Who only goes to the gym once?

Here’s a list of things that don’t work too well if you give up after only the first try:

– Going to the gym
– Driving a car
– Juggling flaming knives
– Marketing for a small business

With all these, if you give up early, and you just wouldn’t get results. And believe it or not, it’s the last one that we’re the most concerned with, as it’s by far the most dangerous.

Seriously. While there are hospitals for clownish accidents, there isn’t one for businesses that can’t grow and fail.

It is thus extremely important to stay the course and see it through. As they say, it takes seven years of hard work to become an overnight success. Are you working on yours?

Repeat after me: Repetition, repetition, …

Marketers who stick with it know that success is partly sticking to their plan and the other part is repetition. Repetition isn’t simply saying the same thing over and over again either, although it can be. Canny marketers know that there are three types:

• Direct repeats
• Repetition across channels
• Flavored repetition

In the first scenario, you should be sending the same postcards to the same list once every 2-3 weeks. This works well because people start to expect that it’s coming and you build a rolling awareness with them.

It takes, on average, 7 such postcards for your brand to become cemented in such a prospect’s mind. Some will buy sooner, but that’s when things really tip in your favor.

This outright repetition is how you land “born-again” leads who were once interested, shelved the idea of purchasing, and then make a quick buy once reminded. You want to be careful however, because according to a 1970 study on repetition in marketing, after the novelty of your marketing wears off people enter a “worn-out” phase where your repetition actually starts to hurt you.

For an example of this just think about how in the mid 2000’s Comcast played back-to-back-to-back television spots and seriously upset consumers who sometimes saw the same ad three times in a row. Too much of a good thing can be a bad.

Switch up your channels

For the best approach, balance out your repeat touches by broadcasting them across many different channels too. When consumers see your ads on TV, the radio, in their mail, and in their email, you’ve activated what’s known as the availability heuristic. That’s where we assume that just because we’re seeing something a lot, that it’s important.

Evolutionarily, this instinct has been extremely useful, but nowadays with cheap, mass digital marketing you can achieve the same effect as true news might have hundreds of years ago. Being on many channels leads people to believe that everyone is talking about you, which then leads them to wonder why they too haven’t tried your service.

Switch up your message

And finally, if you want to keep that repetition going across channels and over a long period of time (and you should), you’ll want to start to vary pieces of your ad to keep things fresh and interesting. For example, keep the same branding and header message on your postcard, but change the value proposition or the pictures of people.

Allstate Insurances’ mayhem campaign does this by featuring the same actor, same suit, and same message in a variety of situations.

Persistence beats resistance

We hate to sound like a broken record, but excuse us: repetition and consistency are the true keys to marketing success! Just as you wouldn’t expect to become a bodybuilder after one trip to the gym, you shouldn’t expect your customers to remember when, where, how, and why they should buy from you after one postcard. It’s going to take many.

That’s why you have to repeat your marketing to repeat your success!

Ready to try it out? Send another postcard right now through our web-to-print platform and get one step closer to that next sale.

If you need help designing a hands-free repetition marketing campaign that’ll run for months on its own, call the experts at Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109!