The Rule of Seven – how to deliver the seven marketing touches
Want to get more results from your marketing? Find out how to use the Rule of Seven and deliver the seven marketing touches your customers need.
Have you heard of the Rule of Seven? Marketing expert Dr Jeffrey Lant believes that, to penetrate a buyer’s consciousness and make significant penetration in a given market, you need to contact the prospect a minimum of seven times within an 18-month period.
If that sounds like hard work, or overkill, don’t worry. If you are organised, proactive and have a developed marketing strategy in place, then seven contacts or touches is manageable and do-able.
To help you, Nicole Martin from Pinpoint Marketing explains how you can deliver the seven touches.
How to use the Rule of Seven in your marketing
A well-rounded marketing strategy or plan will include all activities within the marketing mix, from offline marketing such as networking to online marketing such as social media.
So if you want to implement the Rule of Seven, here’s an example of seven touches you might use:
- Telemarketing – find the right contact through making a call to validate the data and start striking up a relationship.
- Social media – find and follow your contact on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc.
- Networking (known as personal selling in marketing terms) – attend the right events to make contact in person and further build on your relationship.
- Email marketing follow up (with permission) – use cloud based email marketing templates via Mail Chimp (or similar).
- Direct marketing – create a flyer, postcard, letter or invite to an event.
- Advertising – create an advert with a call to action to entice in your contact. This could be a printed advert in a newspaper or magazine (local or national) or an online advert in the media or social media. Make sure you know what type of publications or sites your contact reads and visits
- PR and articles – create a press release or write and submit an article to the above identified media. Show your expertise and be seen as an educator and someone of influence to the contact you are targeting.
These seven touches, or types of contact, can be implemented in any order according to your budget, resource and experience. The above is a suggestion though, based on a logical order to maximise on impact and ROI (return on investment).
Once you have settled into a pattern of weekly or monthly marketing activity, these seven steps can be rolled out time and time again for each new contact or audience that you and your business will be going after to build up your sales pipeline.
Remember though, it’s quality over quantity. Less leads that will buy from you are better than hundreds who will never make a purchase.
Depending on the deadlines and capacity of the media publications, your team in place and so on, these seven touches or contact points are very much achievable in the recommended 18-month period.
Two golden nuggets to weave into your marketing
The next step is to record your marketing activity. What you did, how it worked, any results gained etc. Also keep track of these activities in your database or CRM or even a simple Excel spreadsheet or Word document.
To finish up, be mindful of these two golden nuggets, and weave them into your seven touches of marketing where appropriate:
- Drip feed marketing – this concept looks at constantly feeding marketing messages to your contact. This constant and consistent approach ensures that the message gets through slowly but surely, which feeds perfectly into the theory of the seven touches.
- AIDA – the purpose of any marketing is to create awareness, raise interest, create a desire within the customer and to prompt the customer to take the action you want. So the ensure that each and every one of your seven touches does this through engaging copy, eye catching images, clear calls to action and more.
Pinpoint Marketing offers packages covering marketing planning and strategy brainstorming, so take a look and see how they can help.
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