There’s More To It Than AIDA

There’s More To It Than AIDA

AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – is probably the benchmark for how to structure a sales letter. I’ve talked about it before at length, everyone else has talked about it and it’s not a bad starting point for building the first draft of a sales letter.

But there’s more to copywriting than AIDA.

I’ve been looking at copywriting courses, and by golly are there some terrible things out there. (More on that another day.)

One thing that’s not terrible but not great either is that pretty much every course available – from the free ones on Udemy to ones that cost £1000+ – seems to structure the whole course around AIDA.

Having read a few course outlines, a lot of courses don’t go any further.

This is crazy.

I’ll tell you why in this article.

What Is AIDA?

AIDA is, as mentioned above, a structure for creating sales letters and landing pages.

• Get Attention
• Spark Interest
• Build Desire
• Call to Action

Most sales letters and landing pages contain these elements and are successful because of it.

If you are struggling with starting a sales letter, there are few better ways to start than by using this structure.

This is especially true if you are a beginner, because sales letters use a structural form that doesn’t come naturally. Once you’ve handcopied some articles or spent time reading and creating sales letters, the structure becomes a bit more natural. Until then, AIDA is like riding a bicycle with training wheels.

It’s not the whole story though.

Why AIDA Is Not The Whole Story

Here’s the problem that I have when I explain stuff using the AIDA formula to people.

Go and read one of your favourite sales letters, or load up a landing page.

If the page is remotely sophisticated in terms of either design or copy, you’ll notice that there’s a lot going on. You might see:

• Videos
• Testimonials
• FAQ sections
• Multiple Calls to Action
• Stories and Anecdotes

…Or other wild and strange things that seem stupid but make total sense within the context of the page. (Think about those VSL’s that start with, “Here is a pizza, and I’m going to tell you about how this pizza saved my life. But first…”

Now, the problem is that people will ask (quite rightly) “Where do testimonials fit on your page?”

In terms of the AIDA structure… it depends. All of those things depend, because the AIDA structure isn’t the be-all and end-all of copywriting.

You can use a testimonial to grab attention. Or build desire. Or show you’re an authority. You can put a video at the beginning of a letter or at the end of it.

Ultimately, if you stick too rigidly to the AIDA formula, you run the risk of missing out on these little chances to make your sales page convert better.

How That Can Harm You

Let’s say you have a product that you’re going to sell on a landing page. We’ll talk in stereotypical terms because it gets the point across. So, we’ll pick a hypothetical muscle building pill that’s better than all of the others. Our structure could be:

• Attention (Headline):

“WARNING: Do NOT Take This Pill Unless You Want To Gain At Least 25lbs of Pure Muscle in the next 3 Days!

• Interest: “I was just some skinny geek. I got beaten up every day by the guys on the football team. So one day I decided to make a change in my life…I hit the gym. I set up those weights and I put Eye of the Tiger at full volume in my headphones. I slowly took a hold of the bar, tense and sweating. I told myself “This is just a warm up.” And you know what? I lifted those weights. It took some work, but I knew I’d feel it in the morning. I felt good. That’s when I heard some laughing from behind me… it was the football team captain, laughing at my pathetic display. I spent 6 months in that gym, and I got nowhere. What’s more, everyone laughed at me even more.
• Build Desire: But then I discovered NotQuiteRoids AlphaPill. I took those pills because my geek friend started bulking up and told me all the women inexplicably started cooing at him, and I looked at my sad life and thought, “What have I got to lose?” And you know… they changed my life too. I couldn’t believe the results, and it turns out there’s a simple reason why these pills are magical. It’s the rare ingredient farmed only in the hidden foothills of Taiwan.
• Call To Action: Look, I know you’re fed up of being a pencil-necked nerd. You can be built like Arnold in ten years’ time if you do steroids that shrink your penis or whatever. Or you can hit that buy button right now and BECOME A GOD

The Problem There

If I do say so myself, that’s a pretty convincing argument for these totally legit pills. It follows the AIDA formula closely and ticks all of those boxes.

The problem is that that won’t sell. There are a ton of other elements that you need to put into that sales page to assuage that particular market and those particular readers. Things like:

• Proof pictures
• Testimonials – preferably from credible sounding people
• A guarantee that’s so watertight that submarines could coat themselves in it
• Something to demonstrate every party’s credibility

Now, if you were to try and slot those things in, you’d agree that they take away from the AIDA format. After all, reading about the geek who goes from zero to hero is engaging and entertaining. But we need to sell, and you can’t sell just with an engaging story, even if it’s relatable and gets you most of the way there.

Final Thoughts

I did want to finish this article on a “So what do you do about that?” section. The truth is though the answer is complicated and dependent on the product, niche and company you’re working for. With that said, here’s my basic advice:

For drafting and general structure, AIDA is a decent format and starting point. You will have to include those elements.

After that though, the best course of action is to find examples in your niche and literally draw out the physical structure of the page. (It’s one of Gary Halbert’s other exercises that nobody talks about.)

Write exactly what you’re seeing and go as in-depth as your knowledge takes you.

So, if you’re a beginner, you might write “Testimonials.” Intermediate; “Testimonials that establish author’s authority.” Advanced: “Testimonials that establish authority through authority testimonial AND authority supplying real data from study.”

Then, backwards engineer from there. This will get you most of the way to understanding where certain things fit in across the overall structure.

If this last bit is a bit complicated, let me know in the comments because I’m pretty sure I need to do a better job of explaining this.