It sounds obvious; if you are able to outspend your competition in terms of marketing you will be able to outgrow them. Unfortunately, not many marketers, me included, have ever had nor will have, the luxury of a marketing budget that could simply blow the competition out of the water.
The science behind this comes from the ‘Share of Voice Rule’, which is a study from Binet & Field that states companies that achieve greater share of voice than their share of market are more likely to grow. In simple terms, if you have a market share of 10% but you set your marketing budget at a level that generates 20% share of voice in the market, over time, you will see an increase in your marketing success and market share.
Binet & Field actually put a number to this: a 10% Excess Share of Voice ESOV (i.e. the difference between share of voice and actual market share) then you can expect a 0.7% uplift in market share per annum.
It’s not just about increasing ad spend
Just throwing more money at your digital advertising is not necessarily the answer. To steal a quote from Bill Bernbach:
“If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic.”
The reality is that 89% of B2B advertising is ignored or forgotton, and out of the 11% that is remembered, only 4% is remembered favourably.
Share of Voice is not directly proportional to the amount of advertising you do, it is about the amount of your advertising that gets noticed and remembered. Far too many B2B tech companies play it safe; corporate messaging complying to corporate brand. This results in everyone looking the same and saying the same thing – everyone blends into a sea of sameness, adding to the background noise and with the innevitability that they will be ignored.
Attaining share of voice starts with standing out, getting noticed and being remembered. This is about tapping into what is important to your target audience, striking that chord and standing out from the crowd. It is about great creative (not another picture of a datacenter) and it is about sharp and impactful messaging.
A distinctive campaign with a modest budget will be far more effective at generating share of voice than a bland campaign with a huge budget.
Own your target market
If your marketing budget does not permit you to be that big fish in a big pond, then be the biggest fish in a smaller pond; it will generate far better returns.
A study by Roku and MAGNA found that to achieve maximum recall of your campaign, the audience needed to be exposed to your ad between 10 and 15 times. If you make your target audience too broad, then you simply miss this threshold with each person probably seeing your ad once or twice at best and failing to build that association and trust you are looking for.
Experience has taught me that it is far better to leverage a modest budget by focusing on a smaller market and truly owning it rather than trying to go too broad and not being able to rise above the noise.
The best approach is to look for the white space in the market; what is it that you do that is truly unique and highly relevant to a target audience? When you know this, you can double down with laser focus and truly own a space. You can become ubiquitous in this corner of your world and establish the share of voice and share of mind that will drive up market share.
The competition is not your target audience
Have you ever driven down the road and focused on an obstacle that you need to avoid only to find the car starts to drift towards that obstacle? This is not just a Gary thing, it is known as Target Fixation, and it is because your gaze direction and steering control are tightly linked.
This happens with companies and their competition. The fixation on the competion drives you to be more like them rather than to be distinctly different from them. We need to wake up; the competition is not your target audience – they are not the customer.
If you want to gain share of voice, you will not achieve this by mimicking the voice of your competitors. You need to find the gap, lean into what makes you distinctively different and own it.
The simple steps of outsmarting with a smaller marketing budget
We should not dismiss the Share of Voice Rule because we do not have a big enough budget to outmarket our competitors. We should embrace it by simply outsmarting our competitors.
- Be bold & distinctive – if every marketing pound is precious, then make every marketing pound count. Build campaigns that are bold, that punch above your weight and are both distinctive and memorable. You will get noticed while bigger spenders are just ignored in the sea of sameness.
- Be laser focused where you market – it is better to be famous in a small pond than unkown in a bigger one. Identify who you want to sell to, where you can truly make a difference and then focus all of your efforts here – while everyone else spreads themselves too thin, you are gaining traction.
- Focus on the customer, not the competition – the end goal is to be distinctively different from the crowd, not to blend in. The customer is far more important than the competition; spend your time understanding them, discovering their pains and what their priorities are and lean into them. Your marketing will then resonate far more than simply replaying the competitions’ story.
