Reach: how many people come into contact with your message.

Now that we know why we would want to use a consumer behavior model, let’s start understanding the RAECS model. The first phase of the RAECS model is Reach. Before you “reach” people, they don’t know about you or your message or your product or campaign or anything. You don’t have much of a chance to form a business relationship with them because they don’t know about your offer yet. Your message hasn’t reached them yet.

Reach can be measured by how many people come into contact with your message. In print media this is often referred to as “circulation” and in television there are Nielsen ratings to estimate how many people see your message. On websites this is often referred to as “impressions.” In social media Reach is frequently defined by the size of the practitioner’s network or their number of “friends.”

It’s important to note right up front that Reach is only how many people could possibly see your message, not how many really saw it or did anything once they saw it. Some examples of how/why not everyone who is Reached can move on to the next phase (Acquisition):

• A newspaper subscriber might not have opened the section with your ad in it.
• A television viewer might be channel surfing when your ad is played.
• Website viewers might experience banner blindness.
• The social media practitioner may have a lot of “friends” who really don’t pay much attention.

But the Reach is still there. It’s the largest number of people you could possibly attract with your message.

Getting started measuring Reach

Reach, as a phase of the consumer behavior model, is pretty focused on channels; you’ll often use Reach data to assist in making decisions about where to spend your resources. The actions you’ll take will be the result of weighing the Reach data against your available resources, competition and so on. This is one of those areas where you can develop a strategic advantage by crafting a metric that aligns you with the needs of your audience.

Reach is measured differently depending on the media that you are using to spread your message. You might want to determine the Reach of a particular channel before deciding how much of your resources you can devote to promoting your message on the channel. Here are some ideas:

• Print advertising: ask for audited circulation numbers
• Google CPC, keyword or other search engine marketing campaigns: perform keyword research on your desired search terms
• Search engine optimizaton campaign: perform keyword research and determine strength of your competition for the desired term
• Industry-specific social network: determine size and activity of the network
• Postcard campaign: the size of your mailing list

Once you’ve figured out the Reach for your media channel, you know the upper limit for your message.

Actions you might make based on Reach data

The specific actions you might take based on the numbers you’ve gathered so far are probably the most obvious. If the number isn’t high enough, then you need to find more. If your Reach numbers are astronomically high then you’ll need a way to stand out from the others who are likely working that space as well.

If Reach is too low to sustain business: If you can’t improve your Reach then you may need to re-examine your assumptions about your market size, interest/desire for your product or service or adjust your operations so that you satisfy the needs of a small market and remain profitable.

If Reach is high enough to indicate very tough competition: You may want to examine your market and see if you can segment further, target geographically or create/identify some specific niche that you can serve.  Or perhaps you’ll want to adjust your budgeting to recognize the competitive market.

Further reading related to Reach:

• An article on social network app marketing to shorten the distance between Reach and Conversion (startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com)
• An article about allocating resources online which includes some sample conversion rates (Reach data divided by Conversion data) (socialmediatoday.com)

Next: Acquisition

In the next slide, we’ll talk about the Acquisition phase of the RAECS consumer behavior model.

Getting the most from your web efforts: Understanding the RAECS behavior model

A consumer behavior model helps content producers make the right things for the right people by matching the content produced with behaviors exhibited by people coming into contact with the content. If you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of the stuff you’re making or if you want to learn from how people behave in relation to the stuff you’re making, then having a consumer behavior model is going to help.

The reach, acquisition, engagement, conversion, satisfaction model assumes linear phases. This means that first your content must “reach” someone. Then that person can be “acquired” and then after that become “engaged.” If your offer meets certain critera with the person then they will buy something or contact you or do something else that puts them in the “conversion” phase. And if, after all of that, they still like everything, they can indicate “satisfaction.” A person must take a measurable action to pass from one phase to the next.

Different businesses will have different definitions for when a person has passed from one phase to the next. The way you define each phase can give your business strategic advantages over your competition. But keep in mind, registering more “conversions” doesn’t make you more competitive than having more “friends” on Facebook makes you more popular. Strategic advantages gained from how you define each phase are the result of aligning your goals to those of your customers, not through gerrymandering the definitions to suit existing site behavior.

We’ll discuss some specific examples as we go through each phase.

The first step in the RAECS behavior model: Reach

Learn what Reach is (and isn’t), how you can measure it and some actions you can take on the data.

I first learned of the first four phases of this model from Justin Cutroni, web analyst and partner at EpikOne. I bolted on the last one, Satisfaction, because it helps with some of the media work I’m doing lately and I think it will complement the other four well.

I originally developed this slide deck to give in the hallways of BloggerConnect in New York, January 2009. I showed it to several people using my iPod Touch and they let me know that it was helpful. I’ve since revised the deck to include a slide about Satisfaction and include all the fancy links at the end.

Notes on the slides:

1. What’s a consumer behavior model? Learn why having a well-aligned consumer behavior model might provide your business with a strategic advantage.
2. Reach: how many people see your message Learn what Reach is, how to measure it and how to use it to take action.

Over the next few days I’ll be making explanatory posts for each of the slides in the deck.