MATT HIGGINS · I build brands that lead

In 1986, you paid for reach. In 2026, you’re still paying for reach. Whether you’re selling a toothbrush or accounting software, you want eyeballs, so you market across multiple channels, pull a bunch of marketing levers, and add up the reach. 10-thousand people. 10-million people. One billion pea . . . not so fast. If efficiency of effort and spend matter, you need to consider duplication.

Accurate data is extremely important, but there’s no way to truly account for duplication. And it really isn’t about the accuracy of the data. It’s about your strategy.

What Is Duplication

A total reach of 10-million people on a campaign isn’t really 10-million people. When you add up your total views from every social platform, emails opened, banner ads viewed, etc., there will be thousands of people who saw your content on multiple platforms. And that’s often a good thing. Conventional wisdom states it takes, on average, seven touchpoints to go from introduction to conversion, so someone seeing your product on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and a banner ad is halfway to a sale . . . at least in theory.

So is duplication always a good thing? No. Sometimes too much duplication means you’re not actually reaching new people. You’re just showing the same eyeballs your message again and again, which caps how big your real audience can get. And sometimes too much duplication on a single platform can kill efficiency. The first problem is a reach problem. The second is a spend problem, and it often shows up in affiliate marketing, though the same logic applies to influencer and media in general.

Say you sell a product to a niche audience. You might have dozens of special interest content creators on YouTube you could bring into your affiliate program. But you only have so much bandwidth to nurture relationships and so much budget for products, so spend your time and money wisely. In addition to making sure an influencer will represent your brand and product properly (see influencers as media), you need to understand their audience. Most channels have both a literal and figurative distinct personality, but some channels are extremely similar and share the same audience. Expect some duplication. But when two creators are pulling from the same pool of viewers, you can end up watching two affiliates compete for credit on a conversion that only ever had one buyer behind it. That’s not reach. That’s a rebate.

If affiliate sales are a big part of your revenue, keep duplication in check.

None of this means reach stops mattering. Affiliate efficiency aside, when the goal is brand awareness rather than direct conversion, total reach still counts. The more you take duplication into account and adjust your strategy accordingly, the more your reach numbers will actually reflect your reach. When you’re building brand awareness, that distinction matters.

The Other Duplication

The word duplication means something entirely different to some people in marketing. Here, duplication refers to replicating efforts, not overlapping audiences. It used to mean something like this: if a campaign worked well on Instagram, duplicate that outcome on Facebook. Same goal, different execution, built for the platform.

Now the word often gets used to mean something else: just duplicate what you did before. Run it back. Same creative, same copy, same channel mix. Say a Reels campaign built around a trending audio clip drove a spike in traffic last quarter. The instinct is to run the same format again next quarter. But the trend moved on, the algorithm shifted, and the audience has already seen the trick. The outcome doesn’t duplicate just because the effort does.

It’s great to document processes. It’s great to identify what worked. But it’s not realistic to expect that doing the same thing over and over will keep working. What made a campaign succeed the first time was the fit between platform, moment, and audience, not the tactic itself. Duplicate that thinking, not the checklist.

We all like big numbers in marketing, but when it comes to understanding total reach and being efficient with your time and money, it’s important to recognize and understand audience duplication, in both senses of the word.