Look at your reach in digital marketing as a whole and grade its results
The average chiropractic professional spends $6,304 on advertising each year according to the Chiropractic Economics 2021 Salary and Expense Survey, while group practices spend more than triple that amount at $21,016. Monitoring the effects of your advertising campaigns helps you know whether your monies are providing a good return. One way to do this is to measure your practice’s reach in digital marketing, then grade its results.
What is reach in digital marketing?
In the digital world, the term “reach” refers to how many people have seen your advertisement or other online content at least one time. If you run a Facebook ad, for instance, and 200 people see it, that ad’s digital reach is 200.
Technically, digital reach can be separated into three categories:
- Organic reach is the number of unique people who saw some type of content that you posted but did not pay for. Examples of content that can do well in terms of organic or unpaid reach include blog posts, social media posts, and online videos.
- Paid reach refers to the number of people who saw content that you paid to post, such as when running an ad campaign on a social media site. Your paid reach can be influenced by a variety of factors, some of which include your budget and how you targeted your audience.
- Viral reach is the number of people who saw your online content because someone they know interacted with, therefore placing it in their own social media news feed. If they interact with it as well, the content can go even more viral, taking your digital reach further.
Why digital reach is important
One reason you want to know your reach in digital marketing is that it can provide insight into whether your content is achieving its goal. Maybe you continue to post blogs about sports chiropractic topics because you want to grow that side of your business. However, you’ve not had a new patient requesting these types of services in the past three months. This tells you that your content campaign is not achieving its purpose.
Paying attention to your reach in digital marketing also tells you whether your posts and ads are encouraging people to engage with your practice. The more people feel compelled to interact with your content, the greater your reach — both organic and viral. And if they feel compelled to react to paid advertisements, your paid reach becomes well worth the cost.
Digital reach measurement options
When measuring your reach on social media, some platforms will provide this information for you. For example, when you post on Facebook, you can click on the link to “See insights and ads” under your post. This gives you your post reach. It also provides post impressions (the number of times your post has been viewed, which can include multiple views by the same person) and post engagement (the number of people who interacted with the post, such as by liking it, commenting on it, or sharing it).
Other social media platforms don’t provide reach statistics. Twitter and LinkedIn are two. They do provide impressions to give you some idea of how much your content has been viewed, but you won’t necessarily know how many unique people viewed the post versus how many saw it numerous times. So, this metric may be better than nothing, but it also provides an incomplete picture.
If you work with a marketing firm, they may be able to provide your digital reach data for you. They have access to more measurement tools for the digital world, giving them a greater ability to determine how many people are seeing your content.
Grading your practice’s reach
Once you have your data in hand, consider how well your content is doing in terms of reach:
- Are you reaching the number of people that you’d like?
- Do some types of content have a better reach than others?
- Do you have limited reach but good conversion rates?
- Alternatively, do you have great reach but very few conversions to actual leads?
Look at your reach in digital marketing as a whole and grade its results. If your reach is high and your practice is growing as a result, keep doing what you’re doing. But if your reach is low or isn’t converting leads, it’s time to take a look at your online content and how it is going out to customers and potential new patients. Changes may be needed to get better results.