Every marketer dreams of having their content seen by the right people—but visibility doesn’t happen by accident. Before your brand can spark engagement, build loyalty, or drive sales, it needs to reach real humans who actually notice it. That’s where reach comes in.
Whether you’re running a paid ad campaign, managing a social media account, or analyzing media performance, you need to know how many unique people have seen your content at least once. In marketing, reach plays a leading role in determining brand visibility and audience exposure, especially in regard to advertising campaigns.
Learn more about what reach is, how to measure it, and what you can do to expand it.
What is reach in marketing?
Reach is a marketing metric that indicates the total number or percentage of unique people exposed, at least once, to an advertisement or piece of content in a given period. Other metrics—like click-through or bounce rates—track engagement, while reach only tracks exposure.
By quantifying the number of unique people exposed to your brand and content, reach can give you a sense of how visible your brand is to your potential customers. Thanks to the algorithms that both traditional and social media sites employ, your reach can extend far beyond your list of customers or followers. Your brand’s content can end up on someone’s Instagram Explore page or TikTok For You page simply because it corresponds to that user’s interests.
A common benchmark for whether reach is effective is “3+” reach, which refers to the number or percentage of unique people and unique viewers who have seen an advertisement or piece of content at least three times. The understanding is that those who have been exposed to your content at least three times are most likely to be impacted by it without being overwhelmed.
There’s no single benchmark for “good” reach. What’s considered strong depends on your industry, audience size, and campaign goals. Instead of chasing a universal number, compare reach to your past performance and expectations for the campaign type (e.g., broad for awareness, narrower for retargeting) to see whether you’re truly expanding your audience.
Reach vs.impressions
Reach and impressions tell slightly different stories about how your content performs. Put simply, reach counts people, whereas impressions count views.
Reach focuses on the number of people who saw your post or ad at least once. The goal is to expose your content to as many members of your target audience as possible. Impressions, on the other hand, measure how many times your content was displayed, even if it’s to the same user multiple times. Understanding how impressions measure exposure versus how reach measures audience size helps marketers fine-tune their strategies to strike the right balance between visibility and frequency.
If your digital marketing campaign has a reach of 10,000 and a total number of impressions of 30,000, that means each person saw your content an average of three times. Generally, if impressions are more than three to five times higher than reach without a clear lift in engagement or conversions, it may signal oversaturation and ad fatigue among your customer base.
How to measure and use marketing reach
To measure reach, you simply count the number of people who are seeing your content for the first time.
Many tools—like Shopify’s Analytics dashboard—can calculate reach for you. You can also calculate reach by dividing the total number of impressions by how many times, on average, each person in your target audience saw the content.
Reach = (Number of impressions) / (Average frequency)
Once you know your reach, you can use it to understand your marketing efforts better. Here’s how you can use this key metric:
- Compare reach against impressions. If impressions are much higher than reach—think three to five times more—it means the same users are seeing your content multiple times. Tracking both metrics helps you understand whether your message is spreading widely or being concentrated among repeat viewers within your target audience.
- Segment your reach data. Break down results by digital marketing channel, location, or demographic to see where your content performs best. For example, if your social media posts reach twice as many unique users as email campaigns, you’ll know where to double down.
Tips to improve marketing reach
- Utilize a variety of platforms and formats
- Create content your audience will share
- Form mutually beneficial partnerships
- Use hashtags wisely
By utilizing the right tools and staying abreast of trends, you can expand your reach beyond your existing followers. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
Utilize a variety of platforms and formats
Different social mediaplatforms lend themselves to different formats and marketing efforts. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each allows you to finesse your marketing strategy while considering your ad budget. The goal is to target distinct segments of your audience with unique campaigns to boost your reach.
For example, Good Girl Snacks uses Instagram and TikTok quite differently, despite both of these digital marketing platforms being very similar. OnInstagram, the brand shares event announcements in a flyer-like format, lifestyle and campaign photoshoots, and food spreads featuring its pickles.
By contrast, itsTikTokfocuses more on founders Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar, who post bite-sized day-in-the-life videos and share insights about starting a business with your best friend. While the brand posts campaign content there too, it’s more often behind-the-scenes snaps versus polished final shots.
Create content your audience will share
Focus on achieving both high reach and engagement by creating catchy and relevant content. This can be especially effective for products with a practical or utilitarian component. For apparel, that might mean showing styling options. For beauty and personal care, maybe you can offer makeup application tutorials. For exercise equipment, demonstrate a workout. For food and beverage, share some recipes and cook them on camera.
At the same time, think of ways you can tap into viral trends. For example, on TikTok, check your For You feed daily to spot trending hashtags and sounds, then adapt them to your brand before the trend peaks. Pair one or two trending tags or sounds with your videos. This can boost visibility while keeping your content authentic and aligned with your target audience.
Take olive oil brand Graza, for example. Following the summer 2025 release of the teaser for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights—set to Charli XCX’s “Everything Is Romantic”—Graza paired a segment of that song with a video showing how to make a tartine with white beans and greens and generous amounts of Graza Drizzle olive oil. Using a trending TikTok sound like this can help a video gain visibility, boost engagement, and increase brand awareness.
Form mutually beneficial partnerships
Partner with creators and influencers whose audiences are a good fit for your brand’s offerings. They could help expose your business to more potential customers, unlocking new segments of your target audience and improving your reach in the process. For smaller businesses and those on a budget, nano- and micro-influencers can be especially effective.
Swedish Stockings—a hosiery brand known for its elevated essentials—teamed up with fashion writer Leandra Medine Cohen to design a collection of statement-making tights. An influencer known for her bold, maximalist aesthetic, Cohen has a widely read Substack (165,000 subscribers) and more than one million Instagram followers—nearly all of whom would see this campaign.
The same principle applies to brand-to-brand collaborations. In October 2025, tinned fish brand Fishwife partnered with grass-fed butter maker Churn to create an anchovy-and-lemon-flavored butter spread. The collaboration introduced Churn, which currently sits at 13,300 followers on Instagram, to Fishwife’s 199,000 Instagram followers.
Use hashtags wisely
Even though content relevance, engagement, and platform-specific algorithm signals are now more important, hashtags still support discoverability, categorization, and community engagement on social platforms.
Mix broad and specific hashtags to balance reach and discoverability—broad ones expose you to a wider audience, while niche tags help you surface in more targeted searches where competition is lower. When writing captions, front-load key phrases so the most important keywords appear immediately—this invites high engagement and signals relevance to both users and the algorithm, increasing your chances of being found in search results.
What is reach in marketing FAQ
What is the difference between reach and impressions?
Reach refers to the number of individuals who have viewed a specific marketing message, ad, or piece of content at least once. Impressions refers to the total number of times people have seen your content. Impressions tally the total views and can include repeat views by the same individual, while reach only counts the total number of people who’ve seen something.
What does 3+ reach mean?
3+ reach, also known as effective reach, refers to the number or percentage of unique people and unique viewers who have seen an advertisement or piece of content at least three times.
How do you calculate reach in marketing?
To calculate reach in marketing, divide the total number of impressions by the average frequency, which represents how many times each user saw your content. In other words, if your campaign generated 50,000 impressions and each person saw it twice on average, your reach would be roughly 25,000 people.
