The Rule of Seven is one of the oldest axioms in marketing. It’s simple: People can’t fully absorb a company or brand’s messaging until they’re exposed to it around seven times.

At its core, the Rule of Seven remains sound advice for marketers, but is it outdated? Hollywood executives coined the rule way back in the 1930s. While it was perhaps true in a simpler media environment, today’s world — filled with notifications, constant screen time, and endless content vying for everyone’s attention — has multiplied the need to reinforce messaging several times over to truly make an impression on an audience.

What’s the magic number today? Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Focusing on a single, quantifiable benchmark is a recipe for disappointment in this fast-changing media ecosystem. The right way to pivot off the Rule of Seven, while taking its core wisdom to heart, is to focus instead on the quality and consistency of your messaging. 

When each interaction reinforces the same core story, your audience begins to recognize, remember, and ultimately trust your brand.

How do you refine and simplify your messaging while retaining your identity and still breaking through in a crowded landscape? Our custom, personalized approach at Graham will get you there. 

Examine your position

Any good marketing plan begins with defining what makes you truly unique and understanding who your target audience is. At Graham, we start every new client relationship with a comprehensive messaging and positioning exercise — think of it as a full data download — as we get to know our new client’s business, their key audiences, and the differentiators that help them win in the marketplace. Solidifying these points as a team is a critical step that lays a foundation for all future marketing and communications.

The resulting framework serves as the core messaging and target audience foundation, informing everything else – from brand awareness and lead gen campaigns to branding (and all the nitty gritty components underneath).

When messaging is clear and consistent from the beginning, every interaction with your company (from marketing communications to calls to your service team) reinforce the same story instead of competing with it.

Understand context, audience, and challenges

Messaging only works if it reflects real client needs. That’s why we also take time to understand context: the firm’s history, recent changes, growth goals, and most importantly, who the firm serves.

Most of the companies we work with don’t have just one audience — they have multiple client segments, each with unique needs. We break down the audience into detailed segments, so you wouldn’t be talking to a young professional just getting started with investing the same way you would to a seasoned investor nearing retirement. Different segments have different wants, needs, and communication styles — and messaging needs to reflect that.

Clarify services, value, and differentiation

Once the audience is defined, we shift our focus to how the firm creates value. This means clearly articulating service offerings and how they improve clients’ lives.

We often think of this in terms of transformation statements — understanding the difference between a client’s Point A (their life before becoming our client) and Point B (their life after becoming our client). This means asking two questions: “What is someone experiencing today?” and “How can the firm transform that person’s experience for the better?”

These insights help transform a broad list of services into a compelling narrative that highlights outcomes, not just capabilities. They also help us develop the key pillars of our messaging strategy and the specific language and thematic messages we believe will resonate most strongly with clients, depending on who they are and how they engage with the business. Transformation statements do much more than help us understand the current audience; they also serve as a roadmap for future growth.

Translate messaging into a marketing strategy

We complete our messaging exercise by compiling all of our insights into a single, comprehensive deck. This guides all marketing efforts throughout our client relationship. Touching on everything from audience definitions to key messages to press release boilerplates and brand identity and tone, it truly serves as the foundation for all our work.

With the messaging established, we shift to execution, partnering with you to create a comprehensive marketing plan that aligns goals, audiences, and content themes. The plan defines how to engage each audience across all touchpoints, including direct marketing, thought leadership, and social media campaigns.

We plan content intentionally, with each asset reinforcing the core messages established earlier in the process to maintain consistency and ensure quality in every interaction.

Monitor, review, and refine

That said, we don’t believe messaging should be set in stone. Perhaps the most important step is to monitor whether your marketing strategy is on track and producing the intended results. This is where data analytics and audience feedback can help provide insights into the effectiveness of your marketing plan.

One of our core beliefs at Graham is that refining messaging should be an ongoing process. That doesn’t necessarily mean your core principles will change dramatically. Rather, our goal is to maintain alignment and keep an up-to-date understanding of how your audience’s goals intersect with your firm’s goals.

Conclusion

The Rule of Seven — no matter what the magic number is — relies on consistency and clarity in your messaging. By starting small and building outward, you can develop a simple and effective marketing plan. The result is not just more content, but clearer communication, stronger relationships, and sustainable growth.

How we help

Graham Media Partners specializes in taking the guesswork out of messaging for our clients. People are impatient, and there is an endless stream of content for audiences to consume. While that might sound daunting, our process is a tried-and-true way to cut through the noise. We see it every day — because it works!