The Power of Threes

Stu Eddins: Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them and then tell them what you told them. 

Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO. 

Stu Eddins: I want to talk about something that is really near and dear to my heart, the power of threes. If you go out there and look up such a thing online, you’ll find that threes are a big deal for most people. Human beings really, really like threes. And threes can create a great structure for presentations, marketing, sales classes, all sorts of different things.  

So threes are everywhere. Let’s start with that. In business products are often classified as good, better best. Remember, when Amazon you should do that you can look something up and they give you other choices. Besides that there was a pretty complex method. Yeah, yeah. And before Starbucks came along, we had a pretty standard small, medium and large now we got been taking whatever the heck and everything else they do. But still small, medium, large, was kind of a trio of popular sizes. Three is also pretty much get into our games at our leisure time to three strikes, and you’re out. Who hasn’t played rock, paper, scissors.  

If you think about it, we’re going to the Olympics coming up gold, silver and bronze metals because we like threes. It’s not that we ran out of precious metals to make additional awards. We like threes. So we have gold, silver, and bronze. They’re simple triplets to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Needless to say, there are holy Trinity’s there, there’s all sorts of things. In fact, interestingly enough, most of the major religions, I had time to research a little bit, all of them have some sort of a trinity or a triad involved with them. It’s kind of hard to escape trees, because they’re everywhere. Threes are just simply pervasive in most every part of our lives.  

And it’s really becomes because as humans, we like threes. In fact, our brains really contribute to this, this preference. Through a lot of research, they found that people are able to hold really about three things in their short term memory, some little more, sometimes a little less. But on average, people can hold three things in their short term memory. The one thing about this as humans love patterns, and three is the minimum number of things you can have to create a pattern. It’s kind of interesting, if you think about it. Something I mentioned before landscapers arranged groupings of plants in threes.  

If you look around the world, you can see threes everywhere, again, an optimal number for arranging things to threes. You give somebody two things, they’ve got an either or there’s no pattern, there’s nothing, it’s just a choice, and they feel limited. You give them more than that. people’s brains start trying to find irrelevant patterns among 456 different things. Is there seriously, if you look at something that’s a group of five, I dare you not to try mentally to arrange that in a cross pattern. So thick in the middle and four corners. It’s just the way we do it. Does this reason that when you’re when you’re playing with dice, they look the way they do 

Mariah Tang: Or when you have two bullet points, and it looks weird. And you need a third one.   

Stu Eddins: Yeah, yeah. There’s always that one more thought, well, if you give somebody three thoughts, first off was it just mentioned, their short term memory can store that away, they can keep that and keep it front of mind for the conversation. So threes are everywhere. Humans really liked threes. And this is why threes make a great structure when we have to provide information. So again, that that providing structure capability of threes, a successful presenter, a successful writer, well, you do it every day. It’s a beginning, a middle and an end. You could put together a story or a presentation missing one of those two things, but it’s probably not gonna be very good. Yeah, in fact, it could probably suck. You do have to have these things.  

I have been part of presentations that seem to just start in the middle without setting the groundwork of what we’re talking about. I’ve been in presentations, where we have the groundwork and we look at all the possibilities in the middle, and there’s no conclusion. So a beginning a middle and an end is important to subscribe so far podcasts come to any rate. But the other part about it is we have threes even in our business life. One tactic that I’ve always used for training people, I mean, this goes back to the 70s and 80s. Most teaching people how to use cash registers or retail stores for Pete’s sake. The Trinity of teaching tell me show me watch me do it. I still use that. If I’ve got somebody new into my part of the industry, I’m going to use tell me show me watch me do it, to explain to them how we handle keyword optimization or some other tasks that’s as a routine tasks that goes into, into our daily lives.  

The other part about it is performance reviews. Man, I can remember performance reviews that had a scale of one to 10 anymore. Most of them have three needs improvement made standards exceed standards, threes, right, they’re simple as can be. And again, humans are, this is this is why threes are important. They’re everywhere in our lives, product sizes, gameplay, everything else. Humans are built for threes, because our brains like that number it’s comfortable to work with. And finally, we can use this built in human preference for threes to provide structured almost anything we try to do from business presentations, skills, training, sales, performance reviews, and everything else. Now, not everything lends itself to being divided into threes, that’s a dark shirt, yet where it can be applied. And given how powerful threes are in our lives, doesn’t it make sense to be aware of this very human predilection for threes in lean into it, so we can become even better communicators? Seems pretty straightforward.  

Now, I’ve just given that entire presentation, in a pattern threes. This is something that I was taught ages ago also. And the basic way to go about presenting new information to somebody is tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them. So even in the outline of my outline, I have threes. And it’s effective. Again, you can pretty much take a look at anything that we’ve talked about. And it’d be pretty difficult to not recall, the threes are everywhere, people like threes, and you can use threes to set up your presentations, your stories, anything else relevant to communication? Yeah. 100%. Okay. So that’s three, that’s why they’re important and powerful.  

