Marketing Basics: Are you a quitter?

“It takes seven touches before you get noticed…” The last time I heard this statistic it had moved up to nine.  That means repetition.

Some of you already know what I’m talking about, for those of you that don’t, it simply means that a potential customer needs to have seven contacts or impressions by you before you begin to get noticed and can potentially close a sale.

So that means the consumer needs to see seven commercials, seven ads or receive seven emails or seven flyers before you work your way through the clutter the consumer is bombarded with every day.

That’s the problem…

I am not a patient person.  It is one of the reasons I don’t grow vegetables.  I want results and I want them now!  And I suspect most of you are the same, especially if you are just starting out.

You might run Google ads for a week without any leads and then change your ad or drop your ad altogether.  You might send out one email offering a freebie or discount and get one response, so you dump the email into the “didn’t work” file.

The problem is that maybe your email got deleted by mistake, perhaps it was dumped into the spam folder, maybe that day, in frustration, the consumer deleted everything they didn’t recognize, what if their computer was broken…

That’s the reason behind the idea of repetition.  Besides, repetition works.  The direct mail folks love to do research on this stuff and they’ve got lots of numbers to back up the idea that you have to make multiple impressions on a consumer before you get their attention.  Certainly you’ll have consumers who buy on the first contact but the majority does not.  If you give up too soon you lose the potential for bigger sales.

I see it all the time.  A business owner sends out one flyer, gets no response or a very small response and figures it doesn’t work so they dump the campaign.  Same for email campaigns, same for any campaign.

Aside from the fact that you can generally only expect a very small response, most mass campaigns get only a 1%-2% response rate which is considered good, most people don’t stick it out long enough to really know what is or isn’t working.

Same goes for tweaking the website.  The owner puts up new copy; it doesn’t convert as well as the old copy so they change it all.  Next week, same thing.

Patience

When my father, brother and I started our commercial millwork company it was relatively easy.  My father had been in the industry many years and had a good reputation.  We never had to market…still don’t.  We get most of our work from referral.

When I started the automotive repair business, we had no customer list at all.  And although my partner had a good reputation, no one knew where to find him.  It was very stressful.  For three months we sat looking out the window of our newly painted shop and waited.  $30,000 later we began to make some progress.  Yup, we lost 10k a month paying expenses with only one or two customers who happened to be friends.

It was pretty awful but I knew that it would take time.  We had to find our place in the consumer’s mind.  So we did our marketing and advertising for three months.  We didn’t give up.  After nine years we rarely advertise or market at all.  We pretty much have a referral business and it’s great.

The point is we stuck with it.  We never pulled ads, although they were expensive, we changed them a bit but kept at it.  We networked, handed out business cards, put business cards on cars, we just kept at it.  We had to get our name out.

Keep at it.

So don’t give up if you don’t get the results you seek immediately,  especially if you are running an online business where the noise is even greater than on a local level.  It is critical that you stick with your campaigns and make them multi-stepped.

The seven touch concept has upgraded to nine touches because the noise has become so great.  Think of those nine contacts as your “long-tail”.  As you hit contact 3 and 4 you’ll begin to see more response.  Then as you pass 5 and 6 you’ll see even greater response.  It just takes time.

The biggest take away is the simple act of consistency.  Be consistent.  Keep at it, don’t give up.  Your consistency in getting those impressions out in front of the consumer will pay it just takes a little time.

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