What is the Marketing Rule of Seven?

There’s a lot of different savvy tips in the business world, and the Marketing Rule of Seven is one of them. For bloggers and social media marketers, this is a powerful concept to use. This article will talk about what the Marketing rule of Seven is, and how it can benefit you. There may even be a few tools mentioned, to get you started on using this marketing concept.

What is the Marketing Rule of Seven?

The Marketing Rule of Seven is based on some of the concepts of Effective Frequency in marketing. It’s not something that originated in the 1930s from the movie industry or a marketing concept that was coined the Rule of 7, by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

In advertising, the effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful. – Wikipedia

In today’s world, with how social media has millions of users pushing information into each network, millions of others are scrolling through it. With the Marketing Rule of Seven, it revolves around that your audience, when they see your message, then they will hear and act on it, whether it’s buying something, or sharing something, or whatever it is that you’re asking them to do.

In fact, if you’re on Twitter, your tweet’s length of time that it can reach your audience, is 18 minutes!

With Facebook, your Facebook posts life expectancy can reach your audience between 3-5 hours, and pretty much 75-percent of the engagement is done during that time. From understanding, this is from personal profiles, and not pages or groups. With groups, some already engage at a higher rate, like funny meme groups.

The stats seem a bit daunting, but this where the Marketing Rule of Seven comes in handy.

How does the Marketing Rules of Seven benefit your marketing plans?

Most people, when they send a message out to their social network audiences, probably only send one message, whether it’s a blog post or whatever it may be. Then it just gets buried in all of the other things that other people put online. It’s the reason why people jokingly call Twitter a pool, and as crude as it sounds… when everyone pisses in the pool, it’s hard to tell one thing from the next, as it all gets drowned out. Again, excuse the vulgar comparison.

So, how can you benefit? Well, the answer is simple, and yet also needs to be explained. The trick is to send your message out 7 different times. However, you should also consider different ways.

Take for instance, that you published a blog post, and then sent it out to Facebook, Twitter, and maybe a few other places. That’s great that you did, but you need to do more than that.

Ideas to Varying your message on Social Network sites

There are a lot of things you can do, in order to multiply your message, without sending the same thing over and over. That’s not what you always want to do. You need to vary your message, both in text, and also medium. A medium, is how the message is sent, and in the case of this article, they are:

• Text
• Image
• Audio
• Video

Text

Text will always be the most basic way to convey your message. If you’re pushing out the same message, several times, to social networks, you will want to make sure they are not exactly the same. Most people associate this medium with blog posting, but you’ll also use this for email news letters, and your social media channels.

Image

Images are handy, as they can bring forth another dimension to your message, especially with the right image. Make sure your images are vivid and relate to what you’re trying to say. In fact, in combination with text on images, you can make several images, with a rewritten version of the message.

Audio

If you’re into things like podcasting, but don’t like using video, you can make short blurbs to promote your message. You can even combine it with text, images, and put your audio into video.

Video

Video can be powerful. In fact, other than social media channels, you can utilize platforms like Youtube, which can help increase the potential reach to your message. If you’re blogging, you can turn your blog post into a video version. You could even make smaller video blips to push out to other social networks where shorter video will reach a lot more people, that will engage more. In fact, Blitz Metrics talks about how powerful 1 minute videos can be for your social media marketing.

It’s important, no matter what medium you choose to use, that your message for each one you publish to any social media channel, tell a story that people can connect or product some sort of reaction. It’s important to be unique, and entertaining… kind of what Google Quality Guidelines says, when you’re putting a website together (Related: Google Quality Guidelines 101 WordPress Bloggers.) Hmm… they might be onto something with that. 😉

Now what?

Well, the next is to schedule your posts out on your social networks. You’ll want to take a little time to schedule them using tools like Hootsuite, IFTTT or whatever your preferred social media scheduling tool might be. This will automate some of your work, and eliminate the need to keep going to post on one social network or the next.

Additionally, if you use WordPress, you might want to utilize the plugin Revive Old Posts. If your articles have no expiration and have true information that is timeless, aka evergreen content, this plugin allows you to set up your posts to be published in the future. The plugin usually picks posts randomly, but it’s pretty handy, especially if you have a lot of articles on your site, that you don’t want collecting dust. Please note that this plugin is for posts, so if you’re wanting to schedule for your landing pages or other static type pages, then you’re going to want to utilize a social media scheduling tool to push them out to social networks.

Do you use the Marketing Rule of Seven concept? If so, what have you found best works for you, with tools, and what mediums do you use the most?