Those same principles can apply to individuals hoping to expand or grow their careers, whether looking for new opportunities or simply wanting to gain visibility in the jobs they’re currently in.

Let’s take a look at those principles and how you can apply them to achieve your professional goals.

AIDA

AIDA—Attention, Interest, Desire, Action—is a foundational principle of marketing that dates back to 1898 when Elias St. Elmo Lewis created the framework to describe the customer purchasing process:

• First, the marketer must get the potential customer’s Attention.
• Then, the marketer must generate and sustain Interest in their product or service.
• Next, the marketer must convince their target audience that they Desire the product or service.
• Finally, the marketer must spur their prospect to take Action.

Importantly, that final step—Action—doesn’t signal the end of the process. Indeed, this is really the moment of truth. When the consumer makes the decision to purchase a product or service, in order to keep them engaged as a loyal customer and to encourage their positive word of mouth about the product or service, the marketer must deliver on the promises they made during the AIDA process.

Understanding Your Market or Target Audience

The AIDA model doesn’t just work automatically. Marketers can spend an enormous amount of time and money using this model without achieving desired success if they don’t have a solid understanding of their target audience.

That’s where the psychology of marketing comes into play. In order to generate some desired action from a target audience, you need to know how to drive them to take action by understanding their needs and interests—and the pain points that you may be able to fill. This isn’t a complicated process, and it’s something we’re already familiar with. From early childhood on, we’ve all been engaged in influencing audiences of various kinds, starting with our parents. The ability to influence your parents was dependent on understanding them—What was important to them? What needs and interests did they have? How could you speak to those needs and interests in ways that would achieve your own goals? For instance:

• You’re a kid and want a gooey dessert at a restaurant. You know your parents want you to be healthy. They also want to please you, especially when you’re off on a fun excursion. And you know that they like gooey desserts too. So, you make a deal: “If I eat all of my meal, can we share a dessert?”
• You’re a teenager and want to stay out past your curfew to attend a concert. You know your parents are interested in your safety above all else, but you also know they want you to have a good social life and good friends. You also know that there are certain parents they may like or trust more than others. So, in this case, you might convince them to let you attend the concert and stay out later by telling them that your friend’s parents will drop you off and pick you up from the concert and bring you home.

We use this same process of understanding interests and needs and then positioning our messaging accordingly as we interact with friends and others, including bosses or potential colleagues or partners.

Positioning Yourself for Career Success

Suppose you want a promotion at work. You have a specific job in mind. You know who the hiring manager is. Some important areas of exploration to help you position your messaging using the AIDA model would be:

• What types of employees have succeeded in this role in the past? What knowledge, skills, and abilities did they have?
• What are some of the key challenges the hiring manager faces in terms of achieving department goals and standing out effectively in their own right?
• What are the critical elements of the job, and how is your background and expertise a good fit?
• Where there may be gaps between your background and the needs of the position, how could you visibly demonstrate your ability in building expertise and experience?

Within your own organization, you have ample opportunity to get answers to these questions through your own observations and discussions, including discussions with the manager of the department you’re interested in.

But, even externally, you have opportunities to gain insights into managers and recruiters at organizations you may be interested in by following their social media channels and being attentive to the things they post and the comments they make about their jobs, their challenges, their employees, etc.

Armed with this knowledge, the next step is communication.

Communicating: Repetition Resonates

The marketing rule of 7 is a marketing principle that suggests that a potential customer needs to hear or see a message at least seven times before it begins to resonate. This means you need to proactively and explicitly ensure that your message (in this case, the desire to be promoted) is known and understood by your target audience—the hiring manager and also perhaps HR and executives.

How can you do this? Through a variety of means. The key, though, is recognizing that most employees don’t clearly and explicitly make it known that they have a desire to move up within the organization. They assume company leaders will just automatically know. They won’t.

So, what can you do? Consider:

• Sharing your career aspirations and interests with your manager during scheduled meetings and performance reviews
• Requesting informational interviews to learn more about different roles in the company
• Signing up for internal and external courses and training events—and sharing what you learned with colleagues and managers
• Volunteering to lead task forces or cross-functional processes
• Explicitly sharing your successes with concrete measures of performance when possible
• Volunteering to train or mentor others

Not every employee wants to move into another role, either within or outside of their organization. But if you do, there are ample ways to capture Attention, generate Interest, create Desire, and prompt Action on the part of internal leaders you hope to influence. Marketing isn’t just for brands; it’s also for career professionals.