A few years ago, Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal posted on four buying cycle stages in PPC campaigns: Discover, Research, Compare, and Purchase. His post also introduced "buying cycle modifiers" like "free, article, download, checklist, buy, and cheap" - general words that align with stages in the buying cycle:

As an acronym, "DRCP" is hard on the neurons. Harvard Business School graduates prefer AIDA. This mnemonic model (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA) parses a consumer's "buying cycle" into four stages: Attention - Interest - Decision - Action.

In an economic downturn, Internet advertisers must demonstrate ROI to stay in business. I am grateful to Marketo's Jon Miller for his contributions at http://blog.marketo.com/. In Seven Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession, Jon recommended targeting content to later stages in the buying cycle:

focus your offers on content that will appeal to someone who's actually looking for a solution (as opposed to thought leadership and best practices content, which can appeal to prospects who may one day have a need but are not currently looking).

For an 8th strategy, extend this recommendation to keyword selection. Prospects use different keywords at different stages of their buying cycle, and ad offer content and keywords should be aligned with that cycle. In short:

Choose Keywords

with AIDA in mind.

All the elements behind the AIDA Keywords concept are already out there in the PPC blogosphere. The mission of this blog is to articulate the relationships between the keywords people enter and their stage in the AIDA buying cycle, first with clear but hypothetical examples, and then by exploring real-world contexts.

Reader participation is advised.

Bram Moreinis
Principal, PPC Tarmac