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What is Marketing Reach and How to Calculate it Accurately?

Digital Marketing
December 5, 2024
10 mins
What is Marketing Reach?
Content

Everyone is now bombarded with tons of ads and cold promotions, and that’s horrible. While most ads end up as white noise, it is crucial to account for your campaign’s frequency when measuring your market reach.

Our new blog post on reach in marketing will save you from falling into the audience abyss. Beyond the reach marketing definition, we will show you how to calculate it correctly and maximize your benefits from effective organic and paid media reach in your digital marketing strategy. 

So, let’s start with “What does reach mean in marketing?”

What is Reach in Marketing and Advertising?

In marketing and advertising, reach refers to the number of people who have seen your ads or content. Reach relates to audience size, exposure, and related content. Marketing reach embraces the audience exposed to your message and potential customers. The metric is calculated for specific audience segments or a broader population to evaluate the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. It estimates the number of people who might have seen your ads and indicates the potential customer you may access.

Reach marketing is also important for brand awareness. With wider exposure to your brand and marketing messages, more people will recognize and memorize your products and services. And that’s what you need most to establish brand loyalty and generate repeated purchases.

There’s much more to understand what is reach in marketing.

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Reach as Part of the RACE Model 

To convert more customer interactions into leads, the marketing reach definition assumes considering all the RACE stages: 

Reach focuses on building brand awareness through various channels, including social media, blogs, offline advertising, events, and media publications. The goal is to maximize audience coverage and create multiple touchpoints for potential customers to discover the brand.

Act refers to motivating the audience to interact with the brand online by visiting a website or engaging on social media. It is crucial for pursuing lead generation and helping customers explore your brand further. Tools like Google Analytics will help you track actions like viewing a product, adding items to a cart, or subscribing to a newsletter.

Convert is when a visitor turns into a paying customer. Conversions are online and offline: online ads drive offline store visits and vice versa. 

Engage focuses on nurturing long-term customer relationships through ongoing communication. High audience engagement leads to increased loyalty and repeat purchases, fostered through social media, emails, and direct marketing. the key to long-term success is to gauge customer loyalty, repeat sales, user-generated content, and email interactions.

Most of the questions we get from our clients at Promodo are about calculating reach.

How to Calculate Reach?

Reach is calculated as the total number of impressions divided by the frequency (how often the ad is shown to each viewer). This average shows how many unique people have seen your ad throughout its lifetime. 

As well as how to calculate reach from impressions, marketers analyze reach in synergy with metrics like engagement and conversions to track reach changes over time and optimize their marketing campaigns. 

There is a close relationship between reach, unique visitors, and impressions:

Unique visitors & Impressions

While reach measures your ad audience, impressions measure the times your ads are displayed. Impressions are much higher than reach because ads are displayed multiple times to consumers. 

Once you are ready to launch a paid ad, it is vital to quantify the reach of your online campaign. While you won’t get the exact number for marketing reach, you’ll still be able to estimate the odds of your campaign performance successfully with this core reach formula:

Market Reach Formula

With a strategic focus on the right frequency, you’ll attain the minimum ad appearance for your target audience and impact their buying behavior:

Optimal Frequency for Online Ads

There’s no exact indication of an optimal advertising reach or frequency. While frequency indicates the number of ad impressions per individual, cap it to avoid bothering your audience with ad impressions too often. Frequency caps will help you show your ads a balanced number of times:

Frequency Formula

The average reach rate indicates the percentage of the audience you’ve reached and is determined by dividing a post’s total reach by the number of followers and multiplying it by 100:

Average Reach Formula

Click-through rate (CTR) measures ad engagement by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. For example, if your ad gets 5 clicks out of 100 impressions, your CTR would be 5%. This indicates how effective your ad is at driving action:

Click Through Rate (CTR) Formula

Every ad campaign is purely individual and will depend on your marketing goals. So, how is reach measured? Let’s say, you are a startup and would like to raise awareness and expand your target market with new customers. Your seasoned competitor, on the other hand, may want to increase engagement and sales within their actual customer base:

Impressions Formula

Among the surest ways to advance your marketing reach is to segment your audience and create highly customized ads for specific audience segments. This is how you’ll determine the points of growth and expansion for your reach.

Along with a clear idea of how is reach calculated, the metric allows you to estimate your potential customer base.

Measuring Potential Customers

While audience reach embraces the number of customers who’ve seen your ad, you may also gauge the potential audience for your ads. Knowing how is advertising reach measured, you’ll determine the anticipated reach based on your actual reach.

Out of all the benefits of the marketing reach is the ability to measure your potential audience. You’ll target the intended audience more effectively and generate more sales qualified leads (SQLs) once you know how many people have resonated with your marketing message or an ad campaign, you’ll get an idea of how many people know about your brand name, product, or service. 

Reach Measurement

As an essential marketing metric, reach helps businesses determine potential audience size and shows how well you make data-driven decisions and manage your ad campaigns. A deeper dive into the marketing reach will help you measure your ad effectiveness. A high reach with low conversions indicates that customers don’t engage with your ads. That is why diving deeper into your audience size will help you set clearer goals for conversions and sales.

Beyond ad reach definition, these steps will help you measure potential customers:

  • Explore your targeted demographics and psychographics
  • Research your closest competitors
  • Analyze your product’s unique selling points (USPs).
  • Use monitoring services like Google Alerts
  • Arrange interviews with your current customers
  • Study web analytics
  • Make your brand visible across professional social networks

Before investing in Google Ads or paid social media channels, check various platforms like Facebook or Instagram to estimate your campaign’s reach capacity with a realistic estimate save of approximations. Knowing the potential audience size will help you elaborate a realistic reach strategy.

