How to Increase Reach in Paid Media Ads

When it comes to paid media, there are so many different channels, platforms, and goals to consider to ensure you’re spending the right time and budget for achieving your main business goals. Several factors can be used to determine the right KPIs according to the needs of the organization. For example, your business may want to focus on increasing reach, engagement, conversions, etc. with paid media advertising. In this blog, we’ll focus on the top of the funnel goal of increasing paid media reach. But first, let’s define reach and why your business may want to focus on a goal that ISN’T focused on converting leads, but instead focused on reaching a broad audience.

What does ‘reach’ mean?

In digital marketing, ‘reach’ refers to the unique number of people who see your content. Reach can be further divided into organic reach and paid reach. 

Organic reach refers to the number of users you will reach if you make a social media post without promoting it via paid advertising, for example. 

By contrast, paid media reach refers to the number of people you are able to reach via paid media campaigns, which is through paid advertising. It is common for social media platforms to provide details of reach for organic and paid content. Still, it’s a good idea to know how to calculate this metric.

 Let’s explore two terms that will assist in calculating reach.

• Impressions: As part of digital marketing and online advertising, an impression corresponds to how many times a paid or organic content is displayed to a user. 
  
• Frequency: The frequency of advertising represents how many times the same ad or impression has been displayed per unique visitor.

Source: digitalmediametrics.com

Why would your business want to use reach as a KPI for measuring ad performance?

While some may say their main business objective is to increase revenue and conversions, sometimes it’s best for a business to focus on awareness and building top-of-funnel users instead. For example, a new business or a business with a new product is likely focused on brand awareness and getting the word out that their product or service exists! So it would make sense to focus on reach as a KPI, and getting their ads seen by as many relevant people as possible. Then once the business has established an understanding of the type of audience interested, they can begin focusing on other KPIs such as engagement and conversion. 

Best practices for increasing reach on different paid media platforms:

Facebook: 

There are many ways to share content on Facebook. It’s a great platform if your target audience is primarily active on the platform because that means you can take advantage of the many content forms for paid media (carousel ads, video ads, etc). An ideal audience size recommended by Facebook is between 1,000-50,000 to ensure you have enough of an audience to make your paid advertising worthy. 

Below are the various ways in which you can leverage your paid media on Facebook to increase reach:

1. Boost posts: Facebook’s Boost feature lets you increase the visibility of your post. More people will see it on their timeline as a result. 
   
2. Strengthen targeting: When promoting highly specific content, it can be helpful to focus your target audience on a select few to whom your content is most relevant. A current event that is taking place in the United States wouldn’t make sense to promote to people outside the country. However, if you wish to collect better data through your paid advertising, you may wish to broaden the scope of your target audience.
   
3. Retarget to warm leads: Reaching out to people who visited your website or opened your email but did not take any action is another effective way to increase reach. To do this, upload a list of your contacts on Facebook, and the magical algorithm of Facebook will create a lookalike audience based on your contacts. By doing this, you can widen your reach to a relevant audience quickly and easily.
   
4. Check budget and bids: You can bid on specific actions like link clicks, landing page views, etc, based on how much you want to spend. When you optimize your bid, you can get the most out of your advertising investment and also achieve your desired reach at a lower cost.

Twitter: 

Even though Twitter allows limited characters, it can be a very useful tool for enhancing your reach. An ideal Twitter audience size should be around 3,000 but not less than 2,000 to ensure that paid media is effective.

Below are some examples of how to increase reach with Twitter ads:

1. Promoted tweet campaign: The promoted tweets are just like your regular tweets. The only difference is that promoted tweets are purchased by advertisers who wish to reach a broader audience or to pique the interest of current followers. The audience can clearly identify a promoted tweet because these sponsored tweets are clearly labeled as ‘Promoted’. Other than that, promoted tweets work like regular tweets and can be retweeted, replied to, etc.
   
2. Campaign Targeting: As part of Twitter’s tailored targeting, you can choose to target specific groups and serve ads based on conversations, events, interests, movies and TV shows, keywords, lookalike followers, and engagement to ensure you’re reaching relevant audience members.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is popular as a professional networking platform. However, as a professional social media platform, LinkedIn is also capable of advertising. Paid media is very active in promoting career opportunities, events, and business-to-business relationships.

Below are some examples of how to increase reach with LinkedIn advertisements:

1. Sponsor content: On LinkedIn, sponsored content can take many forms. An ad can be a single image, a video, a carousel, or an event ad. You can use sponsored content to raise awareness of topics that are pertinent to your brand, demonstrate the value of your products, and attract attendees to upcoming events. When you use sponsored content, you increase brand awareness, engagement, discover new audiences, and thus increase the reach of your paid media.
   
