According to Wikipedia, reach is defined in #advertising as “the total number of different people or households exposed at once, to a medium during a given period.” This is the most fundamental element of a campaign because reaching too small an audience, or worse yet, the wrong audience will destroy any chance for success. For example, if we were selling a car with an MSRP over $80,000, we would not target areas 100 miles from the store where the median income averaged $35,000 per year. Regardless of what frequency we used in our campaign, our target audience would, at best, hinder if not sabotage our campaign as a result of geography and fiscal profile.
Instead, we would likely target all households with an income between $100,000 and $250,000 within 30 miles of the store with an emphasis on registered owners driving our brand. An even better solution would be to analyse our previous sales to pinpoint the top producing zip codes and determine how far out from the store we needed to travel to reach 80% of our previous sales. Next, we could suppress our existing customers from the list to ensure conquest sales and tailor a message to that audience. Meanwhile, a parallel campaign could be run to identify opportunities from within the store’s customer database who had purchased more than 24 months ago and may be re-entering the market. Although the general campaign to both segments would be some form of “Buy Now”, the delivery of this message should be drastically different given the context of each relationship.
Next week we’ll discuss Reach vs Frequency – The inverse curves
