Kevin Goodwin’s Post

Your reach is growing, but your business is not. Now what? If you follow me, you likely know I stump relentlessly for the importance of reach. We have decades of research touting the importance of broad reach in attracting both new and repeat buyers. But reach alone is not the objective, and reach alone will not grow your business. Many brands we look at are NOT growing their reach. This is a good place to start when troubleshooting growth. But some brands are growing reach, and still not growing their business. We recently audited a brand growing their reach 45% YoY, but new customer count was down 17% YoY (!!). What gives? Our teams have developed a very simple Brand Growth Scorecard (see below) that helps us easily spot funnel dislocation with no additional tools/measurement solutions. Here is how I use this: - Establish baseline ratios for your business - what does 10% of reach growth translate to from a revenue growth perspective? Hint: it's likely not 1:1! You can then use this to model investment & high-level media plan. - Where is the dislocation in your funnel - i.e. reach is up, traffic is up, but revenue is not following. Use this data point to focus deeper analysis and experimentation. - Monitor funnel "lag" over time - i.e. what does 10% reach growth this month translate to in purchase growth next month. This is a more directional read, but helps you justify/maintain UF investment when revenue impact is not immediate. I find a chart with trend lines is best to visualize this (see below). This is something you can incorporate into your monthly reporting (I would advise against looking at this daily/weekly due to noise). And you can tailor the different measures based on your business/funnel - i.e. this will look different for lead gen. Once you have this scorecard in place, you can be more precise with your strategy: - If reach is not translating to session or search growth, what might this tell you about your creative? About your reach quality? This might be a sign to adjust your creative and/or run a focused ad recall/brand lift study. - If your traffic is not translating into higher intent like cart adds or purchase, what might this tell you about your site? Your pricing? The expectation set by your creative relative to your product & site experience? More reach cannot solve problems like these. - In the case of the brand charted below, it might also be a function of choppy investment. Are we sustaining reach growth consistently to allow for purchase growth? We might be too reactive. You can, of course, measure the effectiveness of your brand building & reach growth efforts through a brand tracking tool like Tracksuit. I like to do both, marrying both survey data and actual shopper data, but this is an easy, free way to get started. New Engen