For the last week I have been fighting a nasty flu bug and have not had the opportunity to post.  While I am not at 100% I wanted to get back to the writing world, so here we go.

During my ‘rest’ I thought about a lot of different topics to write about, but one that kept coming out on top was ‘reach’.  In advertising your services or products, this is one of the most critical pieces to success.  Understanding your reach is something that takes time, data and patience.

Let me take a step back and define ‘reach’.  Reach is the distance, influence and penetration of your sent marketing/advertising message.  How far geographically is your message shared?  How do you influence your audience and what is your audience number?  Reach is the cornerstone of data gathered by both your online and offline efforts.

So how do you measure your reach?  This is where planning, patience and persistence, or the three P’s come in.  The first step is to plan.  Yes you must plan to measure and set the tools needed in-order to measure your reach.  Second you will need patience.  Gathering useful data takes time.  It will not happen overnight.  Third you have to be persistent.  This means you will need to send the message out at different times, in different ways and be able to adapt.  Once you have set up the three P’s you will be able to truly measure your reach.

Why is reach and understanding your’s so important?  As a business owner or as a marketer you can only sale to those that will listen and react.  You don’t use a shotgun to kill a mosquito.  Reach is a powerful tool and an unprecedented ally once you understand and use it.

Here is one piece of my reach; Geographical Location and Data.  These are the points from around the world where people came to this blog last week:

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Blog, Blogging, Content, Geolocation, LIME, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Social Space, Website

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