5 Reasons to Embrace Repetition in Your Content

Creating content for your product or service is a non-stop process. Once you start creating blog posts, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc., you need to keep going because people begin to expect it. And when folks search online for things, Google likes to show the most current results first.

Keeping up with content can feel daunting, which is why it’s important to remember one very important thing.

Repetition is your friend.

I don’t mean putting out the exact same material all the time – that would get old very fast. But you can repeat the same general ideas and themes, which makes it a little easier to keep up. You can also repurpose the same message for different types of content. For example, you could use the same theme for a blog post, social media post, podcast, and video.

Using repetition might still seem counterintuitive, so here are five reasons why it works in marketing.

1: Reinforcement

The first and most obvious reason is that the more often a prospect or customer hears the same message from you, the more it reinforces that message. Even if they don’t need your product or service right now, having seen information about it more than once, in a consistent way, makes it more likely for them to remember it when they are looking for something like that.

Also, remember that people may take time to decide about using a product or service. They’re likely to do some comparison shopping and will want to know what’s different about your product. As with most forms of education, telling them more than once why your product or service is special will help your prospects remember that information.

2: Familiarity and trust

In addition to reinforcing the information, repetition encourages familiarity. People may not have worked with you before, but if they’ve seen a lot of information from you, you’ll start to feel more familiar to them, and with familiarity comes trust.

Additionally, once someone has initially seen your product or service, they’re primed to start noticing it everywhere.

This is called the “frequency illusion,” and it’s something you might have experienced yourself. For instance, if you hear a song that you like, and suddenly you hear it everywhere you go. Odds are, the song had been playing a lot beforehand, but only now are you noticing it.

Of course, utilizing the frequency illusion only works if your message is consistent across platforms. Otherwise, people won’t necessarily connect what they heard before and what they’re hearing now.

3: Newcomers

It’s also important to remember that not everyone sees all of your material. No one but you will likely see everything you’ve done because people are busy these days, and they’re inundated with new information.

This means that even if it feels to you as if you’ve talked about a particular topic far too long, it’s still brand new to many, even long-standing customers. And maybe this time it will catch one of those people in just the right way to encourage them to act on your message.

4: New angles

Plus, even though you’ve gone over certain information several times, if you’re working a lot in that space, you’ll likely be learning new things about it. If you wrote about something two years ago and write about it again now, odds are you’ll end up with something very different.

Looking for these new angles and bits of information is a great way to keep your material feeling new even if you’ve already talked about it. Your readers may notice that it seems familiar, but if they can learn something new and useful, they’ll still be happy.

5: Evergreen content

Finally, it helps to remember that if you provide solid, useful information to your customers, that will always be valuable. That’s the idea behind evergreen content – create something that your customers will always need.

Even then, you can still spruce it up, perhaps create an updated version. But having that foundation of a great piece of content will give you a firm base to work from.

Consistency is key You may feel like repeating your key messages and information will drive people away, but in reality, it’s a good strategy. It will keep you top of mind with your customers and prospects, build familiarity and trust, catch newcomers along the way, provide new perspectives, and create a solid foundation of great information. And it will help you avoid burnout from trying to create new content all the time – a win all around.