How to Increase Your Brand's Share of Voice

What is "Share of Voice How to Increase"?

Share of Voice (SOV) is a measurement of your brand's visibility or presence within a specific market or conversation compared to your competitors. Increasing it means proactively growing the portion of industry attention, mentions, and presence you capture.

The core frustration this topic addresses is market invisibility: investing in marketing and sales efforts, yet failing to be seen or considered by your ideal customers, which leads to wasted budget and stagnant growth.

Earned Media: Visibility gained through press coverage, reviews, or unsponsored social mentions.
Owned Media: Presence on channels you control, like your website, blog, and email list.
Paid Media: Visibility purchased through advertising, sponsorships, or promoted content.
Share of Search: A related metric measuring the percentage of branded search queries for your category that include your brand name.
Competitive Benchmarking: The process of measuring your SOV against key rivals to identify gaps and opportunities.
Mentions & Sentiment: Tracking not just how often you are mentioned, but the context and tone of those conversations.
Market of One Strategy: Focusing your SOV efforts on a hyper-specific niche where you can dominate the conversation.
Content Amplification: The deliberate promotion of owned content through paid, earned, and shared channels to boost its reach.

This topic is critical for founders, marketing managers, and product teams who need to cut through market noise, establish authority, and ensure their solution is part of the customer's consideration set. It directly solves the problem of being an overlooked option in a crowded marketplace.

In short: Increasing Share of Voice is the systematic process of expanding your brand's measurable presence to capture more market attention and mindshare.

Why it matters for businesses

Ignoring your Share of Voice means ceding control of your market narrative to competitors, which directly results in lower lead quality, longer sales cycles, and vulnerability to disruptive entrants.

Missed sales opportunities: If you're not visible during a buyer's research phase, you won't be considered. A strong SOV ensures you are present at every stage of the buyer's journey.
Inefficient marketing spend: Running campaigns without measuring SOV is like advertising in the dark. Tracking it reveals which channels deliver the highest visibility per euro spent.
Weak brand authority: Low visibility is often equated with low relevance or expertise. Increasing SOV in key forums and publications builds perceived authority and trust.
Inaccurate market positioning: Without benchmarking, you may misjudge your true competitive standing. SOV data provides a reality check on your perceived vs. actual market position.
Slow response to threats: A sudden dip in your SOV or a spike for a competitor can signal a new product launch or campaign. Monitoring it acts as an early warning system.
Poor partner and talent attraction: Top-tier channel partners and skilled employees are drawn to visible, talked-about market leaders. Low SOV makes recruitment and partnership deals harder.
Vulnerability in procurement reviews: Procurement teams often shortlist the most visible, credible vendors. Low SOV can exclude you from formal RFP processes entirely.
Stagnant market share: SOV is often a leading indicator of market share. Consistently losing voice share typically precedes losing revenue share.

In short: A strong Share of Voice drives consideration, improves marketing ROI, and protects your market position from competitors.

Step-by-step guide

Many teams struggle because they attempt to be everywhere at once, leading to diluted efforts and unmeasurable results.

Step 1: Define your competitive arena

The obstacle is targeting too broad a market, making SOV impossible to measure meaningfully. You must first define the specific "conversation" or market segment you want to own.

Identify 3-5 direct competitors who target the same customers with similar solutions.
Map the key platforms where your buyers seek information (e.g., specific industry publications, LinkedIn groups, analyst firms, comparison websites).
List the core keyword themes that define your solution category (e.g., "accounting software for SMEs," "cloud security compliance").

Step 2: Establish your SOV baseline

You cannot improve what you don't measure. The pain here is operating on gut feeling rather than data.

Use media monitoring and social listening tools to collect data over a defined period (e.g., last quarter). Measure the volume of mentions for your brand and each competitor across your defined arenas. Calculate your initial SOV percentage: (Your Mentions / Total Mentions for All Tracked Brands) * 100.

Step 3: Analyze the content and channel gap

The frustration is not knowing *why* a competitor has higher visibility. Analysis reveals the tactical blueprint.

Don't just count mentions; categorize them. What types of content are driving their visibility (e.g., whitepapers, webinars, PR announcements)? Which specific channels (e.g., TechCrunch, a popular industry podcast) are giving them the most traction? This gap analysis shows you where to focus your efforts.

