Consistency, consistency, consistency

Does your logo appear on everything you send out? Do you have a house font that you use religiously? Is your core message present in every communication? If not, your marketing materials are not working to their full potential.

It takes prospects between five and nine times to move from reading your message to actually getting in touch. Even then, the reader will not be paying attention all of the time. Prospects might consciously or subconsciously read the message only once out of three exposures. That means the number can then jump from nine exposures to firmly get your message across, to twenty-seven.

Does that mean that you have to bombard prospects with twenty-seven ads or twenty-seven pieces of direct mail? Well, not exactly. If you can provide a consistent message throughout every contact you have with prospects, this number can be cut considerably – meaning you won't have to wait months for your product / service to start selling.

Got a logo? Use it in every ad that you produce, every letter you send out, every page of your website, on your brochure, on your business card, basically any interaction you have with potential customers. If you don't have a house font, choose one. This will also allow prospects to recognise that the message they are receiving comes from your company. As will attaching your core message to every piece of promotion you use.

Familiarity breeds liking. People tend to rate familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar. Psychological studies have shown that even when people are exposed to things in time-spans below the perceptual threshold, they later prefer these things to others they were not exposed to. In relation to your company's offering, this indicates that the more they are exposed to your brand and message, the more familiar it will become to them and therefore the more positively they will view you.

Of course, this does not take into account any rational or emotional reasons for liking or disliking your brand. People may be happy to use familiarity to inform unimportant decisions, or decisions where the choices are all fairly equal. When more is at stake, however, familiarity might be relegated further down the list of influencing factors. Yet this does not mean that you should discount its power.

The more your prospects see your message in a consistent way, in a variety of mediums, the more the message will penetrate. Prospects do need to be in the market for your type of product to pay your message any attention and they will need to view your company positively to buy from you. But a consistent, clear message, reinforced a number of times will help significantly.

So, does your logo appear on everything you send out? Do you have a house font that you use religiously? Is your core message present in every communication? If not, your marketing materials are not working to their full potential. Make sure they do.