The Rule of Seven
“We tried a Facebook ad once. Didn’t do anything.”
If you’ve said this, or heard this, you’re not wrong about what happened
— but you’re wrong about what it means.
One ad was never going to work.
And that’s not a flaw in the ad.
It’s how marketing has worked for almost a hundred years.
It’s called the Rule of Seven.
The idea, first floated in the 1930s, is simple: a person needs to see or hear your message roughly seven times before they’re ready to act on it.
Not seven times in one day. Seven times over the course of getting to know you exist, what you do, what you offer, and why it might matter to them.
Most businesses give up somewhere around attempt one or two.
Think about how you actually make choices to purchase. Whether it’s chose your accountants, your stationery supplier, your even your branding agency.
It’s never one advert.
It’s a name you half-noticed, then saw again, then heard mentioned, or better still recommended, and then finally checked out when the actual need arose.
Buying — especially for a business decision — isn’t an impulse.
It’s a slow build of familiarity until someone trusts you enough to make direct contact.
Seven is a rough number, not a hard and fast law. But the principle behind it is exactly right.
But here’s where it usually goes wrong.
A business runs one campaign, checks the results a week later, sees a handful of clicks and no sales, and calls it a failure.
But if most of the people who saw it were on touchpoint one or two, so of course nothing happened yet.
You didn’t get a bad result — you got an incomplete one.
The campaign got stopped right around the point it was going to start working. In fact we rarely talk about campaigns anymore, we plan ongoing rolling communications programs, for exactly this reason.
This doesn’t mean shouting the same advert at people seven times.
It means the same core message, showing up consistently, in different places, in different forms — a post, an email, a case study, a search result — so it reaches someone at the moment they have a definite need for what you do.
Repetition with variety. Same story, told again and again, in different ways, until it’s familiar rather than forgotten.
The businesses that struggle most with marketing aren’t usually doing it badly. They’re just not doing it consistently enough.
If there’s one thing worth taking from this: budget and plan for seven contacts, not one. A single post, a single ad, a single email was never going to carry an entire purchase decision on its own.
This idea is nearly a century old, but it’s even more true today when media saturation is constant. The tools have changed. The number of touches someone needs before they trust you with their business may have even got bigger.
So if your marketing has felt like it’s not working, the first question isn’t “was it good?” It’s “did it actually get enough chances?”
That’s the kind of thing we look at with clients every week — not just the message, but whether it’s showing up consistently enough to land a punch.
If this sounds like something that’s relevant, get in touch, and let’s have a look together.
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