Continuing this series on 7 Timeless Marketing Rules, today a deeper dive into the concept of frequency that we started talking about yesterday.

First a reminder, Reach is how many different people will see/hear your message and Frequency is how often each person will see/hear your message.

Our brains are set up to filter out of our conscious recall most of the thousands of marketing messages we are exposed to each day.  Some studies say we exposed to over 5000 ads each day.  Others say we only are paying attention to less than 200 true ads. That last study I linked to says only 12 ads make an impression on us each day.

Let’s play a game for a second.  Jot down 10 ads you have seen or heard in the past 24 hours.  Do it right now, don’t wait for 10 ads to appear on your screen or elsewhere, we’re talking about recall and retention.

That was hard.  And I bet some of those are false memories.  You think you saw that ad today, but it was a couple days ago or longer.

This is why we don’t sell one ad on the radio or TV or Internet or nearly anywhere.  Our incredible memory machines (our brains) are able to filter out stuff that we don’t care about at the moment.

Our brains are also able to help us recall things we didn’t even know we knew.  But here’s how that works in the advertising and marketing world and how you need to plan your marketing to be the most effective. 6a00e54fafb9508834010535cfe543970b-800wi

About 10 years ago, my wife needed a special piece of glass for a project she was creating.  She asked me who to contact and I told her about City Glass, a company that has been advertising on one radio station since I was a teenager.  I never bought anything from City Glass, and wasn’t planning on it.  But City Glass was top of mind due to their continuous advertising for at least 40 years on one radio station.

This summer when our house heated up to 80 degrees, we called Doc Dancer, a local HVAC company that will be 70 years old next year.  It wasn’t their advertising that created Top Of Mind Awareness of Doc Dancer for my wife, it was because the owners go to the same church we do.  Interestingly, there are a couple other HVAC companies that are associated with our church, but neither came to my wife’s mind when we needed someone to diagnose and repair our A/C.  It must have been the repeated positive exposure to the owners of Doc Dancer that created Top Of Mind Awareness and created action to the point of us calling them and spending out money with them.

There are additional reasons for more than one invitation that I’ll explore in the future, but simply to build Top Of Mind Awareness for future business is an extremely important reason as demonstrated in those two examples.