Popular vs. Good: Why Chasing Reach Is the Wrong Marketing Goal for Most SMEs

Seth Godin published three sentences on March 2 that most marketers will read, nod at, and promptly ignore. "Popular is easy to measure. Good, not so much."

That gap between what is easy to measure and what is actually working is why a lot of SMEs in Singapore end up with thousands of Instagram followers and a very quiet phone.

Key Takeaway: Reach is a platform metric, not a business metric. Most SMEs optimise for the number that is easiest to count, which is often not the number that actually grows the business. The better question before any campaign: what does "good" look like for your specific goals?

Written by Derek Chua, digital marketing consultant and founder of Magnified Technologies. Derek works with SMEs on performance-focused marketing strategies that connect spend to actual business outcomes, not just dashboard numbers.

The instinct to chase reach is not irrational. Reach goes up, the number is visible, and the platform makes it easy to track. The problem is that popular and good are not the same thing, and optimising for one often works against the other.

Popular Is a Platform Metric, Not a Business Metric

The social media platforms are not neutral parties in this conversation. They built their analytics dashboards to surface the metrics that keep you posting. Reach. Impressions. Follower growth. Engagement rate.

These numbers feel meaningful because they trend upward. They feel important because the platform tells you they matter.

But every advertising-funded platform earns revenue when you produce content and audiences consume it. The metric shown most prominently is the one that keeps you in the cycle, not necessarily the one that builds your business.

Reach is easy to report because platforms own the data. Every impression is logged server-side in real time. Revenue from your marketing is harder to trace. It requires attribution, patience, and the discipline to connect marketing spend to a business outcome across weeks or months. Platforms have limited incentive to make that easy for you.

So by default, reach becomes the goal.

Why the Reach Trap Is Easy to Fall Into

Reach is not a useless metric. For early-stage businesses entering new markets, visibility matters. But there is a difference between reach as an input to a larger strategy and reach as the measure of success.

The trap works like this. A post gets strong impressions. That feels good. The next one underperforms. That feels bad. So you reverse-engineer what produced the stronger number and replicate it. Gradually, your content strategy shifts toward posts that spread, not posts that convert.

Three months later, your reach is up. Your analytics dashboard looks healthy. The pipeline is unchanged.

At Magnified, we have reviewed marketing accounts where a client was averaging strong impressions per post but generating fewer than two qualified leads a month from that channel. When we shifted focus from impression volume to content that addressed specific purchase intent, reach dropped by roughly 40%. Qualified leads more than doubled. The platform stats looked worse. The business results were better.

Popular and good, as Godin puts it, are not easily aligned.

What "Good" Looks Like When It Is Not Popular

Good marketing in a business context does specific things, and none of them require a large following.

It brings in the right people, not just more people. A campaign generating 20 inquiries from well-matched prospects is worth more than one generating 200 from people who cannot afford the service or are in the wrong segment.

It converts at a meaningful rate. If content reaches a thousand people and zero of them take a next step, it may be interesting, but it is not doing marketing work. Good marketing has a job: move a prospect closer to a decision.

It builds an asset over time. An email list is an asset. A loyal customer who refers others is an asset. A post that got strong views last Thursday is a moment. Good marketing compounds. Popular marketing expires.

This connects to something worth flagging from our earlier piece on vanity metrics: the metrics platforms surface are not the same as the metrics that matter. The shift requires deliberately tracking different numbers, even when the more visible ones look encouraging.

Three Signs You Are Optimising for the Wrong Goal

You do not need a full marketing audit to spot the problem. Here are three signals that popular has quietly replaced good as the default goal.

Content decisions are driven by what performed last week. You are choosing topics or formats based on what got the most likes or shares in the previous cycle, rather than what is most relevant to a prospect in a buying decision. The feedback loop is reach, not revenue.

You spend more time on the post than on the offer. Caption length, hashtag research, posting time, production value. These considerations are real. But if three hours go into a video and thirty minutes into the offer it is promoting, the allocation is backwards.

You cannot connect social media activity to a business outcome. You know reach is trending up. But you cannot point to a specific period and say: these clients came from this channel, through this content. If the connection between marketing activity and revenue is unclear after three to six months, you are most likely measuring the wrong thing.

None of this means abandoning social media or reach as a consideration. It means not letting reach be the default measure of whether marketing is working.

How to Reorient From Popular to Good

The practical shift is not complicated, though it requires some discipline upfront.

Define "good" before you brief anything. For your business, what does a good outcome from marketing look like in the next 90 days? A qualified inquiry? A booked consultation? A repeat purchase? Write it down before you set targets. Without a clear definition, the path of least resistance is to optimise for whatever number is already on the dashboard.

Add one metric that connects to revenue. Reach can stay as a benchmark for channel health. But pair it with something that links to business outcomes: lead volume from the channel, cost per lead, email list growth driven by social, or direct messages that converted into bookings. When reach goes up and the revenue-linked metric stays flat, that tells you something.

Audit your best recent clients. Find your last ten clients who converted well and were a good fit. Ask: where did they first encounter you? What content or channel influenced their decision? The answers often point to activities that generated low reach and high relevance. Build more of that.

Give every piece of content a specific job. Content without an explicit purpose tends to optimise for whatever metric is easiest to observe. Which is reach. A useful brief includes not just the topic but the intended audience segment, the stage in the buying process it addresses, and the specific next step you want the reader to take.

Last week's article on AI content quality made a related point: the question is not who made the content, it is who approved it and whether it is doing a real job. The same logic applies here. The question is not whether your content is performing by platform standards. It is whether it is performing by yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does reach matter at all in SME marketing? Yes, but as a means rather than an end. Reach matters in the early stages of building brand recognition, and in markets where your audience genuinely does not know you exist. The issue is when reach becomes the default success criterion without any connection to business outcomes. A useful check: can you trace a path from reach to revenue for this channel? If not after several months of consistent activity, reach may be the wrong primary metric for your situation.

How do I know if my social media is actually generating results? Track one metric beyond reach that connects to a business outcome: lead volume from the channel, email list growth driven by social, referral-sourced clients who first found you there, or direct messages that converted into paid work. If you cannot draw that connection after three to six months of consistent activity, the channel either is not working for your business model or the content is not positioned for conversion.

What if my industry genuinely runs on awareness and reach? Some categories, typically fast-moving consumer goods or lifestyle brands with low average transaction values, do run on reach at scale. But most SME service businesses, consultancies, agencies, clinics, and professional services are not in this category. For service businesses where the average client engagement is worth thousands of dollars, conversion from a small engaged audience consistently outperforms reach from a large passive one.

Should I stop tracking followers and impressions? Not necessarily. They serve as useful benchmarks for channel health. Knowing your reach is trending upward is useful context. The issue is treating reach as the goal and optimising your entire content strategy around maximising it at the expense of content that converts. Keep reach as a health indicator. Stop using it as the primary definition of success.

How does this apply to paid advertising versus organic social? Paid advertising makes the connection between spend and outcome more traceable, which makes it easier to separate popular from good. Most SMEs running paid social can tell within a few weeks whether a campaign is generating qualified leads or just impressions. The organic problem is that feedback loops are slower, so the platform metric (reach) becomes the proxy by default. For paid, use your existing attribution. For organic, set a quarterly review window before drawing conclusions, and define what "good" looks like before the quarter starts.

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Marketing that is only popular is not working hard enough. Popular means people saw it. Good means it moved them.

If you want help building a marketing strategy where the goals are linked to revenue and not just reach, get in touch with Magnified. We work with SMEs who want clearer lines between their marketing spend and their business results.