How often should you publish self-promo posts/emails is one of the most frequent questions I get during my strategy sessions. It’s a great question, too, because we all want to sell but we don’t want to annoy our audience either.
The unbearable truth: the more you talk about your offers, the more you’ll sell.
The unbearable consequence: if you only talk about your offers, you’ll bore and annoy your audience — yes, even people who would have eventually bought from you if you hadn’t sounded like a car salesman.
How do you reconcile the two?
Psychology says you should repeat your message as often as possible
Propaganda 101 says that, the more you repeat something, the more it becomes ingrained in people’s minds and perceived as the truth, whether it is or not.
Like it or not, propaganda and marketing have quite a lot in common.
Here’s why repeating a message works:
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The Recency Effect
People tend to recall the most recent information more accurately. (source)
Picture this: someone sees your offer for copywriting services but they’re not sure they need them yet. They need a couple of weeks to mull it over.
In a couple of weeks, they will have seen about a dozen other similar offers and, you guessed it, they’ll remember the most recent one.
Make sure your offer is the most recent one in their minds.
The Spacing Effect
Learning is more effective when repeated in spaced-out sessions. Repeating your message in separate “sessions” helps your audience retain and recall it until it’s fixated in their long-term memory. (source)
Repeat your message and make sure you also repeat the keywords in it. This doesn’t necessarily mean re-posting the same offer verbatim, just keeping some of the main points identical to help your audience recall them.
The Forgetting Curve
Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve states that memories weaken over time and, unsurprisingly, the biggest decline happens right after the moment of learning.
More importantly:
- Clear things are much easier to remember → is your message clear enough?
- How your audience feels affects what/how they remember.
(source)
If your audience was sleep-deprived, anxious, or simply “not feeling it” the first time you published your offer, you need to give it a second chance.
Common sense supports the need to keep pushing your offers
In a world where:
- Social media reach is abysmal
- ±50% of your email subscribers open your emails (if you have an above-average open rate)
- People doomscroll but don’t really read
- It takes 5-8 touchpoints to make a sale
It makes sense to repeat your offer. Don’t expect people to buy the first time around.
Also, don’t expect them to know what you do and go to the trouble of finding your contact info on their own.
In last week’s issue, I told you how guest posting helped me build my writing agency. The best outlet for me was an obscure website, far from the fanciness of Forbes or Entrepreneur.
The editorial team, however, allowed me to add a CTA to all my posts after a while. This was an absolute game-changer.
I could tell people where to find me and how I could help them and they acted on it.
Do the same for your audience whenever possible — tell them what the next logical step is, don’t expect them to figure it out on their own.
So: YES to repeating your message/ offer but how often?
How much is too much?
If all you do on social media/email is pester your audience with your sales pitch, you’ll lose them. As always, balance is key.
Aim for a 70/30 ratio (most of the time)
70% non-sales content, 30% sales content. This is a rule of thumb, not the law. You will need to mix things up depending on:
- Whether or not you are in launch mode
- Context: if you have a seasonal offer or a time-sensitive offer, you will need to push it more than usual
- The size of your audience: the bigger your audience, the more you will need to speak about your offer to make sure you reach as many people as possible.
Mix things up
Don’t repeat the exact same message over and over again. Try a new angle, emphasize a new benefit or a new pain point.
Nudge, don’t push
If you’re in launch mode, you’ll feel tempted to push your offer more than usual. To avoid boring your audience, alternate sales pitches with behind-the-scenes content.
You don’t have to use salesy lingo to sell. Remember the Forgetting Curve above? Sometimes, a simple reminder of what you do is enough.
Highlight a happy customer story, for instance. Give it 99% of your real estate and only save 1% for the CTA. Or talk about your experience to boost your credibility. You may not make a sale right then and there, but you stay top of mind when your audience is ready to buy.
My most successful LinkedIn posts are those that combine sales lingo and stories or categorical stances, like this one about selling your time versus selling your expertise. Even when they don’t bring any direct sales, they keep my offers top-of-mind and strengthen my position as an expert.
Who your audience is matters A LOT!
If you sell to B2C clients, it’s easier to get away with more sales content.
If you sell to B2B buyers, you’ll need to tread lightly. They’re bombarded with hundreds of offers every day, on every possible channel.
They’ve seen all the FOMO-inducing lingo, all the clever CTAs, all the “once in a lifetime” discounts. They’ve seen them so often that they now register them as white noise.
They’ll respond infinitely better to an H2H (Human2Human) approach — less pain agitation, more transparency.
What if I kept repeating the message and I still got no or very few sales?
You may have run out of audience members to convert.
No matter how big or small your audience is, you will have eventually reached all its reachable members. They will have seen your offer, pondered it, and decided it’s not for them.
There’s very little you can do to change that. Plus, these attempts have a very low ROI.
Consider growing your audience instead. ← Use that article to fuel your audience growth or click here and you’ll be the first to know when I launch Audience Accelerator, the course that will teach you how to grow an audience that’s ready to engage and buy.
Empathy is a good side-kick
We all know at least one seller who’s all pitch, no substance. Think about it this way: how long until you get tired of their relentless pitches?
I’m a marketer, so I usually hang in there more than most people because I like to dissect sales copy and pitches. But that doesn’t mean the 12th email about the same offer will get me to buy if the first five fell flat.
If you’ve repeated the same message 5-10 times but your conversion rate is still below industry averages, look elsewhere. Sometimes, the key to more sales is not more pitches but better product-market fit, better copy, or a bigger audience.
Adriana’s Picks
- Airchat wants to be the next hot social media platform. They combine Clubhouse with Twitter, so let’s hope they won’t succumb to the same fate as the former. Are you on Airchat yet? Come find me, I managed to grab the @adriana handle.
- This again? Elon wants to charge new X users a small fee. He says it’s the only way to curb bots and AI-powered accounts.
- Meta’s Oversight Board is looking into AI-generated deepfakes of public persons.
That’s it from me today! See you next week in your inbox.
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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