Page 91 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

39 THAT FORMULA

You can’t write a book about copywriting without mentioning the
most potent formula for writing powerfully persuasive copy: our
old friend AIDCA. I discussed it in depth in my last book, Write to
Sell, but I make no apologies for picking it up again here. You can
write copy without it, maybe even very good copy. But why go to
the trouble?

Even when I don’t consciously follow AIDCA, I write copy that turns
out to use it as an underlying structure. It’s certainly fantastic for
planning your copy, allowing you to get all the main elements of
your sales pitch down in black and white. You don’t have to be a
slave to AIDCA, especially not the order, but boy does it help.

The idea

From almost every piece of copy I’ve ever written (though not all)
AIDCA, as you may well know already, stands for Attention, Interest,
Desire, Conviction, Action. As AIDA it’s been around pretty much
forever, maybe not as an explicitly codified approach to selling, but
certainly as a route into a prospect’s consciousness, through their
objections and toward a sale. When a market trader calls out “Come
on girls, lovely fresh pineapples, only a pahnd each!”—he’s got all
of AIDA right there in that ten-word announcement. And he’s been
doing that ever since there were markets.

Nowadays, people are more skeptical of sales claims than maybe
they were in earlier, less advertising-saturated times. So we add in
the C—for conviction. In other words, we aim to convince them
that it’s safe to act. Or, in other words, that what we are telling them

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