The other part about threes that I kind of like, is it’s easy to remember. And to me that that’s something that’s always been just kind of critically important. The thing that I tried to do, and I even have this note, on my on my computer monitor with a sticky note. The reason he’s three is it’s easy to do, it’s memorable, and it’s effective, you can make a presentation out of those three points if you want to do, but that’s just it. So when I have a new employee, or no, let’s not say new, when I have an employee ready to to ladder up a little bit and start trying to be a leader inside of a team. I’ll make sure to teach them this pattern as well. Threes, tell me show me watch, we do it that way to explain things. The way to lay out a report to a client, when you got to give a performance report, we do that we have what we’re talking about in the meeting, we talk about it in the end, we summarize what we just talked about, still the same pattern.  

You can get into trouble. It’s easy to get lost in that middle part. It really is when you’re trying to get the point across about your triad of of points you made in the first part, you can get off track pretty easily. So the other part about this is again in threes, try make sure your presentation last six to nine minutes. It tends to work that way. Yep. Right now. I think we’re just about nine minutes into this presentation. Okay, yeah, that was purely by accident. When we talk about advertising, we’re also talking about the three levels. We have awareness, we have the decision making, and we have the commitment part. And we need ads to address each one of those spots. 

Mariah Tang: With blog content, it’s you know, what happened, why it matters? What are we going to do about it? Yeah, just about any topics? Yes, three main settings. 

Stu Eddins: And sometimes the world has, in some ways, we built the world to fit into our paradigm into what we think or how we think rather. Okay, so we’re able to make anything into threes. If we really try hard. I was just download down the hallway talking to Cory. He’s got a presentation that he’s trying to put together. Or perhaps it’s a brochure or more thing, worthy. But even though the process has four steps, he’s broken it into three segments, the introduction of what we’re talking about why it’s so important that the second segment, the middle part is okay, so important. We have a process even though the process has four steps. It’s still a middle part. And the final part is and if you do this, you can reap the benefit of what we described at the beginning.  

The other part about this is we tend to see this in responses to our clients. If a client asks a question that requires There’s more than a yes or no answer. The first thing we tend to do is put something out there that says, you asked us this, just to make sure we’re on the same. On the same understanding, we state back to the client, what we heard them say we paraphrase it back, then we tell them what we did for research. And then finally, we give them the conclusion what we found out. That’s a paragraph, it doesn’t take much. But by keeping it in mind, keeping it particularly front of mind, that that can make sure that your communication is more precise, more on point. And, you know, in a world where we communicate by written language, through email, and text, in a way, it also subtracts some of the emotion from what you’re saying. So you’re just not overlaying anything. It’s just right there in front of you. You’re not including tone of voice or anything.  

Mariah Tang: Yeah. And on the opposite side of that, I think we as agency people, we love data, we love numbers. So we have a tendency to data dump. And if you go do your data dump, then go back to that three. Now pick out the things that matter, you know, these are the things we’re going to expand upon, you can still deliver that data later, but you’re delivering the main message to the stakeholder in that three segments. 

Stu Eddins: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes I feel on that particular point, we get a little backwards. We say Here, drink from this Firehose first. Yeah. Now will tell you about all the stuff you just had, you know, Russian pasture yet? Yeah. 

Mariah Tang: I like the Tarantino model, or you start with the end. And it’s still the same three. But you say, here’s the thing that occurred. Here’s how we built that for you. Here’s what we think you should do next time to continue this process. 

Stu Eddins: Yeah. And all the data becomes an appendix. Yeah. Yeah. For example, our clients don’t need us to read charts to them, they can read it. So instead, in the beginning, we’re going to tell them all the stuff that happened last month, and what that means for going on. The next part is gonna be telling you how we’re going to make that happen. The third part is really telling you about what the what the success metrics look like, once that does happen. Yeah, give them something. And then everything else is an appendix. By the way, you want to know how many clicks you got on this particular keyword last month, published page for anybody can read what happened last month.  

The important part, the takeaway part has to be explained is, here’s our observations, here’s what it means. And here’s what we’re doing about it. And whether the doing what we’re doing about it is either in response to a challenge, or to take advantage of an opportunity. It still fits that same pattern, and it may be a mixed bag of each, 

Mariah Tang: I think what I’m gonna add a link in the show notes to an example of one of our website, blog templates. It’s a pretty simple three standard, we have three social posts, we have three subheadings, and three ideas that we want to cover. So I’ll add that to the link. 

Stu Eddins: Okay. And threes also worked very well on things like marketing, landing page layout. Yeah. In particular. Really marketing landing page has three jobs to do. First thing it has to do is assure the person who landed on it that, yes, we have the information you were looking for, need to validate that they have found the right page. The next thing is explain why you’re different. Your point of difference. And again, that’s the middle part. Yes, you’re in the right place, we have what you want. In fact, we may have more than what you want. And that’s what makes us different. And then the final part is now you know all this stuff about us. You know, this is our brand, this is what we do. And at every step wait along the way, you allow them to just simply say great, and with conviction, they can commit a conversion of some sort. But still, instead of cramming so much stuff into a landing page, use the threes to kind of lay out a landing page, use it to set up your marketing plan in the first place.  

And the marketing plan can be across any channel. That middle part from when we have discovered the top research in the middle and, and commitment at the bottom. The research part is huge. People spend more time there than either of the two other areas. And that’s where he rolled out all sorts of content marketing is where you roll out all the the supporting information and the advertising tools to support the content, not the objective. Anyway, again, a different topic to cover later on. But again, mentally breaking things up into those three steps can help you get to the point quicker and can help you make sure that you stay on plan. 

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.