you’re offering can help them. The easiest way to accomplish this is to appeal to their personal needs and wants. So instead of just describing what you are offering talk about the problems it will solve or the tasks it will make easier for the customer.

• Action

The final step is to make it very clear to your audience the action you want them to take. For example, to ‘Visit our website for more info’ or ‘Click the link below to learn more’ rather than just letting people figure it out for themselves.