Reach and Engagement are Vanity Metrics for New Ventures

Reach is a poor marketing metric to care about for a new venture. So is engagement. Why? Both metrics ignore the resources used (both in money and time).

Let’s say we assumed that there are intangible benefits associated with reach and engagement. Even then, these metrics would be better:

• Cost Per Engagement (even this isn’t optimal because you can make create content that leads to negative engagement actions - “angry face” on Facebook or nasty, angry comments on any platform that allows commenting)

• CPM (cost per thousand impressions)

I can’t think of a many situations where a new venture should be paying attention to the absolute figures associated with reach and engagement as opposed to using relative cost ratios. If you spend more, absolute figures go up. Is the answer to spend 99% of your resources to grow reach and engagement since it never goes down? Absolutely not, it’s a ridiculous idea.

This isn’t to say that a high engagement and reach campaign does not have value. Large enough campaigns can enter the cultural zeitgeist where there are numerous intangible benefits. But here’s the thing. How likely is this going to happen for a new venture? Especially when established companies are throwing 1,000 X or more for those moonshot campaigns. Not likely.