Not repeating key messages or revisiting important topics means you, your clients, and your prospects are missing out.

Unfortunately, we regularly get pushback from advisers, planners, and other marketing experts (who frankly should know better) when we suggest revisiting a topic.

We hear things like:

• “We posted on social media about that two months ago”
• “We wrote about that in a blog a few months back”
• “We can’t say that again, people will get bored”.

Telling people they’re wrong isn’t a great way of winning friends or influencing people. So, instead, let’s just say the benefits of repetition are a marketing hill we’ll happily die on.

In fact, if you want your messages to land, repetition is essential – something that all politicians understand.

In the UK, Boris Johnson used “Get Brexit Done” to great effect in the 2019 general election. Go back a couple of decades to Tony Blair, and we have memorable phrases such as “Education, education, education” and “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.

Over in the USA, Barack Obama was famous for his “Yes We Can” message, while Donald Trump won two elections with the “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Let’s reverse out of the political rabbit hole and bring this back to marketing with seven reasons why you should embrace the power of repetition.

#1. People forget

Reading a message is very different to remembering it.

Research proves that seeing messages multiple times improves recall. In “Advertising Repetition: A Meta-Analysis on Effective Frequency in Advertising” (Schmidt & Eisend, 2015), the authors found recall increases as people see the same ad more often, and it still hadn’t levelled off before eight exposures.

Translation: if you want to be remembered, repetition isn’t optional. As Matt Campbell said to me earlier this week, the point where you’re bored of saying the same thing is the point where the message is being heard.

#2. People miss messages

Newsletter open rates typically range from 50% at the lower end to around 80% at the upper. That means a large proportion of your audience won’t see each message.

The same is true on LinkedIn, where research suggests most people won’t see your posts. Rival IQ analysed 58,000+ LinkedIn posts and found the median brand gets impressions equal to 8.63% of followers per post. Even the top 20% of posts only reach around 20% of followers.

So if you only cover a topic once in your newsletter or on LinkedIn, you’re basically choosing to be ignored by a large percentage of your audience.

#3. Give new people a chance to catch up

Every month, new people join your audience.  They follow. They subscribe. They hear about you from a client and go digging. Hopefully, you’re also boosting numbers by adding new prospects and professional connections to your newsletter database.

But these people haven’t seen the posts, blogs, and articles you wrote three months ago, and they’re not going to binge your back catalogue like it’s Netflix.

The answer? Repeating messages so they get a chance to see them.

#4. The antidote to skimming

Inboxes and social feeds are noisy, so people don’t read, they scan, grabbing a few words, a sentence or a number, and then moving on.

That means you need to design your content for skimmers: short sentences, punchy subheadings, bullet points, and a conclusion that repeats the main point.

Then repeat the same messages over weeks and months, because skimming means “seen it”, not necessarily “understood it”.

#5. Trust is built through consistency

We build trust by showing up regularly and saying the same things. If your message keeps changing, prospects assume you’re unsure. If it stays consistent, confidence grows that you know what you’re doing.

Repetition doesn’t bore people. It reassures them, building trust and confidence that you’re the expert they need.

#6. You become tied to the message

When a financial planner once said to me, “You’re always banging on about social proof,” I smiled. I knew I was being heard.

Repeat a message long enough, and people start linking the idea to you. Then, when they become motivated to solve the problem, you’re the name that pops into their head.

#7. It speeds up content creation

Ideas are the bottleneck for most advisers and planners. When they run out, posting stops, article deadlines are missed, and marketing stalls.

Repetition fixes that. You don’t need endless new ideas, just a small set of core messages, repeated from different angles.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

There’s no downside to repeating messages, subjects and topics.

So it’s a bit of a mystery why many advisers, planners, and marketers worry about doing it. Hopefully, this blog helps to address the problem.

And yes, expect to see us repeating these messages in future blogs, on LinkedIn posts, and when we speak at events and on podcasts.