Understanding Reach in Marketing: Strategies to Increase Reach
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Have you ever heard the term ‘reach’ when it comes to using web advertising or social media?
‘Reach’ refers to the number of users who have seen an advertisement or post. To achieve success for a company through web advertising or social media, it’s crucial to first reach a large audience with your content. Therefore, reaching out is of paramount importance. In this article, we’ll delve into the meaning of reach in marketing, its benefits, and detailed strategies to increase reach.
What is Reach?
Reach refers to the reach rate of advertisements or content, indicating the number of people who have encountered the advertisement or content, or the proportion relative to the total audience.
Since reach is counted on a per-user basis, even if the same user sees the same advertisement three times, it is counted as 1 reach. Therefore, reach is used as an indicator of the breadth of exposure of advertisements or content.
Benefits of Gaining Reach
Reach, which represents the reach rate of advertisements or content, is one of the key metrics to consider when conducting marketing.
So, what are the effects of gaining reach in marketing? Here, we’ll explain the benefits of gaining reach.
Cognitive Expansion
Acquiring a large reach means that the content has reached many users. In other words, it leads to cognitive expansion.
With increased awareness, it becomes easier for users to become interested in your company’s products or services, indirectly affecting the company’s sales.
Maximizing Advertising Effectiveness
In advertising, achieving interest from a certain percentage of the reached audience leads to results. Therefore, as the reach increases, the number of users interested in the advertisement also increases, resulting in higher advertising effectiveness.
Moreover, by analyzing the reach, it becomes possible to identify advertisements that are more easily accepted by users and conduct effective advertising campaigns.
Increase in Followers
Increasing the reach increases the opportunities for users to see your content, which may lead to more users becoming interested in or sympathizing with your company and following you.
Therefore, along with cognitive expansion, there is also the benefit of increasing followers. Additionally, analyzing reach can help understand what information should be communicated to the target audience.
Distinguishing Reach from Easily Confused Metrics
When conducting marketing activities, various metrics are used for analysis, some of which have definitions similar to reach. To enhance the accuracy of analysis, it’s essential to understand the differences between each.
Impressions
Impressions are used as one of the indicators of the effectiveness of advertisements or posts, but they simply represent the number of times they were displayed without considering whether the advertisement was clicked.
In other words, if the same advertisement is displayed twice to the same user, the number of impressions will count as two.
Therefore, unlike reach, which measures the number of users who have seen the advertisement or content, impressions count the number of times the advertisement or content was displayed.
PV
PV stands for Page View, representing the number of times a specific page within a website has been opened. It serves as one of the metrics to measure how much a website is being viewed, so merely displaying an ad does not count as a PV.
Conversely, even if there are no ads displayed on a page, PV will still be counted. Also, since it simply counts the number of times a page is visited, it cannot be measured on a user-by-user basis like reach.
Engagement
Engagement is a metric that represents the proportion of user reactions to advertisements or posts. The actions counted as engagement may vary depending on the social media platform, but mainly include likes and comments.
Unlike reach, which merely involves the display of advertisements or posts, engagement refers to users reacting and taking action on what is displayed.
Engagement has benefits such as enabling two-way communication and visualizing relationships with users, making it an important metric that contributes to a company’s success.
Frequency
Frequency refers to the average number of times an advertisement is displayed to a single user.
At first glance, it may seem similar to impressions, but impressions represent the number of times an ad is displayed, while frequency indicates how many impressions there were per user.
Additionally, while reach refers to the number of users who have seen advertisements or content, frequency refers to the number of impressions per person.
Ways to Increase Reach
Increasing reach is crucial for effective advertising delivery and social media operations, but how exactly can it be increased? Here, we introduce methods to increase reach by media type.
Internet Advertising
Internet advertising includes listing advertisements that appear in search engine results and advertisements placed within websites.
Clarify Your Target
When delivering advertisements, clarifying your target audience enables more effective delivery. For example, if you’re targeting female college students in their 20s, using trends popular among female students in your ad creative can make it more appealing and lead to increased reach.
By clarifying your target audience, you can tailor your delivery to them, making it easier for them to see your ads.
Set Days and Times
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can determine the optimal delivery times based on their lifestyle rhythms. For example, targeting students during morning commute or lunch breaks can increase your reach.
It’s crucial to display ads during the days and times when users are most active.
Craft Compelling Headlines
In internet advertising, text plays a crucial role. How you appeal to users with your messaging can significantly impact your reach.
Therefore, setting compelling headlines that entice users to click is vital. Consider addressing users’ concerns or including keywords to create titles that are both clear and memorable.
Since users are exposed to numerous ads daily, differentiation is key.
Create Creative Images
Some internet ads include visuals. Using images helps users visualize the ad content, enhancing its effectiveness.
By using creative images that catch users’ attention, you can expect to expand your reach. It’s also essential to tailor colors, illustrations, and other elements to appeal to your target audience
SNS
Although there are various social media platforms, let’s explain the common methods for gaining reach on each SNS.
