26 June 2023 | Marketing
You’re thinking about ‘repetition’ the wrong way
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How to use repetition in your social content to occupy space in your customer’s mind
‘I feel like we’re repeating ourselves a lot.’
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this from a founder, or someone in marketing leadership…
I wouldn’t be rich. But I’d have quite a few dollars. Lol.
‘Repeating yourself’ as a brand is a real fear for a lot of marketers when scaling a social presence. And I get where it comes from.
When you are scaling on organic social media, you’re posting frequently — sometimes more than once, twice, three times per day.
What if our customers get sick of hearing the same ideas over and over again?
Again. Valid thought. But it’s flawed.
You’re falling for the Spotlight Effect
This way of thinking is a classic example of the Spotlight Effect. We all experience the Spotlight Effect at a personal level. The idea is that because we are the center of our own world, we overestimate how much other people are thinking about us.
As a marketer (and especially) as a founder, you are deep in your brand on a daily basis. It can feel like the center of your world. So you assume your customers are also in and around it all the time.
Breaking news: they have their own lives. And they are being hit from all directions by other stimuli that require their attention. You shouldn’t worry about your brand being too in their face — you should be more worried about not being on their mind at all.
So I want to reframe repetition today.
What if repetition was a super power?
What if repetition was a lever you could pull in your social strategy?
What if it was a way to break through the noise in your customers’ lives and make sure your brand takes up more and more space in your customers’ minds?
It is. And there are a few types of repetition you can use.
One example is repurposing content — saying the same idea in a million different ways. All of the best brands on social do this. All of the best content creators do this.
Just scroll through my LinkedIn profile and you will see examples of the same idea, slightly re-worked. You’ll even see some that I’ve straight-up copy-pasted. It works.
But I feel like you already understand the value of repurposing content (if you want me to do a deep dive on… this reply and let me know).
The version of repetition I want to focus on today is having a slogan. A slogan that’s repeated everywhere in your social presence — and across your brand.
Your social profiles
Your website
Your emails
Your packaging
Everywhere.
Every time your customers see this slogan in writing or hear it in conversation, it reinforces their connection with your brand.
[Kind of similar to the idea of ‘owning an emoji’ that I wrote about here]
As I’m writing this, I’m realizing this is less about ‘social strategy’ and more about the wider brand marketing strategy.
And this is important to note because it’s a perfect example of how social media cannot be stuck in a silo. Social needs to be involved in wider marketing meetings — topic for a different deep dive, though.
Some of my favorite examples
Brand: Represent / 247 / George Heaton
Slogan: ‘On a mission.’
Brand: Bare Performance Nutrition
Slogan: ‘Go One More’
Brand: Zach Pogrob
Slogan: ‘Follow obsession’
[I did a full interview with Zach on how he gained 1.6M followers across IG and TikTok in 6 months. Read that here]
Brand: Darc Sport
Slogan: ‘N.F.G.U’ (Never f*ckin give up)
And of course, there’s the classic…
Brand: Nike
Slogan: ‘Just do it.’
The kicker here is that these slogans, one-liners, whatever you want to call them… aren’t just a social ‘growth hacks.’ They are core pillars of the brand.
Hell, two of brands’ founders’ that I listed above have the one-liner tattooed on themselves.
It’s serious.
And this piece of your brand identity is something you and your team should be putting legitimate thought into. Done right, it can be the spark of a movement.
TL;DR
- Repetition is not bad. You are just biased and think your customers are spending way more time looking at your content than they actually are.
- One way to implement repetition into your marketing strategy (and social in particular) is by leaning into a specific slogan or idea, and reinforcing it all across the buyers’ journey
- You can’t ‘growth hack’ your way into finding this. It takes real thought. It must feel organic. Don’t walk away from this and try to engineer your slogan (if you don’t already have one).
- If your brand already has a slogan like this that your community resonates with, think about how you can lean into it more across your social strategy. Can you put it in your bios? Can you great a content series around it? Can you incorporate it into your graphics?
I’m thinking about all of these ideas myself for both Social Files and my agency.
Hope this helps and was thought provoking for you.
That’s all I’ve got today.