Effective marketing REQUIRES repetition.

Let me say that again. If marketing is going to work for you, you are going to have to repeat yourself. Over and over again.

Saying it once is not going to do the job. SHOWING it once isn’t going to do the job.

Somehow, it just doesn’t sink in or get believed until it has been repeated many times.

One study found that consumers had to see an ad 9 times on the average before they responded. But that it had to run 27 times to be seen 9.

I know a business owner who responded to repeated mailings from a consulting company…. after they mailed to him 75 times.

Seventy-Five Times.

I’ve never seen a good explanation of why this is. But it is an observable fact. So, what do you do about it? Let’s explore the implications.

The first thing to know: A campaign that ASSUMES a response the first time your message is seen, is doomed to failure. This explains at once why TV advertising is not for the small business. You can’t afford to run a commercial often enough to get noticed.

A marketing campaign should be budgeted to run forever – even if you never make a dime off it.  That’s an exaggeration of course. But it can take six months of repetition and fine-tuning for a campaign to really get cooking.

MEASURE AND REFINE

If you can’t expect an initial positive return on investment, how do you judge if it is working? Because you can’t wait six months to find out that your campaign isn’t reaching the right market, or with the right message.

I have two rules of thumb on this. The first is, if your campaign is on-the-money, it will get SOME response immediately. If it gets NOTHING, you’d better bail on it and figure out what is wrong. If you can get some response, then you can get more, as you repeat and refine your campaign.

The other point has to do with what are called “sub-statistics.” If you are ultimately going for a purchase, there are many small steps on the way there. Some of these can be measured.

If it is a Google Ads campaign, the first one is “impressions” (your ad is being seen). Then you get “clicks” (someone thought enough of your ad to click on it). Then a reasonable “click through rate” (the percentage of people who saw the ad who then clicked on it). If that percentage is too low, most of those clicks could be accidental.

You’ll see visits to your website increase. If the bounce rate (percentage who leave the site at once) is too high, those clicks aren’t going to translate into contacts (leads). Then people need to spend enough time on the site to get interested.

Every one of these steps can be refined and improved with a resulting increase, not only in the sub-statistic that measures it. You should get an increase in every sub-statistic that comes after it.

It’s like a water hose that you’ve been taking the kinks out of. At some point, the water (leads) start to flow out the end. And if the leads are of decent quality and well handled, you start getting sales, and, ROI (Return on Investment).

This is just as big a lesson as “you must have repetition.” You make sure you can continue to AFFORD to repeat your campaign. Then the result of the repetition is prosperity and expansion.

It’s often a lengthy and difficult job to get to that point. But how worth it that is! I went through this process with my own business. It took three months to get the first lead and five to get the first sale, but that campaign has been the primary source of business for my company for over eleven years now.

You can do the same.