Hopefully, you are here because you were intrigued by the slightly strange article title. I’ll admit, when I was trying to think of a title that tied both of the ideas for building your sales that I wanted to talk about here together, I struggled.
So instead of coming up with a boring generic thing that covered both, I thought I’d go with the slightly unconventional option and explain why the “rule of 7” and “going where the fish are” are the two strategies you need to be using to get more sales.
The Rule of 7
Previously, researchers thought that we were rational beings who weighed up all of the options before making the best choice. But recently, it’s become more and more clear that’s not actually the case.
The modern world is confusing and filled with information. Some estimates say that we are required to make literally thousands of micro-decisions every day, from what we eat multiple times a day, to the route we are going to travel, to what work we are going to prioritize today. If you own and run your own online business or small business, then you probably have far more decisions per day than the average human!
That’s why repetition and “remarketing” matters. And that’s where the rule of 7 comes in. It’s estimated that buyers who don’t know about a new product or service need to hear about it or see it at least seven times before they take any further action on it. Don’t take it as a hard and fast prescription for success. The actual number might be six or eight. But the point is clear – once just ain’t enough.
Facts like this make it clear why “legacy” advertising formats like radio and out of home advertising (billboards and digital signage) are still so effective and growing, even though digital marketing has emerged as a dominant force in recent years. Simply putting an ad for a product on a morning radio show, and having a billboard for that product on a busy highway means that commuters in that area might be exposed to the advertising message for that product up to ten times in a week.
That’s one piece of the puzzle.
Going Where the Fish Are
Of course, digital allows you to take that billboard or radio message and “level it up”. When people who are interested in your product or service visit your website or click on one of your ads, they are showing what’s called “positive intent”. That means that they’ve shown some level of interest already.
That also means that they are further along the journey to becoming a customer than someone who passively views your Facebook ads without engaging with them.
So the simple question is this: who do you want to target? The large number of people who passively see your messages or the small number of people who’ve displayed positive intent? The answer, in a heartbeat, should be retargeting and remarketing to the small number of leads who’ve shown positive intent.
That’s what tools like Connect Retarget help you do. is a tool that has advanced behavior-based custom audience building, which retargets only your most engaged visitors. It lets you put your ads in front of those visitors multiple times, to get closer to that “rule of 7” while spending a fraction of what you would if you were to buy radio time or billboard space.
Put simply, it lets you “go to where the fish are” when you cast your marketing message into the world. And that is a recipe for much bigger “catches” and returns on investment when it comes to your marketing dollars.