Proven Strategies to Improve Marketing Reach

Knowing the nuts and bolts of reach definition marketing alone will not tailor a sound ad approach. Our primary advice here is to reach audiences through a multi-channel marketing strategy. This way, you’ll see how your reach differs across your targeted audience segments, marketing channels, and ad campaigns.

We recommend these key strategies to expand your reach in marketing:

Optimize Audience Targeting for Effective Marketing Reach

By understanding and effectively segmenting your audience, you’ll reach the right people with tailored messages, 

Here are key strategies to optimize your audience targeting:

  • Understand your audience to identify the characteristics of your ideal audience like age, interests, location, income, and purchasing patterns.
  • Deep-dive into your target audience to get an idea of where your customers spend their time and how they consume content 
  • Segment your audience based on behaviors, preferences, and demographics to target the right people with the right message on each platform.
  • Utilize advanced targeting tools like lookalike audiences, retargeting, and interest-based targeting to reach new customers who share similar characteristics with your existing customers. 
  • Use multiple retargeting platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to meet your audience where they are now. 
  • Test and optimize your targeting strategies with variations in messaging, offers, and channels to refine your approach and focus on the most effective tactics.

Leverage Multi-Channel Marketing

By leveraging multiple channels with a cohesive personalized approach, you’ll create a more engaging and effective marketing strategy that meets customer needs:

  • Make your brand identity, tone, and message consistent across various channels to create a seamless customer experience.
  • Use data from multiple channels to personalize your approach.
  • Monitor performance and track metrics across the channels: click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates (CRs), and customer lifetime value (LTV). 

Don’t Neglect Social Media

Social media platforms offer immense potential for expanding your reach. Each platform meet the requirements of specific audience demographics:

  • Instagram and TikTok: Ideal for younger, visually-driven audiences.
  • LinkedIn: Perfect for B2B and professional networking.
  • Facebook: A versatile platform for all age groups.

Adapt your content and social ads to resonate with each platform’s user base, and use analytics tools to track engagement and optimize performance.

Optimize for Mobile Audiences

With mobile users accounting for over half of global web traffic, namely 64.04%, optimizing your campaigns for mobile is non-negotiable. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, create vertical video content for platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok, and leverage SMS marketing to connect with customers on the go.

Invest in Content Marketing

Creating valuable, shareable content is one of the most effective ways to expand your reach organically. Blogs, infographics, videos, and interactive tools can attract and retain an engaged audience. Implementing an SEO-focused strategy ensures your content ranks high on search engines, reaching users actively searching for relevant information.

Examples of Marketing Reach in Action

The podcast industry is on the rise. Listeners working from home prefer podcasts as the best type of media content. Advertisers benefit from new technologies and have the resources to make podcast advertising even more personalized and precisely targeted. Its outcomes are more measurable than ever,” said Eric John, Vice President, IAB Media Center.

Reach benefits of audio ads: 

  • Precise targeting: detailed targeting means a better return on advertising spend.
  • High conversion rates: Nielsen has found that listeners like audio ads better than display ads. It is 24% more memorable than display advertising and boosts purchase intent twice as much.
  • Lower ad spend: compared to traditional advertising, digital advertising has a lower cost.  Advertisers easily track the ratio of the number of listens to the campaign cost. 

Why a High Marketing Reach Doesn’t Guarantee ROI

While planning your ad campaigns, focus on three core metrics: 

Core Marketing Metrics

  • Impressions show that your ad resonates with your target audience and runs smoothly.
  • Reach tells you how many users see your ad and helps gauge how often they need to see it before taking action.
  • Engagement indicates how effectively your ad is driving interaction.

Engagement reveals which ad is more successful once your ads have similar reach-to-impression ratios. Despite strong impressions, low engagement suggests your ad could be more compelling and you’d need to optimize it. Engagement ultimately gives the clearest picture of your ad’s ROI by indicating the cost of each user action.

Engagement Rate Benchmark

Beware, though, that higher reach is not always a win-win solution and won’t bring you a higher return on ad spend (ROAS)

People are overwhelmed with non-stop ad messages and simply do not resonate with most of them. Your strategic task is to segment your target audience and forward finely-tuned messages to the right ears.

Assuming you are a startup and want to promote the new soup for vegans. With this intent in mind, focus on vegan groups online, even with a smaller reach, rather than large media platforms with a mere vegan audience. This way, you’ll target more people interested in your new product. This is how you’ll win quality leads at a reasonable ad budget.

With the right geo-targeting, you’ll attract more vegan customers within a 10-mile radius of your business in contrast to wider vegan demographics across your area.

Conclusions

Beyond the question of what is reach in advertising, there is a long way to customize your ad strategy. 

Our reach marketers are experienced experts in multiple channels ready to elaborate on the best-fit reach digital marketing.

At Promodo, we operate various reach optimization strategies to help you expand your online visibility, grow your brand’s reach and awareness to win more quality leads over competitors.   

Let's reach your business goals!
Contact Our Experts For Marketing Reach Session.
Written by
Taras Bereza

Content Marketing Manager at Promodo

Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.

Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.

Published:
December 5, 2024
Updated:
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