Understanding Content Reach & Impressions in Digital Marketing

As technology continues to push us further into the digital age, the effectiveness and popularity of digital marketing continue to increase. This is directly in tandem with the overwhelming growth of individuals who now use the internet on a daily basis. We are no longer interested in print media, newspapers, or television nearly as much as we are in live streaming and web browsing on mobile devices for things like online shopping, local searches, or information. As a result, more and more small businesses are harnessing the power of digital marketing and its ability to convert.

What Are Conversions?

A conversion is the percentage of individuals that follow through on a call-to-action. In most cases, this refers to someone following through on a call-to-action on your website, such as signing up for a digital subscription, making a purchase, or contacting you via your contact form. While conversions are extremely important, they aren’t the only metric you need to know about and pay attention to when it comes to digital marketing in Canada and North America. You also need to know about content reach and impressions.

What Is Content Reach?

When you create a blog post and it sits on your website, published live but no one interacts with it or sees it – you have no reach. When we talk about reach or content reach, this simply refers to how many people see your content. This content could be on your website, on your blog, through your social media channels, or via an ad. The distinction to make here is that the reach is the number of “unique” people that see the content you have posted – meaning if someone reads your content twice – they can only be counted as one.

What Are Impressions?

An impression is the number of times that your content has been displayed. For example, if you have a service posted on a freelancing platform and you take a look at the impressions metric and see 1,587 impressions in the last 7-days – this means that in the last 7-days, your content has been shown to the masses 1,587 times.

Another example of this would be if you were to take a blog post from your website and share it on Facebook or Instagram. Then a customer comes along and sees it and decides to re-share it across their own newsfeed. This is going to give you at least two impressions, if not more, as the customer who sees it is one impression and then those who see the re-share are another one plus impressions (depending on how many see it). If the original sharer comes back to the post and re-shares it a second time to another social feed, that doesn’t count as a unique impression as they’ve already seen it.

Why Does Content Reach & Impressions Matter?

A low content reach means that your content does not reach a large number of people and as a result, you won’t expand your customer base as people aren’t seeing you. If this is the case, you want to work on increasing your social media reach and your content reach so that more people find you – this is called increasing your brand awareness.

What is the Importance?

? Having a lot of impressions but a short reach means that you will pay more for the number of views you get because fewer people are converting.

? Having low impressions but a large reach means that more people may see your content but they will see it less often. This becomes a problem if those people do not convert right away.

How Can You Boost Reach?

Make sure that you are creating high-quality content that is relevant, evergreen, and addresses your audience’s needs or pain points. Make sure that any engagement or interactions you have with your audience provide value and that the content you offer up fits the format you are catering to. For example, don’t place large blocks of text on a mobile responsive website.

Other than this, make sure you have a solid search engine optimization plan in place for inbound marketing and provide data-driven content like videos, infographics, lookbooks, live chats, solution builders, quizzes, whitepapers, brochures, and blog posts. Also, don’t forget to network, link and curate content that fits your niche and engages your audience.