AIDA the final two pieces

Last week I talked about atten­tion and inter­est, this week I’ll cover the two final and extremely impor­tant ele­ments of this for­mula, desire and action. It’s great to get atten­tion and even bet­ter to have folks really inter­ested in your stuff, but…unless you can turn that inter­est into desire and ulti­mately action you’re not going to be able to move out of the cube farm any­time soon.

Desire

This a crit­i­cal step in the process, because even though you’ve man­aged to cap­ture poten­tial buyer’s atten­tion and inter­est you have to light the fire of desire that peaked their atten­tion in the first place. For those of with souls this step is the chance to show them you know them and what they need. More­over, this step is not about sell­ing or con­vinc­ing it is about reveal­ing and enhanc­ing how your stuff can help them.

Even though you’ve gone to great extremes to get them to this point all that was just the tip of the ice­berg. Now you get to help them see and expe­ri­ence the gift of the emo­tional labor you’ve included with each piece.

Lan­guage

Talk to them using lan­guage that reflects the emo­tional labor of your work, don’t just describe the phys­i­cal and prac­ti­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics, that’s not why you make what you do. You don’t have to get all touchy and feely help them see the hid­den sur­prises in your work. Use lan­guage that reflects the feel­ings you want your work to evoke, and do it by show­ing them, help them dis­cover the gift.

Gift focused

Each piece of your work has a gift included in it, the gift of you and the emo­tional labor of your vision. One key way to decom­modi­tize your work is to help your buy­ers see the gift it is. Whether your work is designed to hang on a wall, sit on a din­ner table or be some­thing peo­ple wear, when­ever you work crosses paths with oth­ers it becomes a gift, spark­ing a reac­tion in oth­ers. That reac­tion, that awak­en­ing is your gift, the more your work shares that gift the less it is seen as an object.

Tell the story

Con­sciously or uncon­sciously your work tells a story, a story of your gift and your vision, cre­at­ing desire helps bring that story to the sur­face by mak­ing it vis­i­ble to those who are seek­ing it.

Design each sales venue in a way that enhances the story, a way that sparks the poten­tial buyer to become engrossed in each piece, see­ing a dif­fer­ent chap­ter with each piece they inter­act with. More impor­tantly, you want the story be strong and vis­i­ble enough to turn the spark into a fire that com­pels poten­tial buy­ers to con­nect your gift with their needs.

Action

This final step is where every­thing you’ve done so far cul­mi­nates, where the buyer either con­nects with your vision, your gift or doesn’t. And it doesn’t solely rely on them to make the deci­sion to become a stew­ard of your gift. Often would be buy­ers get to the desire point and are not able to make the move that will ensure they can take your gift home.

Tra­di­tion­ally, this is where you make the all impor­tant “call to action” where you ask for the sale. And I don’t think this works for artists, instead you need to make the path to becom­ing a stew­ard of your gift clear by con­sis­tently remind­ing would be buy­ers of the good­ness of their choice. I’m not nec­es­sar­ily talk­ing about con­ver­sa­tion here, that works also, and it can be enhanced through the way you design hang tags, the way you phrase the on-line mes­sage that points the way to the “Buy Now” button.

More often than not, some­one who con­nects with your work and really wants to become the stew­ard of your work never makes it because the path isn’t clear, the action they need to take to expe­ri­ence your gift is not obvi­ous, so…they move on.

Make sure the path is clearly marked…