Brand awareness requires both quality and quantity of communications. No matter how great your messaging, it is impossible to become known – either as a brand or for something – when those messages don’t reach your audience.
This is particularly true of startups and scaleups pursuing category ownership, where the most successful players typically become synonymous with their category. Think Uber for ride sharing, Netflix for streaming, or Darktrace for AI-powered cybersecurity. Brand awareness is a powerful engine for gaining market leverage.
Share of Voice (SOV) continues to be a key measure of brand awareness. It helps you to understand the visibility of a brand in market; how often it is featured compared to its competitors and what opportunity the audience has of receiving its key messages.
But of course, it is not enough to measure SOV. For marketers and communicators, the real question is how to boost it.
Start with a good content strategy
Earned and social media do not operate in a vacuum. And this is one of the most important things that any brand seeking to boost their SOV must remember. Whether a journalist reviewing a pitch or a user consuming content on their feed, its relevance will determine whether they want to engage and share it on with their audiences. Start by understanding what trends and topics your audience is engaging with online and explore how you can credibly tap into those conversations.
Build a strong news pipeline
How often do you reread a book or an article? I’d wager you are not doing it regularly. Similarly, your audience needs new reasons to engage with your brand, so never overlook an opportunity to tell them good news. New product launches, customer wins or executive hires. Find reasons to keep them engaged with a strong pipeline of announcements.
Be smart about the audiences you can tap into
When it comes to earned media, all brands are fighting to feature in a finite pool of publications. And unless you’re Google or Meta, the same tech journalists are unlikely to cover you every week. Consider where else your audience is consuming content. Are they reading sector publications? Are they consuming influencers’ content? Are they engaging with your partners’ channels? Don’t miss opportunities to extend the reach of your brand and engage your audience by focusing your comms too narrowly.
Maximise your content
Don’t treat content like a one-trick pony. When you have something to say, be savvy about the different ways you can take it out to market. Reactive comments are a great way of driving up SOV in news-heavy industries, such as in cybersecurity where data breaches occur almost daily. Quick responders can secure multiple hits, while key messages can then be repurposed on social media as quote cards or threads. Similarly, notes from an interview can inform a byline, or with the right news hook, a pitch could be repurposed as a Letter to the Editor.
Be consistent
This comes back to Jim Collins’ analogy of a flywheel: when you start pushing a heavy wheel, it inches forward and each push requires a great deal of force. But if you keep pushing, the wheel itself starts to gain a momentum of its own. This undoubtedly applies to building SOV too; building brand awareness and recognition takes persistence.
This is particularly true given SOV will rarely be consistent quarter on quarter – after all there’s nothing stopping your competitors throwing everything at it one month and disrupting otherwise consistent results. Only with consistent measurement will you understand if this is an anomaly or ceded ground, and what it will take to reclaim it.
Want to start building momentum to boost your SOV? Get in touch with us at [email protected] today to find out how we can help!
