The Rule of Repetition: How it's Crippling Your Marketing Efforts if You are Not Using it

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The Rule of Repetition is basic, yet very powerful. Simply put, it means that any marketing communication is most effective when it is repeatedly brought to the attention of the target market.

Why is repetition in your marketing so important? Most prospects don't respond immediately to a single marketing communication, or perhaps even several of them. There are various reasons for this:

• Repetition helps build familiarity, which in turn helps build credibility. Some prospects will start to recognize your company and products only after they've seen them over and over again. Gradually they come to recognize that your company is stable, not just another fly-by-night operation, and will eventually start to develop enough trust to start doing business with you.

• Your prospects are bombarded with many other 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 to be a very busy, time-pressured individual with a wide array of other things competing with your sales message for his/her time and attention. Even when your marketing communications win the attention of your prospect, and even if they decide they want to buy your product or service, other distractions in their busy lives can cause them to set your marketing materials aside. Soon, they may forget all about your offer.

• 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, many often do the easiest thing - procrastinate. But time works against you: the more time passes, the less your prospect remembers your offer.

• The timing of your offer may be bad for a particular 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 a major event in their lives, temporarily couldn't afford it, they weren't interested at the time, or a myriad of other possibilities.

• Other unfortunate things can happen.

  While your marketing communications are important to you, this often isn't so with your prospects (even if they requested them). They may lose or misplace them, throw them away, or perhaps accidentally delete or otherwise destroy them. Perhaps you haven't encouraged them to take immediate action, or maybe they just haven't yet realized that what you 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 that contend for the time, money and attention of your prospects. To convert those that don't respond immediately to your offers into buyers, you need to keep in touch with them repeatedly before they will finally be motivated to act.

  When you run your business by the Rule of Repetition, you won't just present your marketing message to your prospects one time and then rest contentedly, but you will be persistent in your marketing efforts, and will thus overcome many of the obstacles mentioned above.