In 1898, an insurance salesman named E. St. Elmo Lewis wrote a pioneering marketing textbook called, Financial Selling. In it, he created a tool he called the “AIDA Sales Funnel”. That four step model for customer engagement is still valid today.
Back then, Lewis thought that each sales rep would be responsible for all for steps in the sales funnel – including paying for their own advertising to reach potential customers.
Today, the traditional “AIDA” marketing model helps to assign appropriate roles, rules, and responsibilities for the four stages of customer engagement. In a distributed marketing model, the AIDA cycle looks like this:
- The AIDA demand generation model.
In most companies, corporate marketing creates the attention, interest, and desire – and local marketing generates the action. That’s why empowering local marketing to deliver customized, localized messages to customers is among the best investments available to a marketer.
For more information on how to create an effective distributed marketing process that brings the 113-year-old AIDA marketing model into the 21st century, download a free white paper Empowering Local Marketing now.