The Rule of Repetition: How It's Crippling Your Marketing Efforts If You're Not Using It

Copyright Marty Foley, http://OptInZip.com

The Rule of Repetition is very powerful, yet overlooked by many businesses and entrepreneurs.

Simply put, it means that any marketing communication is most effective when repeatedly brought to the attention of your target market.

Why is repetition in your marketing so critical? Because most of your prospects won't take action the first time exposed to it, no matter how good it is.

There are various reasons for this:

• Your prospects aren't familiar enough with you yet.

Repetition helps build familiarity, which in turn helps build trust and credibility. Some prospects will start to recognize your company and products only after repeated exposure.

Gradually more will come to recognize that your company is not just another fly-by-night operation, and will then start to do business with you.

• Your prospects are bombarded with myriad distractions in their busy lives.

You see, your typical prospect does not sit idle each day waiting for your marketing materials to make their grand entrance so he/she can eagerly read them over and over again, savoring each and every word. Hardly!

Your prospect is likely a busy, time-pressured person with a wide array of things competing with your sales message for their time and attention.

Even when your marketing communications win the attention of a prospect, and even if they decide they want your product or service, other distractions in their busy lives can cause them to delay action, and soon forget all about you and your wonderful widgets.

• Your prospects may not yet have made a decision in your favor.

Understandably, some prospects need more time than others to decide whether or not to act on your offer. Instead of making a decision, most will often do the easiest thing - procrastinate. But time works against you: the more time passes, the less chance you'll make the sale.

• The timing of your offer may be bad for a given prospect.

Many prospects will miss your marketing message the first time around. Perhaps because they were on vacation, it didn't sink in, they were distracted by other events in their lives, temporarily couldn't afford it, weren't interested at the time, or countless other reasons.

• Other unfortunate things can happen.

While your marketing communications are important to you, they're less important to prospects (even if they asked for them). They may lose or misplace them, throw them away, or accidently destroy them.

Further, perhaps you haven't encouraged them to take immediate action, or maybe they just haven't yet realized how your offer can benefit them. Regardless of the cause, the unfortunate result is that they don't (or can't) do business with you.

As we've just considered, your marketing communications are competing with so many other things contending for the time, money, and attention of your prospects.

To convert the highest percentage of those who don't act immediately on your sales messages into buyers, you must present it to them repeatedly.

As an example of the effectiveness of this approach, one highly successful direct marketer said jokingly that his company keeps sending direct mail to prospects "until they buy, or die."

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should bombard untargeted, disinterested prospects with your marketing when avoidable. That's just inefficient and wasteful.

But when you conduct your marketing campaigns by the Rule of Repetition to the extent possible, you won't just present your message to prospects one time and rest on your laurels.

Instead, you'll be persistent in your marketing efforts, ideally targeting only interested prospects who are in a position to do business with you.

Done properly, you'll overcome many obstacles mentioned above, and will increase sales as a result.