AIDA Model
Attention · Interest · Desire · Action
What is the AIDA model?
- A four-stage mental flow: Attention → Interest → Desire → Action
- A tool for diagnosing which stage is leaking
- B2B needs adaptation for multiple decision-makers and intermediate conversions
The first thing that changes when you actually start using AIDA is the language of your meetings. Taste debates like 'I think this copy is a bit weak' turn into pinpointing the problem: 'Impressions are fine but click-through is 0.4%, so we're losing people on the first screen.' Pinning the problem on a stage, not on a person is the practical value of this model. It lets you fix only the one broken stage instead of tearing down the entire detail page.
Once you've split the journey into stages, you only get a real diagnosis by attaching a proxy metric to each one. Typically, Attention is read through impressions and click-through rate, Interest through 50% scroll depth and time on page, Desire through views of case-study and pricing pages, and Action through form completion rate. A funnel and AIDA are different things. A funnel is the shape of your own data shrinking, while AIDA is the sequence that unfolds in the customer's mind, so staring at funnel numbers alone will never tell you why people dropped off.
In B2B, the four stages don’t finish on a single screen. A and I happen in ads, I and D in landing pages and materials, and D and Action in meetings and quotes, with typically 3 weeks to 6 months in between. Action also has to be defined as an intermediate step such as a material download or demo request, not a purchase, or it can’t be measured. On top of that, the practitioner, the line-of-business team lead, finance, and the CEO each stand at a different stage, so you end up managing not one person’s AIDA but three or four at the same time.
The most common misunderstanding is believing every visitor walks through the stages in order, starting from A. If you lay out three scrolls of problem-statement copy for a returning visitor who has already finished comparing competitors and came to check pricing, you end up driving away someone who was ready to buy. Conversely, if you inflate Desire with lines like “cut costs in half in 3 months,” contracts close faster but come back six months later as claims and cancellations. In B2B especially, if you win over the contact person but give them no grounds for the approval memo (ROI calculation, budget line items, risk response), that enthusiastic contact stalls at the approval threshold.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Euijung KimBrand strategist with 30 years in advertising, formerly a division head at Daehong CommunicationsIt started from a stage theory that E. St. Elmo Lewis, an American advertising and sales expert, put together in 1898 to train salespeople. It later became the prototype of advertising-effect hierarchy models and gave rise to many variants (AIDCA, AIDAS, and others).
Let’s look at a hypothetical case: Company A, a logistics automation solution provider with 90 employees and annual revenue of KRW 24 billion (≈ US$17,956,000). It spends KRW 6 million (≈ US$4,490) a month on search ads, yet in three months it got only 8 website inquiries. The CEO said, “Let’s change the ad agency,” but the marketing team decided to first look at which stage was leaking.
- Mr. Kim, a marketing manager, pulled three months of logs and found that 68% of 3,200 ad clicks left on the first screen. They had paid for attention, but every visitor was dropping off at Interest.
- When the first-screen headline changed from “The new standard in logistics automation” to “Built for 3PL sites spending 4 hours a day on outbound picking,” the 50% scroll-depth rate rose from 31% to 54% in two weeks.
- The head of sales said, “It has to read exactly like what customers actually say in meetings,” so three sentences from a warehouse manager interview and an on-site photo went into the Interest section as they were.
- For the Desire section, they added a before-and-after table showing a comparable 3PL’s picking time dropping from 4 hours to 1 hour 20 minutes, plus a calculator that returns the payback period once you enter shipment volume.
- In the Action section, the single CTA at the bottom became 3 CTAs, one per section, and the form shrank from 7 fields to 3: name, company email, and monthly shipment volume.
- Three months later, the ad budget was still KRW 6 (≈ US$1) million, but monthly inquiries rose from 8 to 27 and 11 of them led to meetings, so cost per lead fell from KRW 750,000 (≈ US$560) to KRW 220,000 (≈ US$165).