Use the 7–11–4 Formula To Build Your Brand and 10x Your Audience Growth and Engagement

How to find your niche and build your loyal tribe of true fans.

Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

Growing an audience is a magnet for growing your online business.

“The best in the world who make money online do it with a foundation of content.
I don’t know anybody who’s succeeded online without video, audio, writing, or images.”

I have used the 7–11–4 method to more than 10x my audience engagement and impressions on LinkedIn in the past month:

As a result, I’ve been inundated with more paid speaking opportunities, board offers and consulting projects than I know what to do with.

The point of the article is this:

You first build your audience, and then your audience builds your business.

Here’s how you can do it.

The 7–11–4 Formula

Building an audience means building trust at scale.

Your brain forms emotional bonds based on three key ingredients:

Time = accumulate 7 hours.
Interactions = create 11 touch points.
Location = interact in 4 different locations.

Here’s the breakdown:

The magic of making people fall in love with you in 7 hours

Humans are hardwired to bond with those they spend time with.

When we spend enough time with another person, we can’t help but get emotionally involved with them.

If you can accumulate 7 hours of time spent together, people will bond with you emotionally.

Don’t do this in a creepy or annoying way. There is nothing worse than someone who is constantly asking for your time and attention.

Instead, use your digital media to accumulate seven hours of ‘bonding’ time. The human brain has difficulty distinguishing between digital media and real-life interactions.

That’s why we feel sad when a celebrity dies, even though we’ve never met them. But we’ve consumed so much of their content through movies, TV shows, or books that we have formed an emotional attachment.

Your goal: Build enough content online that people could binge for 7 hours or more.

This could be articles, podcasts, videos, etc. The more diverse the format the better. People relate differently to different contexts.

Remember: Your digital content serves to build deep relationships at a scale that you couldn’t possibly do yourself.

The frequency of interactions you have:

In a Google research paper called ‘Zero Moments of Truth”, they found that when people had about 11 interactions with a brand, they were considerably more likely to buy from that brand.

Why? Because of trust.

Once someone interacted with a brand or person 11 times, trust naturally starts to form. It’s human nature.

Just as your digital content can be leveraged to accumulate the 7 hours of bonding time, your digital content can also be leveraged to accumulate 11 different touch points.

The most underutilized content creation on social media?

Comments.

Most people mindlessly scroll and sometimes like a post. Very few leave valuable comments. And even fewer start a conversation that leads to meeting up in real life.

You can see some posts with 50+ likes but no comments. Leave a thoughtful comment. Not just a generic ‘great job’ or ‘well done’ and you’ll stand out.

An ounce of thoughtfulness goes a long way.

I was terrible at leaving or responding to comments until recently. Now I aim to engage with a post by leaving a ‘like’ and then a thoughtful comment that adds value through education or entertainment.

My engagement and number of opportunities have skyrocketed as a result.

People will store that interaction in their minds. When you do finally meet in person, you find it is much easier to strike up a deeper conversation.

Increase the number of places you meet:

Locations are not just limited to physical locations.

Interaction with your content in different digital locations can be just as effective.

Aim for your ideal audience to be able to find you in 4 different locations. Just like investing, diversity is the key.

The internet allows you to treat your customers differently. Create different content for different people. Use 2–3 social media platforms, blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos.

Not everyone will engage with you on every platform but you still need to provide different options to engage with your content in a variety of formats — words, audio, and video.

When people interact with your content on different platforms they register this as a new experience. A new and deeper bond starts to form.

More places = deeper connection.

What does this mean for you?

When you use the 7–11–4 formula with your content, your audience growth and engagement will 10x.

Listening to your podcast, reading your blog, or watching your YouTube channel is an intimate experience.

People can often feel less lonely when they hear your voice, become optimistic when they read your words, and love to see your face when you talk about something you love.

I’ve had moments where people say that my writing has changed their life. Or my podcast inspired them to take action. Or my LinkedIn content made them think differently.

It’s an odd relationship dynamic.

People will approach me like we are old friends. They know me very well, but I don’t know them at all.

They’ve bonded emotionally with my content while I am only just meeting them for the first time.

A good test for your impact is:

“How many people would reach out and wonder (or complain) if you didn’t send out that next email blast? That’s the metric worth measuring and considering.” — Seth Godin

__________________

If you enjoyed this article, you can connect with me HERE.

You can also support more of my work by becoming a Medium Member using my referral link: michael-lim.medium.com