Step 4: Prioritize owned content on underserved topics

The obstacle is creating content that simply adds to the noise rather than filling a clear void.

Identify topics within your arena that are highly relevant to buyers but have low-quality or sparse coverage from competitors. Create definitive, practical content (guides, benchmarks, frameworks) on these topics. This "market of one" approach allows you to quickly dominate a specific sub-conversation.

Step 5: Systematize content amplification

The pain is publishing great content that no one sees. Creation without amplification wastes resources.

Repurpose core content into multiple formats (blog post, LinkedIn carousel, webinar, newsletter snippet).
Use targeted paid promotion to place this content in front of specific audiences on LinkedIn or industry newsfeeds.
Proactively share with relevant journalists, analysts, or micro-influencers who cover your niche.

Step 6: Pursue strategic earned media

The frustration is relying on sporadic, unfocused PR. Instead, align media outreach with your SOV goals.

Based on your channel gap analysis, build relationships with key journalists and editors from the outlets that matter most to your audience. Pitch them stories, data, or commentary that directly addresses the underserved topics you identified, positioning your founders or experts as authoritative sources.

Step 7: Encourage and leverage user advocacy

The missed opportunity is ignoring the powerful voice of your existing customers.

Make it easy for satisfied customers to leave reviews on sites like G2, Capterra, or Bilarna. Develop a case study programme. User-generated content and testimonials provide credible, third-party validation that boosts SOV more effectively than branded messaging.

Step 8: Monitor, report, and iterate

The risk is viewing SOV as a one-time campaign. It requires continuous management.

Set a regular cadence (e.g., monthly) to recalculate your SOV. Report on changes, correlating spikes with specific campaigns. Use these insights to double down on what works and abandon tactics that don't move the needle.

In short: Increase SOV by defining your arena, benchmarking your position, filling content gaps with authority, and amplifying strategically across owned, earned, and paid channels.

Common mistakes and red flags

These pitfalls are common because teams chase vanity metrics and lack a structured measurement framework.

Confusing SOV with Share of Market: They are correlated but different. High SOV doesn't guarantee immediate sales, but sustained low SOV will eventually hurt market share. Fix: Track both metrics separately and understand SOV as a leading indicator.
Measuring only branded mentions: This ignores the broader category conversation. Pain: You miss critical insights into market trends and unbranded search opportunities. Fix: Also track unbranded category keywords and competitor names.
Ignoring sentiment and context: A surge in negative mentions increases SOV but damages the brand. Pain: You celebrate a metric that's actually a crisis. Fix: Always qualify SOV data with sentiment analysis and read key mentions.
Focusing solely on social media: This gives a distorted view if your B2B buyers rely on trade press or analyst reports. Pain: You optimize for the wrong channels. Fix: Define your arena based on buyer behavior, not channel convenience.
Buying low-quality links or mentions: Attempting to artificially inflate SOV through spammy directories or paid link farms. Pain: This damages SEO credibility and provides zero real business value. Fix: Focus on earning visibility through quality content and legitimate media.
Not aligning internal teams: Marketing, PR, and product teams work in silos with different goals. Pain: Inconsistent messaging and diluted impact. Fix: Establish SOV as a shared KPI and coordinate campaign themes across departments.
Failing to benchmark: Knowing your own mention count is meaningless without competitive context. Pain: You cannot gauge progress or threat level. Fix: Competitive benchmarking is non-negotiable; start it from day one.
Giving up too early: Expecting dramatic SOV shifts within a single quarter. Pain: Abandoning effective strategies before they gain momentum. Fix: Treat SOV building as a long-term strategy, not a tactical sprint.

In short: Avoid SOV pitfalls by tracking quality over sheer volume, measuring in the right arenas, and maintaining a consistent, integrated long-term strategy.

Tools and resources

The challenge is navigating a crowded martech landscape without a clear map of which tool category solves which part of the SOV puzzle.

