Audience Reach
The third and final dimension of size that impacts Proprietary Audience Development is reach. Most often associated with paid advertising, reach is simply the percentage of a target audience that was exposed to your advertising within a given period. In today’s world of email, mobile, and social media, it can also be defined as the percentage of your SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, or FOLLOWERS who viewed your message. Facebook defines the term as follows:
Reach measures the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. The reach number might be less than the impressions number since one person can see multiple impressions.2
Within Facebook, reach is the percentage of your audience that was on a page where your post was displayed. It is not a metric of interaction—a click, read, or view. Reach defines your effective audience. It also highlights that audience size and attention are not the same thing. Just because you have 100,000 Facebook FANS does not mean they’re hanging on your every word.
In fact, Facebook disclosed in 2012 that on average, any given post reaches only 16 percent of a company’s Facebook FANS.3 This angered a number of marketers who felt they were owed 100 percent distribution and didn’t want to pay for Sponsored Stories to get it.b But the number reflected a fundamental reality about Facebook and social media in general: they’re virtual waterfalls of information that consumers dip into and engage as they see fit. Whether we’re talking posts (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+), tweets (Twitter), photos (Instagram), or pins (Pinterest), social media channels produce streaming content akin to television; that is, it’s your choice to tune in when and where you want. More importantly, the consumer does not feel the obligation to retroactively check every update from every connection since their last login.
Reach defines your effective audience and also highlights that audience size and attention are not the same thing.
By contrast, email and SMS are channels where consumers are more conditioned to check every last message either out of:
Fear of missing something important
Visual cues within the channel (e.g., unread-message bolding)
Physical cues of their devices (e.g., noise or vibrations)
Far from the waterfalls of social media feeds, email and SMS inboxes are more akin to “to-do” lists that consumers check off, one message at a time. Your email and SMS messages tend to have far greater reach than social media, because every message the user receives creates an impression through its FROM and SUBJECT lines—even if they never open it. That’s vastly different than Facebook posts and tweets that your audience members might never even see.
Of course, the big asterisk next to the email channel is whether the message is received by SUBSCRIBERS. Aggressive spam filters have always been the bane of the permission-based email marketer’s existence, but the new challenge is from newer features, like Inbox Tabs and Priority Inbox from Gmail. Released over the summer of 2013, Gmail’s Inbox Tabs automatically sort unread messages into tabs of Gmail’s choosing (Primary, Social, Promotions, and Updates).4 Priority Inbox, on the other hand, allows the inbox owner to sort messages based on the importance they assign to the sender.5 Should more consumers adopt such features, then we may see the average email’s reach drop because it’s automatically being placed in “nonpriority” folders.
Whatever the channel, reach—in combination with your audience size—helps you determine the potential visibility of your message. Here’s how it may play out when comparing a fictitious company’s same sized audiences of email SUBSCRIBERS, Facebook FANS, and Twitter FOLLOWERS:
Which channel would you prioritize? Based solely on the data above, you’d have to say email. But there’s a lot more that goes into determining the right audience for the job—factors that may shift your channel priorities to Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere. That’s why we need to answer The Audience Imperative’s call to increase audience engagement and value, too.
Engagement
If I had a nickel for every time some marketing type uttered the word engagement over the past few years, I’d be a very rich man. Unfortunately, marketers who are “all hat and no cattle” often use the word as a cover. They’re big on talk, but light on metrics that actually document the revenue impact of specific marketing activities.
However, engagement is a critical metric in Proprietary Audience Development. An engaged audience is an attentive audience. An engaged audience is a responsive audience. And an engaged audience is a profitable audience.
So how the heck do you get an engaged audience? You nurture them. You interact with them personally. You amplify their content, even if there’s no direct or immediate benefit to you.