There’s an old maxim in advertising & marketing, it’s one of the oldest rules in our industry that dates back to Old Hollywood, and for once it’s arguably much more applicable to B2B than B2C. It’s the Rule of Seven. In essence, it maintains that it takes an average of seven viewings of (or interactions with) your brand before a buyer will purchase your product (or service). According to research commissioned by film studios in the 1930s, the public needed to see a film’s poster at least seven times before deciding to watch it.
Understanding the Rule(s)
Why Seven? Seven has significant symbolic associations, while psychology tells us it’s a highly memorable rule. In the 1950s, cognitive psychologist George Miller, a Harvard University professor, published a paper proposing that “humans can effectively process no more than seven units, or chunks, of information, plus or minus two pieces of information, at any given time.” Miller reached this conclusion after conducting a series of memory experiments. He also explained that to aid recall, it’s important to organise information into smaller, digestible portions. Since then, ‘Miller’s Law’ has become one of the most highly cited papers in psychology, helping us to understand how we process and recall information.
- Promoting familiarity and confidence
The core idea is simple and based on a psychological truth; repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity engenders confidence and trust. And trust is what you need to sell to people. Trust in your brand, your core message, your product. We’re talking about brand recognition and brand awareness.
Once your ideal target customer has engaged with your brand at least seven times – though an even older rule states 20 times – they’re more likely to remember and engage with your offering when the occasion arises. In B2B, that’s usually, when their maximum ‘pain-point’ level has been reached.
- Repetition helps you connect
When was the last time you saw an ad on TV or social media for the first time then rushed over to their shop or website to make a purchase? With so many of us exposed to ever increasing levels of advertising and marketing, even the most creative and compelling content needs to be seen a number of times to ‘cut through’ the noise. Often, that creative work is building on an already familiar, well-established brand. Repetition ensures that the message reaches through and makes a connection in the consumer’s mind. Do you know why brands write jingles? Because they can be insanely memorable, and their repetitive techniques can work as a fast track to achieving lasting familiarity.
- Reinforcing the message
Arguably, the need for repetition to reinforce key brand messaging is especially true of B2B, as Mark Ritson of Mini MBA fame conceded in a recent article, “The buying committee is infinitely more complex than a single consumer.” B2B almost always means selling to a collective and the decision-making process can easily take several weeks. Sometimes months. In that time, you need to maintain your brand messaging, with each new encounter reinforcing the previous one; building up brand recall and creating positive associations with your product or service.
As Ty Heath, from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute says, “Most of your growth potential lies in reaching people who won’t buy from you today, but who will buy from you in the future.”
Put another way; why does Coca Cola, the world’s truly universal brand that’s known by all, advertise so much and so frequently, often saying much the same thing? Because they’re at the top of their game – and want to stay there.
Applying the Rule of Seven
Here are seven tips to making sure the rule of seven is working for you:
1. Know your customer
Truly define who it is you’re targeting and talking to. Lift the lid. Get under the hood. Get to know their aspirations and their pain points. Relate to them and their situation and you’ll start revealing rare insights. You can create a target persona to neatly define who you’re pursuing. It’s all to get the right message at the right time to the right audience.
2. Mix up your marketing
Which is not to say you should try a scattergun approach, but your marketing plan should carefully consider where best to catch your targets. If you’re only advertising on the same page in the same magazine, you’ll be missing out. You need a combination of channels with the right reach and frequency to really connect.
3. Consistent messaging is key
You need to focus on what’s truly important. Too many messages = too many executions for your main message to gain traction. You have a short time to capture your market’s attention. Maximise that time and use consistency to achieve cut-through.
4. Consistent branding is vital too
To establish and grow your brand, your targets need to see it in action with the same fonts, colours, logos, style of imagery, language and tone, and messaging. Your brand can evolve over time, but you need to establish it first, and that means promoting familiarity through repetition.
5. Keep on track and manage your channels
Learn to ‘Fail Fast’, then move on and focus your resources on your successes. Say, if your social posts are flopping but your videos are going ‘gangbusters’, then you should know where to direct your efforts to achieve the best ROI. Measure your metrics, and adjust your approach based on the data.
6. Let it settle
You need to allow enough time for the ‘magic to happen’. It will be more than seven days. It takes time for the messaging to sink in and resonate. People need to be nurtured to respond how you want them to; again, that takes time. Remember, you’re playing a long game.
7. Follow up
If you’ve got customers interested, that’s really great – now you need to engage with them. It’s a process of nurturing and relationship building, establishing and building trust, leading to conversions. Remember, once an organisation starts to engage with you, they are more inclined to continue. It’s an emotional transaction as well as a business decision. Which you need to reinforce.
And there we have it; seven tips for the rule of seven. Remember, if you need a boost to your brand visibility, to achieve greater reach, recognition and awareness, and if you need help connecting to and persuading your targets, then it’s time to talk to an agency that knows how to do B2B brilliantly.
