The Difference Between Reach and Relevance on Social

Reach is an easy number to celebrate, but reaching a million people who aren't your customer delivers far less business value than reaching ten thousand people who genuinely are.

Relevance drives conversion, reach drives awareness

Both have a place in a marketing plan, but treating them as interchangeable metrics leads to poor decisions — like judging a bottom-funnel conversion campaign by the same reach benchmark as a brand-awareness push.

Audience quality over audience size

A tightly defined audience that closely matches your actual customer profile will almost always outperform a broad, loosely targeted one on the metrics that matter to the business, even if the broad campaign posts a bigger reach number.

Match the metric to the goal

Before launching any content or campaign, it's worth being explicit about whether the goal is reach or relevance — because optimizing for the wrong one produces numbers that look good but don't move the business.