You have to understand your market. You have to match what you sell to how often consumers buy it. For example: if you sell ice cream you'll have steady repeat customers perhaps every week. If you sell cars or major appliances, you may not see them again for several years.
And people may be in the market for ice cream every day, but major appliances every five years.
But there is only a very small percentage of people that are looking to buy cars every month. And the people that are not in te market for what you are selling will not read your ad anyway, because it won't catch their attention. Think of the last time you were thinking of buying a car. Before you thought of the model and style of car you were interested in, you probably didn't notice them as you passed them on the road. But after you decided on the kind of car you wanted, you started noticing them everywhere you drove. Why? Because now you are interested, and before you weren't. After you became interested in a new car, you also started noticing the car ads in newspapers, on radio, on TV, and in other ads.
It's the same with your market. If you show an ad once and then show the exact same ad a month later, it's an entirely different set of eyes that are seeing your ad. So you can continue to show the same ad, because every few days, another group is coming into the market for what you sell.
The mistake advertisers make is thinking they should advertise over and over again because it builds the desire to buy from them. They think that it takes several repetitions of seeing an ad before anyone will buy. This is simply not the case. You will have results after the first time you run your ad. This is more true in print ads than in broadcast ads. But the first day you run a radio or TV ad, you'll know if the ad is paying.
The reason you repeat your ads is not because it takes several exposures to generate any sales, but because you are showing your ad to a different segment of the market every time it shows.
This is another thing to look at: how often do you run the same ad? As often as it generates a net profit from every ad. For example, running a car ad once a week may prove profitable, but a daily ad may be too frequent, because the same people are seeing the same ad, and the audience hasn't had a chance to churn.
In our retail store, we find that an ad running once a month (the same ad) is being seen by entirely different people every month. In other words, the people who were in the market to buy a month ago, are now out of the market, and a new group is in the market. We have found that if we advertise more often than twice a month, our sales suffer on each ad. The reason is, there has not been enough time that passed for a new group to be in the market.
We also advertised with three different direct mail companies that used direct mail. We advertised at the exact same time with all three. It was a Christmas sale. The results were just ten percent better than if we only sent out the ad with one direct mail company. Why? Because the same people were getting three nearly identical ads. And just because they saw the ad three times doesn't mean they will buy three times as much. Two thirds of the mailing was wasted. If we has sent the mailings a few weeks apart, we would have had far better results.
Single ads, that are not repeated are generally for some kind of Event. A Holiday Sale or a Grand Opening. In fact that real strength of those kind of events is that they only last for a very short time, creating a sense of urgency in the mind of the customer.
So, the moral of this story is that you advertise repeatedly, because you are always reaching a changing audience. Advertise single ads for events. But if you run a print ad, and nothing happens, don't keep running the same ad hoping the results will change. Change the ad.
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