On average Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. That’s a wild 375 ads every single hour.

Which means when your audience is logging on to social media or they’re checking their email, they’re already programmed to either ignore or delete any message that’s screaming “Sale!” or “Buy this from me!” or “On sale now!”

Your audience is so inundated with sales messaging, that your typical sales message, isn’t going to even make it onto their radar because they’re just deleting or scrolling past it before their conscious brain even has a chance to see it.

The only thing that would change that situation is if they have an immediate or dire need for what is being offered because then their brain is going to slow down and see that message thanks to selective attention.

It’s kind of like the blue car theory where you buy a blue car. You’ve never seen blue cars before, and now all you see are blue cars. It’s because your brain is already thinking about a certain thing. So now it’s going to pick up on the thing it’s thinking about.

With this in mind, as a service-based solopreneur with a very small marketing budget, how do you stand out against the chaos of all the big brands with big marketing budgets?

Build a strong personal brand and consistently show up for your audience on the social platforms they’re already active on.

Yup, the answer is to consistently create organic (free) social media marketing content, email marketing newsletters, or show up on any of the digital platforms that you know your audience is already using.

If you want someone to remember your brand, you have to stay consistent.

This means that when you’re creating content for social media (or any digital platform), you can’t go about it all Willy Nilly. Meaning you can’t keep changing your font, your colors, or the style of your content depending on your mood.

In other words, you need to stop rebranding because people need to see the same version of you over and over and over again.

Otherwise, it’s not going to resonate and they’re not going to remember and know that it is you.

On top of that. If you want people to remember what you sell, you can’t just tell them once and you need to stop changing your services every other month. (That includes renaming your packages!)

Stop altering what your audience is starting to familiarize themselves with when it comes to you.

Every time you switch it up, you lose the sense of familiarity you started to build and are starting from zero once again. The goal isn’t to blend in. The goal is to be memorable. Consistency and repetition lend themselves to being memorable.

For the sake of example, think about Marie Forleo who has B-School.

The only reason I know about that course (I’ve never purchased it) is because year after year, I keep seeing the same messaging, the same brand – the same everything.

Obviously, she is a bigger brand with a large marketing budget so she can afford paid advertising which gives her content a little more leverage than say, Joe Schmo down the street. But it’s the same concept because if she changed the name of her program every single year (even with paid ads and affiliate sellers blasting content at us from every angle) you and I would not remember that.

This goes to show that you need to stay consistent with your service offerings and tell your audience about them – over and over and over again.

This doesn’t mean talking about your services every week. This means talking about your services until you feel like you’re blue in the face.

Your audience needs to be reminded thousands of times.

The world has an obnoxious amount of things fighting for your audience’s attention and they’re BUSY.

You have to say what you want your audience to hear, repeatedly.

If you’re using Instagram to get your message out there (which I highly recommend you do thanks to the various content formats available) talk about your service offerings on your stories, talk about them in your feed posts, talk about them in your reels, write about them in your caption, and even on the text on screen or vocally say it to your audience face-to-cam style.

Consistency and repetition are what is going to help cement, who you are, what you do, and how you help them into your customers’ minds.

And on top of that, if you want to build an even stronger connection with your audience, start utilizing emotion and storytelling in your content. Studies have shown that emotions and stories can make information much more memorable.

So infuse those funny stories, those heartwarming moments, or even attention-grabbing cliffhangers – whatever feels right for your brand – and integrate it all into your content.