Have you heard of the 7-11-4 method to increase audience interaction? Building an audience means building trust at scale. From there, we can create emotional bonds with the audience based on three key ingredients that we will see below.
The magic of making people fall in love within 7 hours
We are programmed to bond with those we spend time with. Therefore, we should try to accumulate 7 hours of time with our audience to achieve an emotional bond with them.
Think about this example. With an actor or soccer player that we have followed, we have had so much time consuming their movies or matches that we have created an emotional bond. And that’s even though in most cases, we don’t even know them in person.
It’s not about being annoying, tiresome or insistent in a way that generates rejection, but about trying to add value. Thanks to digital channels, accumulating these 7 hours of bonding can be very feasible. Therefore, the goal is to create enough online content so that the audience can reach that minimum of 7 hours binding to us or to our brand.
The frequency of interactions we have should be closer to 11
In Google’s excellent research paper called “Zero Moments of Truth,” it was found that when people had around 11 interactions with a brand, they were much more likely to buy that brand.
This is due to trust. Once someone interacts with a brand or person at least 11 times, trust begins to develop naturally. Just as digital content can be leveraged to accumulate 7 hours of bonding time, it can also be leveraged to accumulate 11 different touch points.
Ideally, your audience can find you in 4 different locations
This diversity in presence is key and digital channels are perfect for this. For example, we can create content in blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos and TikTok live.
Not everyone will interact with us on all platforms, so the ideal is to generate different options to interact with a variety of formats. The more meaningful locations, the better and deeper the connection with the audience.
Photo credit: SM