2. InMail advertising: InMail ads are a great way to extend your campaign to your target audience. Premium LinkedIn accounts have access to InMail, a messaging service that allows users to send messages to people they are not connected with on LinkedIn. Your InMail message should be simple, direct, and clearly indicate its purpose. Since you are reaching someone via a personal message, opt for a personal touch but without overwhelming them. 

Instagram:

There are 1 billion monthly active users accessing the Instagram app globally. That means there are multiple groups of people for you to target. If utilized properly, paid media on Instagram can enable you to reach a large audience.

Here are some examples of how to increase reach with Instagram advertising:

1. Instagram advertising(photo, video & carousel): Similar to LinkedIn, Instagram’s advertising can take the form of posts, carousel posts, stories, reels, or videos. Depending on your target audience, you can choose which form of paid content is most effective. Through paid media on Instagram, you can reach a wider audience and, as a result, increase your reach, which is difficult to achieve using only organic reach.
   
2. Boost Posts: You can boost a post you publish on Instagram to make it appear as an advertisement to reach more people. It is possible to select a goal for your advertising, such as more profile visits, website visits, or messages.

Google Ads:

There are approximately 2 trillion searches performed on Google every year. From a marketing perspective, this is both good news and bad news. The good news is that you can reach a large audience due to a large number of searches. This, however, requires a robust paid media campaign strategy, as the competition to rank on the top pages is high. 

The following are some examples of how to increase reach with Google advertising:

1. Search: The paid search results appear at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), and they display a small box with the word “Ad”. With these ads, you’ll only be charged when a visitor clicks on your ad and gets redirected to your website. When your advertisements are rank high in the SERP, the chances of people clicking the advertisement increase. To rank higher, create high-quality ads paired with relevant keywords and polished landing pages. By doing so, you’ll increase your quality score, which increases your chances of better ad positions.

2. Display: When targeting a specific audience, display ads are highly effective. Customers see these ads when they read articles, watch videos, or visit websites. These advertisements can be highly targeted based on location and interests. Thus, your ads will be more likely to be viewed by an audience that is aligned with your business and will be more responsive to ad messages shown.

General best practices for increasing reach:

1. Research target audience:

It cannot be overstated how important it is to be familiar with your audience. You cannot effectively reach your target audience if you do not know what they like and prefer. Thus, you should dedicate a good deal of time to understanding your audience.

2. Customize paid media for every platform: 

Each platform provides something unique to the individuals that use it. You should apply the same theory when creating paid content for your digital marketing. Consider utilizing native formats for paid promotions rather than distributing similar content across all platforms. Make a carousel post for Instagram and an infographic for LinkedIn using the same information, for example. It would take extra effort, but it would allow you to better target people on specific platforms.

3. Decide what needs to be paid: 

Not all of your content needs to be promoted with paid advertising. You can still achieve success with organic content. Determine the type of audience you are targeting, the purpose of the media content, and the results you want, and then decide whether paid or organic media is appropriate.

4. Try converting organic to paid: 

Simply put, your best-performing content is the content that appeals to your audience. Therefore, you should choose top-performing organic content and boost the post or spend your advertising dollars on similar content to ensure it reaches a large number of people.

5. Know the algorithms: 

​​Every social media platform has its own algorithm. Keeping up with these algorithms is crucial to both organic and paid media. Understanding the algorithms will also help you write and create better content. 

6. Conduct A/B testing: 

You can find out what kind of promoted content your audience prefers by testing your ad content, ad designs, audience segments, etc. to see which performs better as measured by your desired metrics (reach, impressions, content interactions, views, etc.). This can also serve as a blueprint for future paid promotions.

7. Focus on the CTA: 

You have created the perfect paid advertising campaign for social media. Great work! But what’s next? What should people do after viewing the ads? The purpose of a call-to-action is to direct all your paid media efforts in the direction of achieving the results of actions you desire from your audience. 

8. Track insights: 

Once you have posted your paid content, be sure to monitor it regularly. Analyzing these insights can help you determine if your content is performing well and is reaching the intended audience. Future paid media campaigns can also be improved by monitoring the analytics and setting KPIs accordingly.

Tying it all together

By creating a customized well-thought-out paid media strategy using the various tools provided by media channels, businesses can reach their target market or discover new audiences effectively. Though paid media campaigns require substantial investment, they can yield significant results in the long term. You will need an in-depth understanding of your target audience and the tools and settings provided by media channels, including a solid advertising budget and an understanding of your KPIs to be successful.

Contact Pyxl

We’ve discussed the basics of how paid media can help increase reach, but if you need further assistance with your paid media campaigns, we are here to help. Pyxl can help with paid media campaign creation, strategizing, monitoring, and more. Contact us for help building a successful brand awareness paid media campaign.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022