Three Magic Words

There are three magic words that, at the end of the day, spell success or failure for your marketing effort: reach, frequency, and repetition.

Reach simply speaks to the number of potential buyers that you reach at any given time.  For instance, if there are 10,000 decision-makers/influencers in your market, how many of those people are identified in your database?  If you have 1,000 names in your database, then your current reach is 10%.  And that, based on my experience, is spectacular compared to the reach established by many high-tech sales organizations.

• You can quickly gain a “guesstimate” of your current reach by contacting any list broker and asking him/her to provide you with a count of demographically desirable companies within your marketplace.

• Once you know the count, multiply that number by the number of decision-makers or influencers that are involved in your typical sale.  The result of that multiplication will be the number of names that you should have (give or take a few) in your database.

You can’t optimize your sales results until you optimize your reach.

Frequency, on the other hand, speaks to the need to touch these demographically desirable individuals, regularly.  Depending who you talk to, you should touch every decision-maker/influencer in your market at least seven times per year; I favor a monthly touch.  By maintaining this level of frequency, you prevent decision-makers and influencers from forgetting about you.

Typical marketing (postcards, cold calling, lunch and learns, etc.) are excellent strategies to obtain top-of-mind awareness.  But, once obtained, retaining or maintaining top-of-mind awareness is the ultimate goal of every marketer.  Consequently, you must employ closed-loop marketing concepts to touch every decision-maker and influencer in your market, every month.

A touch can be a phone call, email, trade show meeting, face-to-face meeting, you name it.  But, work diligently to prevent people from forgetting about you.  Remember, “not now” doesn’t necessarily mean “not ever“.

The third magic word that needs to be applied by marketers is repetition.  Your audience of decision-makers and influencers will not absorb your marketing message and/or value proposition on your first attempt.  More often than not, you should repeat the message regularly.  We can discuss in future articles sophisticated methods such as split-testing, etc.

But, for all intents and purposes, if you’re not repeating your value proposition, you can bet that your market hasn’t fully absorbed the value that a relationship with you and your team will produce.

In summary, reach everyone, talk to them regularly, and repeat your value proposition constantly.  Those three simple steps will produce a dramatic improvement in your top and bottom line. What’s your thoughts on this?