Aida Formula

Imagine you had a tool that helped you structure your spa marketing strategy!

Is it not highly confusing hearing all those different advises:

“you have to have social media activities for your Spa”
“your Spa needs its own blog”
“you just cannot give up high glossy print brochures”
“you should invest in better IT solutions”
“traditional ads still work best”
“public relations is important to your brand image”…?

I am sure you have heard those or similar ones which may have caused some doubts, and which may make you feel running behind.
None of those statements are wrong, yet none of them are entirely right either.

Which spa marketing activities are really useful for you spa and which ones you can easily give up, can be identified by applying the AIDA formula.

In marketing in general, the AIDA formula has been known for a long time and is until today “an oldie but goody”. Of course, starting point is always your overall business strategy and identifying your target customer, which can then be covered with the AIDA model as grid.

AIDA stands for

A – Attraction

I – Interest

D – Desire

A – Action.

Briefly translated, it means: Attract your target customer, keep his or her interest, trigger a desire for you product which leads to a wanted action.

Apply this great framework that can help you keep focused on your business strategy:

A – Attraction
Every business needs attention and be noticed.

It is fairly easy to gain simple attention, for example by a crazy action videotaped and published on youtube. Ok, so far so good, yet this is NOT what you want for a business.

A business wants to attract the right people, your target market. Which equally means that simply lots of traffic (for example in a social media channel) is not an indicator alone that you attracting the right customer.

By choosing the wrong marketing channels, you may spread your message way to broad and not reach the people you want to address, thus wasting time and money.

Choosing suitable marketing channels is a careful selection process.

Attraction can work with social media. Yet beware of the variety of social media channels, not every channel is right for your business.

Good questions to ask yourself are:

In which channel/s is my target customer active?
When are they active in this/these channels?
What demographics do they belong to?
What are they looking for? General information? Entertainment? Product information? Making purchases?
What language do they speak? Formal? Informal? Do they use special terms?
Words or pictures?

I – Interest

Keeping customers interest means keeping their attention. What you have on offer has to be useful and interesting.

This is the hard part: recurrent and sustainable attraction! A great one-off attention creator is excellent, yet not sustainable. Thus in order to keep customers interest, you need reoccurrence.

Relationships help in this case, so this is the time to build personal relationships with your customers.

A tool for keeping personal communication are emails.

D – Desire

Businesses can only sell what their target is asking for. Products and service offers have to fulfil a need or desire of the customer.

It is hard to ‘create’ a desire or need of your customer, better to trigger or channel an existing one.

So the Spa’s message should be: “This is what your life would look like if you chose my solution (i.e. massage) to your problem (i.e. muscle stiffness)”.

This is the time to also eliminate objections, for example by presenting other customer’s reviews and recommendations.

A tool that can help to trigger desire is for example a blog.

A – Action

You can inspire your customer act in different ways, depending on what you are looking for. Actions can be non-profit-generating at first, however should all eventually lead to revenue.

Desired actions can be for example:

making a reservation
making a booking
a sales transaction
signing up for a newsletter
joining a club / membership
engage in social media activities
word of mouth
bring a friend
redeem vouchers
respond to sales promotions etc.

Conclusion:

The AIDA model is a great visual making one understand, that spa marketing has to be a chain of interrelated actions and elements, not simply disconnected individual activities.