(As you can tell from this reply) You do get a notification from a reply even in the situation you describe.
If you want to make sure it’s visible to every one else you’re replying to the immediately preceding post without quoting any particular part of it, you can initiate a quote and then erase the body text:
[quote="Yim, post:172, topic:3200"]
[/quote]
which shows up like this:
(notice this is a screenshot, so the notification you receieved is from my reply to your post)