Media Monitoring & Social Listening Platforms: Use these to establish your baseline and track mentions, sentiment, and share of voice across digital channels, including news, blogs, forums, and social media.
Competitive Intelligence Software: Employ these for deeper analysis of competitor marketing strategies, content performance, and advertising spend, going beyond public mentions.
SEO & Share of Search Tools: Essential for measuring visibility in search engines, tracking keyword rankings for you and competitors, and understanding the "search" portion of your voice.
Content Analytics Platforms: Use these to measure the performance and amplification reach of your owned content, identifying what topics and formats resonate most.
PR & Relationship Management Tools: Helpful for systematizing earned media efforts, managing journalist contacts, tracking outreach, and measuring coverage.
Review and GTM Platforms: Facilitate the collection and management of customer reviews and case studies, which are critical for advocacy-driven SOV.
Marketing Attribution Software: Connects SOV efforts to pipeline and revenue, helping prove the business impact of increased visibility.
B2B Marketplace Platforms (like Bilarna): Provide a trusted, centralized channel to build visibility among serious buyers actively comparing solutions, contributing directly to your share of voice in the consideration phase.

In short: Choose tools that cover the full spectrum: listening for measurement, analysis for insight, amplification for reach, and attribution for value.

How Bilarna can help

A core frustration in increasing Share of Voice is finding credible, efficient channels to reach qualified B2B buyers who are actively evaluating solutions.

Bilarna addresses this by providing a controlled, AI-powered marketplace where businesses search for and compare verified software and service providers. Building a strong profile on Bilarna directly contributes to your Share of Voice within a high-intent audience. When procurement leads, founders, or product teams use the platform to solve a problem, your visibility here places you directly in their consideration set.

Our AI matching connects your offerings with relevant buyer requests, while our verified provider programme adds a layer of trust that enhances the credibility of your presence. This turns the marketplace into a strategic channel for increasing measurable visibility among decision-makers.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is Share of Voice just a marketing vanity metric?

No. When tracked correctly within a defined competitive arena, SOV is a strategic health indicator. It measures real-world visibility and mindshare, which are prerequisites for growth. A declining SOV often signals competitive threats or strategic misalignment long before revenue drops.

Next step: Ensure your SOV metrics are tied to business outcomes by correlating them with lead volume and website traffic from your target market.

Q: How often should we measure and report on our SOV?

For most B2B companies, a monthly tracking cadence is practical for identifying trends, with a deeper quarterly analysis recommended. This balances responsiveness with the recognition that meaningful shifts in market conversation take time.

Next step: Set up a dashboard in your monitoring tool to automatically calculate SOV monthly for your key competitor set and primary channels.

Q: What's a realistic SOV goal for a challenger brand?

Aim to dominate a niche ("market of one") before targeting the overall category. It's more realistic and impactful to own a 40% SOV in conversations around a specific sub-problem (e.g., "GDPR compliance for SaaS") than to chase 10% in the broad "cloud software" category.

Next step: Use your initial gap analysis to identify one underserved niche topic where you can create definitive content and set a goal to become the most visible brand on that topic within six months.

Q: Can we increase SOV without a large paid advertising budget?

Yes. A focus on earned and owned media is highly effective for B2B. This includes:

Authoritative content marketing on underserved topics.
Strategic public relations with targeted trade media.
Building a strong presence on relevant B2B comparison and review platforms.
Activating customer advocacy through case studies and referral programmes.

Next step: Audit your current owned assets and customer relationships to identify one high-potential, low-cost channel to amplify first.

Q: How do we handle a competitor who has a vastly larger SOV due to brand heritage?

Do not try to beat them on volume. Instead, compete on relevance and precision. Focus your messaging on emerging trends, pain points they ignore, or a specific customer segment they underserve. Your SOV metrics should then be filtered to measure visibility specifically within that more focused conversation, where you can realistically lead.

Next step: Redefine your competitive arena in your monitoring tools to include keywords related to your focused niche, excluding broad generic terms owned by the giant.

Q: Who in the company should be responsible for managing SOV?

While marketing typically owns measurement and reporting, SOV is a cross-functional metric. Product teams influence it through innovation and launch communications, sales through customer stories, and executives through thought leadership. Accountability should sit with a role that can coordinate these efforts, such as a Growth Lead, Marketing Director, or Head of Strategy.

Next step: Establish a quarterly cross-functional meeting to review SOV data, align on key messages, and coordinate upcoming visibility initiatives.