Increase Post Frequency
Unlike internet advertising where increasing the number of placements requires more budget, on SNS, you can post without additional costs. By increasing the number of posts, you can increase your reach.
Increasing posts not only increases the likelihood of catching users’ attention but also ensures that more people see them.
However, be cautious as excessive posting may deter users.
SNS platforms have a feature called hashtags. By adding hashtags to your posts, they can be seen when users search for the same hashtags.
This means there’s a chance for users who don’t follow your account to see your posts.
When using hashtags, it’s essential to be relevant to your posts and to lower competition by using multiple hashtags.
Grow Your Followers
With more followers, more users will see your posts. Therefore, like increasing the number of posts, growing your followers can help you gain reach.
Additionally, having more followers increases the likelihood of them sharing your posts, leading to more exposure.
To increase followers, it’s crucial to enrich your profile and actively engage with followers.
Adjust Posting Times
SNS platforms allow you to set precise posting times, as each platform has different peak user activity times.
For example, the hours of 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. during commuting or studying, and 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. during lunchtime are known to have high user activity.
Reference: Fiscal Year 2020 Survey Report on Usage Time and Information Behavior in Information and Communication Media
By targeting these times, you can gain more reach.
Engage Actively with Followers
A significant advantage of SNS is the ability to communicate with users. There are various ways to engage with users, primarily as follows.
- Responding to comments on posts
- Liking or commenting on users’ posts
- Responding to DMs
- Using question stickers in stories
By actively engaging with followers, you can expect more dissemination. Additionally, proactive communication enables bidirectional communication, which can also benefit marketing efforts.
SNS-specific Reach Acquisition Points.
While there are common points to gain reach on SNS, each SNS has its own characteristics, so the methods of gaining reach also differ. Therefore, it’s important to grasp the points of each SNS.
Points for Achieving Reach on Different Social Networks
While there are common points in achieving reach on social networks, each SNS has different characteristics, resulting in variations in the methods to gain reach. Therefore, it is also important to understand the specific points of each SNS.
When aiming to expand reach on Twitter, it’s essential to understand its features and make the most of them.
While hashtags can also be used on Instagram, Twitter has a feature called Trends, which displays keywords that are currently trending in real-time.
By effectively utilizing these trends and hashtags, you can expect to gain a lot of reach.
Retweet Past Tweets
Twitter has a feature called Retweet, which allows you to retweet tweets. By retweeting, you can tweet the same content again that you tweeted in the past.
One of Twitter’s features is its fast-paced feed. Therefore, even if you tweet, it may quickly flow away and may not reach many people.
By retweeting, you can repeatedly put important tweets or tweets you want people to see in the feed.
Like Twitter, Instagram has its own unique features and characteristics. Understanding these features and leveraging them for reach acquisition is crucial.
Repost in Stories
Instagram also has a repost feature like Twitter. You can repost other users’ posts or your own posts by quoting them.
Posts that may be buried in the feed can be less buried by using Stories, making it easier to gain reach.
Additionally, reposting new posts in Stories allows you to inform your followers about new posts.
Run Campaigns
In Instagram, you can conduct promotion marketing called campaigns, which are user-participatory initiatives aimed at attracting customers and expanding awareness.
“Hashtag campaigns” that utilize the hashtag function of posts are common, where you prepare an original hashtag, encourage users to post with that hashtag, and aim to spread the original hashtag.
You need to provide gifts or benefits to users who post with the original hashtag, but with ingenuity, you can implement it while keeping the budget down.
By conducting such campaigns, your account, products, or services can be spread to many people, allowing you to gain reach.
Facebook allows for more information to be included compared to Twitter or Instagram, so there are various methods for reaching out. Here, we’ll introduce two of them.
Use Images in Posts
Since Facebook allows for a larger amount of text in posts, using images is recommended as excessive text may make it less likely for users to be interested.
Using images makes it easier for users to react with likes or shares, ultimately leading to an increase in reach.
Include Details in Page Descriptions
Page descriptions are displayed at the top of Facebook pages, making them a crucial source of information for users to decide whether or not they’re interested in the page.
Therefore, it’s good to specify what information or content is being shared. However, overly long explanations may cause users to leave, so it’s important to write succinctly and clearly.
Summary
In SEO consulting advertising and SNS operations, acquiring reach is essential. The more reach you have, the more people you’ve reached with your content, making it easier to achieve results. Understanding the concept of reach and how to increase it is crucial for delivering your company’s products or services to customers. Based on the explanations provided in this article, let’s aim to increase reach on the platforms we use.
Author Profile
Mr. Takeshi Amano is a graduate of the Faculty of Law at Nihon University. With 12 years of experience working in the advertising agency industry, he discovered SEO and began his research during the early days of SEO. He self-taught and conducted experiments and verifications on over 100 websites. Using this expertise, he founded Admano Co., Ltd., which is currently in its 11th year of operation. Mr. Amano handles sales, SEO consulting, web analytics (holding the Google Analytics Individual Qualification certification), coding, and website development. The company has successfully managed SEO strategies for over 2000 websites to date.
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