When we look at the website from the visitor point of view it is easier to land people in the right place at the right time and say the right things.
AIDA From Attraction to Action
We can take the standard marketing model of a customer journey through stages of Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action – or AIDA for short, and apply it to the way we build websites to support the different tasks users might have at the time.
It’s courteous and helpful isn’t it?
Attraction: Offline marketing, Advertising, Social Media and other channels, delivering traffic to the website
Interest: People start their searching by looking for information around a subject, to solve problems
Desire: When you start to understand the buying decision, and a solution presents itself, people start choosing things
Action: A decision has been made, even if it’s to only follow or to come back again later
People arrive on the site at any stage of this buying process
Building Better Websites
What we want to read will change, depending to where we are in the process. Sound reasonable?
It means we can assign specific jobs to ‘types’ of pages.
Blog Pages
- Interest – Information Searches
At this stage of the process, people are searching for more information, generally about the problems they have.
Selling to these people is probably the wrong thing to do, depending on the complexity of the solution. If the route is simple, then perhaps a landing page would be better. But for genuine, how, what, why type queries in Search Engines, blog pages should do a good job.
Hub Pages
- Desire – Solution Searches
Once people have decided they’re interested, they often don’t yet have the tools to make a proper decision. There is an opportunity to influence, but a final decision is probably a way off.
1. Qualification
Navigation can take the place of qualifying questions. Large, small, premium or budget, red or blue. Depending on the click, the answer, we can start saying different things for different interests
2. Researching the buying decision
When looking at higher value products and solutions, often more complex, white paper material can be swapped for an email address, or more often these days, shared directly on the website.
We call these pages ‘hubs’ to be inclusive of both the qualification and education functions. But they can also emulate the consulation, to give the visitor an idea of what the conversation might be like.
Landing Pages
- Action – Product Searches
When people are ready to buy, the idea is often to give them what they need to know and get out of their way. Some people even remove navigation from these pages, to remove distractions. But there is a common factor, Call To Action should be front and forward!
Important Tip: Particularly for service industries where ‘who you buy from’ is extremely important, consider building blogs alongside the landing page. The more complex the buying decision, the better blogs can be to aid credibility and the right decision.
Website structure improves lead generation
- Planning a good website structure around what people are looking for, helps us think about the visitor’s experience in a better way
- The job of each page becomes to ‘promote’ the next step in the process
- Having the right traffic go to the right page, and saying the right thing, increases conversions
This is a framework, it is an abstract thing designed to help us think about whether traffic is going to the right place, and whether we’re saying the right thing at the right time. It makes a big difference to conversion rates.
We hope it can help other people too.
