Modern businesses spend billions of dollars on marketing. This year alone, the total digital ad spending will reach a whopping $455.30 billion. Without advertising, it’s almost impossible for businesses to keep up with the competition.

That being said, what does market reach mean in marketing, and how can it be leveraged to acquire the targeted number of potential customers and profits?

This article takes on one of the most important metrics in marketing: market reach. Find out more about market reach, why businesses need it, and how to increase reach and grow your business.

Key Marketing Statistics in 2021

• Marketers have been taking a keener interest in digital advertising than in traditional advertising
• 59% of the global population (4.66 billion people) was active on the internet as of January 2021
• The global revenue for digital advertising is expected to grow from US$463.8 million in 2021 to US$632.7 million in 2025
• 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing
• 45% of small businesses invest in PPC advertising

What Is Market Reach?

Market reach refers to the number of potential customers who see or engage with your advertisements as per your marketing strategy. For instance, if you serve ads on a third-party website or buy a local TV commercial space. The potential number of people who see that ad is what savvy marketers call the market reach.

Note, however, market reach doesn’t mean the actual number of people who will see your ads and automatically turn into customers. Rather, it’s an estimation of the number of people that might see your advertising. For example, not everyone will see it if you rent space on a billboard down the highway. Some drivers will be far too busy observing traffic to notice your ad. And out of those who will, not all might be your target audience. It will help with your overall brand awareness, though.

What Is Customer Reach?

Customer reach refers to the number of existing customers or targeted prospects you can reach with your marketing message. Due to the rapidly changing digital landscape, modern audiences have grown “immune” to advertising.

In response, businesses have adopted new ways to reach their existing or potential customers through the following:

• Digital marketing
• Native advertising
• Google and Facebook ads
• Social media marketing
• Email & Direct mail marketing combination
  

We’ll discuss how each of the strategies listed above can be used to improve customer reach. For now, get this: successful market reach requires qualitative and quantifiable data.

‍Note: Reach is NOT the same as impressions. Here’s the key difference between reach vs impressions: while reach refers to the total number of unique users, impressions refer to the number of views (number of times your content has been viewed).

How to Improve Customer Reach

Lets’ review some of the directions mentioned above in more details.

1. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing takes advantage of the internet to increase a brand’s visibility and attract more potential customers from all corners of the World Wide Web. To succeed in digital marketing, companies have to first establish their online presence through a website.

A website is the equivalent of a physical location for the business. Companies can create service pages for their products and services. They can also share valuable content through blogs, whitepapers, and guides.

Same as with any type of marketing, before starting a digital marketing campaign, businesses must first very clearly define their ideal customer. This involves identifying demographic information such as gender, age, profession, location, etc. Once the company identifies this, it can create content matched to their needs and better target their audiences with their offers based on these parameters.

• Create relevant, helpful written, image, or video content for a targeted audience
• Stick to consistent posting times for your content
• Promote your content organically to increase your organic reach
• Use paid advertising and remarketing to push your website to even larger audiences
• Employ SEO best strategies to increase rankings on search engines
• Market products and sell
• Offer excellent customer service
  

The type of content on the website also impacts the level of engagement. Some users find images and videos more valuable than written content. Others find more satisfaction in written content. Whether it’s images, written content, or video, the company has to create high-quality original content that matches the user’s needs.

2. Paid Ads (Google and Facebook Ads)

Paid advertising is effective for faster results when driving customers to the business’s official pages, product pages, checkouts, and much more. Google and Facebook allow businesses to create and place ads strategically on the news feed, other websites, and search engine results pages.

While Facebook targets the user’s interests, Google targets the searcher’s intent. Google ads lead to a 4.40% conversion rate on the search network, while Facebook ads lead to a 9.21% conversion rate across all industries.

3. Email and Direct Mail Marketing Combination

Email marketing involves the use of electronic mail software to send marketing materials such as newsletters, offers, promotions, and much more. The good thing with email is that it can be used to engage with existing customers or potential customers regardless of whether the business knows them or not (cold emailing).

Direct mail marketing also ensures the customers get your offers and promotions, but instead of the inbox, they will receive them in their mailbox in a printed form.

In every email or direct mail marketing strategy, a company should first build its own email list. Your list should include all the existing and past customers, unless they unsubscribe. Grow your lists through call to actions that invite people to signup to get free offers, free trials, free ebooks, free consultations, quotations, and more.

• Conduct an audience segmentation based on customer needs;
• Serve your messages to your contacts on the customers or prospects list;
• Keep your message short;
• Add visual media (high-quality images and videos with smaller storage);
• Add a compelling call to action;
• Alternate the channels: instead of sending three same emails in a row, send an email, and follow-up with a nicely designed postcard to their postal address;
• Automate the flows and set up the triggers based on behavior.
  

For best direct mail automation, try out Inkit Send to easily send print communications based on real-time customer actions.

4. Social Media Marketing

The business can also engage in social media as part of its marketing strategy. Customers have a social life, and following them to social media can help increase reach. Post fun and engaging content to keep readers interested. Paid reach can also help push your ads to interested customers.

People share stories of their experiences on Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Instagram stories, TikTok, and user-generated content, among other channels. They talk about your business and what they liked (or didn’t like).

As a marketing-savvy business owner, this engagement provides invaluable insights on what to tweak to better satisfy your customers’ needs. You want to measure all this information through social media analytics tools and use it for your next campaigns.

How Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform Helps with Market and Customer Reach

Inkit is a Reach Enablement Platform offering software to:

• autocomplete and verify addresses,
• automate customer campaigns,
• and generate paperless documents securely at scale.
  

Businesses across every industry are using Inkit's technology to reach customers with confidence:

Finance & Banking

At Inkit, we understand the struggle of creating and managing multiple financial documents and the consequences of keeping invalid data in your database. We help finance and banking firms obtain validated shipping addresses through Inkit Verify. We also provide Inkit Render software for easy PDF generation and management.

Marketing, Retail & Ecommerce

The issue of missing packages is something many people have grown used to. Nearly $25 million in goods get lost every day. With Inkit Verify, we want to ensure that your packages never make it to the list of lost goods. We verify customer addresses and autocomplete shipping addresses before the packages get sent. And should you want to automate the print & delivery process based on your consumers’ behavior or habits, use Inkit Send for trigger-based automated campaigns.

Healthcare

When it comes to healthcare, keeping clear records matters significantly. You need to keep a clear, updated list of customer information and, at the same time, protect confidential data from falling into the wrong hands. At Inkit Verify, we keep our customers’ records clean and validated for seamless communication with healthcare service providers. And quality HTML to PDF generation integrated into your portal via Inkit Render API will ensure your patients get well-formatted downloadable PDF versions of whichever data your platform allows them to pull (i.e., lab results, signature-ready documents, etc.).

Final Thoughts

Building a wide customer base is only the beginning of greater success ahead. Despite the efforts put in by many companies to establish their dominance in the industry, only through valid, accurate data can they measure, track, and bette