Influential Reach: Tracking and Measuring Social Media's Impact

Influential reach is a core metric, if not the most important metric, for social media advertising and engagement marketing.

Influential reach is a measure of the reach achieved with a marketing campaign, coupled with a measure of influence attained. For brand marketers, tracking and understanding the reach AND the positive influence of your brand are critical to measuring campaign effectiveness.

Reach is not Effectiveness

Reach has long been a mainstay of advertisers and marketers to help evaluate the scope of brand advertising, but is often confused with or assumed to be a measure of campaign effectiveness.

However, reach is not a direct measure of the overall effectiveness of a brand campaign. It may be a strong component in evaluating effectiveness, but by itself, reach is purely a measure of the scope of your message. Lacking any other metric to combine it with, marketers often assume effectiveness and reach are correlated – or worse, opt to target massive reach in order to compensate for low influence rates.

What brand marketers lack is a response measure similar to that transaction-oriented marketers have enjoyed. Like no other media before, the web provides transaction-oriented marketing with a direct measure of effectiveness. If you couple reach with direct measures of purchases and leads, you can evaluate, in no uncertain terms, campaign effectiveness with metrics like CPC, CPL, and CPA. However, for brand-oriented marketing efforts, there are no such standard response metrics available – until now.

Influence, the New Metric

Influence is the missing metric for brand effectiveness. Although quantifying influence is extremely difficult and not possible with high confidence with many forms of media, new capabilities and advances in online social analytics can shed some light on understanding the actual influence generated with web-based media. In fact, social media gives marketers new tools to not just measure influence, but to actually engineer influence.

With the social web, it is now possible to not just reach your target market segment with brand awareness, but actively influence them and, possibly more importantly, measure that influence. It’s an exciting time for brand marketing!

IR Plots
An interesting way of looking at this is by plotting influence versus reach. A truly effective branding campaign will maximize both.

Influential Reach is the New Measure for Brand Marketing

Advertisements in TV and display banner ads can achieve high reach but often lack any actual influence. Social media marketing can typically generate measurable and strong influence, but can struggle with achieving high reach. Achieving both influence and reach is the goal for brand marketing.

Influential reach is a core metric, if not the most important metric, for social media advertising and engagement marketing. Social media sites like Gather.com offer the combination of social media and social networking, which gives marketers the tools to engineer influence and reach.

Gather is the leader in implementing successful engagement marketing campaigns. For more information about getting your engagement campaign started, contact sales@gatherinc.com.