#1 Best Seller. Bryan W. Heathman

      You couldn’t bear the thought that your passion for these concepts was yours alone. You had to get the word out. It was your mission. You simply must tell others, because you knew that they could be changed if only they knew about the key that you had discovered for yourself. You knew that their lives would be better, easier and more provident if you could just reach them—if you could share the gems that you had come by through years of trial and error, of love and blood and sweat. You could shorten their learning curve, and you could help others by making their lives easier. You could change a piece of their world if you could just reach them with the message in your book.

      And then it happened, the thing you couldn’t have expected, though you’d dreamt of it often enough—your friend said yes.

      “Sure,” he smiled, “I’ll help you publish it too, if you’d like. You might want to think about writing a talk to go along with that manuscript of yours. These things work best in tandem.”

      Now the memory fades as the flight attendant brushes past you, gliding down the aisle. The young man in the seat next to you sweeps the shock of hair from his eyes and searches your face. The hum of the jet drones on, like a bass note in the dance of your life. “Why wouldn’t you want to put down roots, or retire early and get off this merry-go-round?” the young man says. “I mean, what makes you want to trek the planet and say the things you do?”

      In the back of your mind, you hear a Ziglar quote which comes back to your mind like a distant memory, “You will get everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

      And suddenly, in a flash, you connect with your reason why, that driving force that silently compels you to push forward… serving others.

The Rule of 7

      It’s funny how you can be talking to someone, and they seem to understand what you’re saying. They smile and nod; even interject a comment here or there.

      But are they really getting you? Once the conversation is over, it’s like it never happened.

      Maybe a few days later the subject comes up again. You hash it out one more time, and this time it seems like you’re getting through.

      But no. It’s not that they’re obstinate. It’s just that any new idea requires repeated exposure to become internalized. That is how the brain works.

      Studies show that people need to hear an idea seven times before it sinks in.

      Think about that the next time you ask your teenager to take out the garbage. You don’t have to hound them until you’re “blue in the face.” Just tighten up your repetitions, and you’ll compress the amount of time it takes to drive your point home. After a while, it becomes automatic, and you don’t have to mention it again. Well… maybe a couple more times.

      This brings us to the all-important topic of exposures in marketing campaigns, and what I call the Rule of Seven. When you can leverage this rule, the seven exposures get your audience to “see the light” and make a purchase.

      It sounds simple—and it is—but it’s not without technique. Let’s cover a few simple rules that you can apply to your book or new product launch to drive sales and create evangelists.

      Sales Lessons from the Marketing World

      Did you ever notice product displays when you go to a retail store or mall? The brand jumps out at you every time you walk by.

      By your third pass, you stop and notice that the featured widget might actually be something you could use to solve a problem or engage a desire. In fact, the product could be tremendously effective. It might even change your life. But the first time you passed by, it didn’t even register.

      During my Fortune 500 marketing career, I was responsible for rolling-out a retail kiosk for a brand-new kind of service. It was a revolutionary product, and our Marketing team had a pretty robust ad budget to support the US launch. Amazingly enough, our Sales team was successful in putting this display in 20,000 retail locations across North America. Failure was not an option.

      You would think that with all those locations and gobs of money for advertising, all we had to do was wait for the checks to come rolling in. But the fundamentals of consumer awareness apply across the board. We used the Rule of Seven to drive messaging home and make sales.

      Using the One-To-Many Approach… Seven Times!

      When you are planning your next social media effort or ad campaign, there are a few principles to consider. You can use them when deciding how many ad exposures it will take to reach your audience effectively. It still takes seven repetitions to generate awareness of a brand, a book or service, but you can do it much more efficiently.

      In our campaign to drive sales in those 20,000 retail locations, we focused on messaging that went from one-to-many. We carefully planned a series of messages reaching millions of “influencers,” called Early Adopters. The Early Adopters in this industry embraced new ideas and technologies earlier than most, and we knew they would evangelize our product for us.

      The structure of the marketing campaign for this product was built around the Rule of Seven. Here is how the campaign was structured to reach the magic number of exposures:

      1 Trial coupons in Free Standing Inserts (FSI’s) in leading newspapers

      2 Direct mail campaign

      3 Print flyers, delivered by a partner company

      4 In-store advertising in grocery stores, where most people shop 2.3 times (on average) each week

      5 Television commercials

      6 On-kiosk advertising in major retail locations such as WalMart, Target, and Costco

      7 Sponsorship at a series of sporting events

      Each one of these venues invited multiple exposures and drove home the message to generate awareness, familiarity and ultimately, trial. This marketing philosophy can be applied and works for new product launches, and can even be effective for a book launch campaign.

      As you plan your next marketing campaign, remember the Rule of Seven. How can you plan your book launch campaign to leverage the Rule of Seven used by professional marketing teams?

      Here is a sample idea of how to create 7 repetitions of the message around your book that does not require the multimillion dollar budgets of professional marketers.

      1 Plan a daily series of social media posts. If you can schedule 3-months of daily posts, you will earn top marks in your class!

      2 Send regularly scheduled emails.

      3 Schedule a series of speaking events.

      4 Hand-out bookmarks promoting your book at live events.

      5 Clearly establish the profile of your target readers, and reach them via an advertising campaign online (Google ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, etc.).

      6 Schedule bookstore signing tour.

      7 Ask the local media for a radio or TV appearance.

      Your patience in generating seven repetitions will prove that 7 just might be your lucky number!

Branding for the Big Bucks

      Where could your business, your speaking business or book sales go if you released all your limitations? With the right company brand or personal brand behind your business endeavors, you can break through untold barriers and realize your professional dreams.

      What exactly is branding? Your branding is the way people perceive you and your mission—whether it’s your company, your personal career branding at work or even your private objectives. Branding distills your ideology into a series of elements that together create the look-and-feel of an ideal.

      Branding