What Is Incremental Reach, and How Does Audio Deliver?

These days, audiences have never had more options when it comes to consuming media—and more choices are popping up all the time. The challenge for advertisers is finding ways to reach increasingly scattered and disparate audiences at scale. The good news: Leaning in on incremental reach and digital audio can help. 

Incremental reach refers to the additional and unique audience that hears your ads throughout the day, wherever they are, and however they’re listening. Let’s dive into how digital audio perfectly complements any advertising campaign and how to leverage incrementality to unlock the full potential of your media mix.

What’s the Difference Between Reach and Incremental Reach?

In simple terms, reach is the total number of unique people exposed to a campaign’s messaging. Meanwhile, incremental reach measures the additional, and unique, number of people that receive the message through a specific channel or platform—not including those already reached in the same campaign. 

The higher the incremental reach, the more people your campaign can reach and influence. So if there is no audience overlap, you get pure incremental reach—meaning you can efficiently access new and different untapped audiences. 

Why Is Incremental Reach Important?

Incremental reach essentially extends your audience and potential customer base when you add new channels to your campaign. But there’s more to it than that. Here are some powerful reasons why incremental reach brings value to your campaign. 

The True Impact of Audio 

Here’s a fun fact: Online audio has reached new heights with 228M Americans listening monthly. And, when you crunch the numbers, listeners spend an average of four hours and 29 minutes daily with this medium.  

When done right, adding digital audio advertising to your media mix helps you broaden your audience and connect with people that consume other channels. And digital audio itself isn’t limited to a single channel: there’s streaming audio, satellite radio, and podcasts. Combined, digital audio channels offer an immense audience base to your campaign. 

Audiences Consume Media Differently 

The traditional "print, radio, TV" advertising model doesn’t catch everyone anymore. Think of your friend who might always be playing music but isn’t interested in podcasts. Or think of that family member who obsesses over satellite radio but doesn’t watch CTV. Consumers have more options than ever when it comes to media consumption, and brands need to show up in more places to reach them. 

Enhanced Campaign Efficiency 

Reaching more unique listeners improves your ad campaign’s results. Incremental reach comes from incorporating additional channels or platforms into your campaign, which means you can glean more insight into what’s working and what needs to be adjusted.

How to Add Incremental Reach with Audio

As you can see, incremental reach provides a powerful boost to your marketing efforts. Here are some pro tips for leveraging digital audio for incremental reach. 

Hardly Any Overlapping with Streaming and Podcast Audiences 

When you add another channel or platform to your media mix in a given market, there’s likely to be some overlap among audiences. However, with SiriusXM Media, our podcast network has virtually no overlap with SoundCloud, Pandora, and SiriusXM Digital—meaning pure incremental reach and a bigger impact. 

Timing Is Key

Advertising on digital audio can unlock a world of benefits and ROI and ROAS. And you can maximize its effectiveness by focusing on when reaching audiences via audio gives you the most bang for your buck. The old 8PM to 11PM prime time that linear TV established has been replaced by the audio’s more powerful 8AM to 5PM time frame. We’ve found that during these nine hours, the majority of people are running errands, shopping in-store or online, or visiting a restaurant bar or cafe—and they’re listening to audio in the same window of those activities.  

Whether your audience is out and about or socializing, they’re plugged into audio. Add additional audio channels for incremental reach during these primary hours to pump up your campaign's volume.

Don’t Discount CTV

Connected television, or CTV, is television connected to the internet to allow for streaming and downloading digital content. In comparison to linear TV, it’s what digital audio is to AM/FM radio: Consumers choose the what and when for the content they consume (vs. scheduled) and receive far more personalized content. CTV is also a medium that’s way more measurable and targetable.

While there may be some overlap in the venn diagram that is your reach for both CTV and digital audio, you can still use that to your advantage. There are contextual capabilities on both, allowing you to target your messaging based on what the audience is listening to or watching. On top of that, there’s cross-device targeting, letting you reach the same audience across devices to drive your message home. Our recommendation? Run your video ad on Pandora and SoundCloud to boost completion rates. 

We’ve found that adding CTV with digital audio drives +14 pts in message association and +12 pts in aided recall. When you leverage both mediums, you’re on the fast track to receiving continuity, connection, and unfragmented audiences. 

Add More Audio 

You could add one or two digital audio channels to your campaign, but why stop there? There’s SiriusXM, which reaches one in two cars on the road. There’s the SiriusXM Streaming Network (including Pandora, SoundCloud, and others), which boasts an 87% addressable audience. And then there are podcasts, which are exploding in popularity right now, with no signs of slowing down. Our SiriusXM Podcast Network reaches 70M monthly listeners. And, with that virtually zero overlap among our platforms, you can rest assured that your message is resonating with unique listeners, as complementary to each other as digital audio as a whole is to your overall ad campaign.

When you partner with us, these are the results that are waiting:

• +142% incremental reach: By adding streaming and podcasts to a SiriusXM campaign

• +89% incremental reach: By adding SiriusXM and podcasts to a streaming campaign

SiriusXM Media Delivers Incrementality for DoorDash

To get a sense of how incrementality plays out in the real world, here’s a success story of what happened when we partnered with DoorDash. The food order and delivery platform wanted to get consumers excited about their new retail and grocery categories, and they were eager to see whether adding a new advertising channel (podcasts) to their existing campaign (streaming) would drive incremental reach. Spoiler: It did—and beyond expectations.

Combining the power of the SiriusXM Podcast Network with that of the SiriusXM Streaming Network gave a +70% incremental reach to the streaming portion of the campaign. Thanks to our ability to map user IDs to both on- and off-platform campaign impressions, quantifying the duplication between platforms and calculating the incremental reach was a breeze. On top of that, we found that 64% of all attributable actions were incremental. Put another way, a majority of those actions happened thanks to consumers’ exposure to ads on SiriusXM Media. 

Looking to Get Incremental?

As the saying goes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With incremental reach on the line, any advertising campaign is far more effective with multiple channels working in tandem. 

Ready to add digital audio to your media mix? Let’s talk.

More Reasons to Prioritize Incremental Reach