Share of Voice in Marketing: A Founder's Playbook

Let's cut the marketing jargon. As a founder, share of voice (SOV) is simple: picture your market as a noisy room. Your SOV is how much of the conversation you actually own. If you’re not being talked about, you’re invisible.

This isn't a vanity metric. It’s a leading indicator of brand health and future market share. At BillyBuzz, we don’t see SOV as a report card; we see it as a strategic map. It shows us where our competitors are dominating the conversation and—more importantly—where they're silent. Those are the gaps we can jump into.

What Share of Voice Really Means for Your Startup

As a founder, you don't have time for vanity metrics. Share of Voice (SOV) isn't one of them. It's a real-world indicator of your future market share and a vital sign for your brand's health. Think of it as your brand's volume in the marketplace. If you're not making any noise, you're invisible.

Back in the day, SOV was pretty straightforward. It was all about paid advertising. Marketers would calculate their brand's ad spending against the total ad spend for the entire industry. For example, if you dropped $5 million on ads while the industry as a whole spent $100 million, your SOV was a neat 5%. The old model was about buying up ad space.

The Evolution of Share of Voice

Fast forward to today, and that concert hall is now digital. The "stage" isn't one place anymore; it's scattered across dozens of channels. Because of this, SOV has grown to mean so much more than just ad spend. For any modern startup, it’s about your total visibility and influence wherever your customers hang out.

This new, broader definition covers your presence across key areas:

Social Media: How often are people talking about you on X, Reddit, or LinkedIn versus your competitors?
Organic Search (SEO): When someone searches for your most important keywords, what percentage of the top results belongs to you?
Paid Channels (PPC): In Google Ads, what’s your impression share for the search terms you're bidding on?
Digital PR: How many articles, mentions, and backlinks are you getting compared to everyone else in your space?

Each of these channels is a different part of that concert hall. Your total share of voice is the sum of how well you're being heard in all of them.

At BillyBuzz, we don't see SOV as just a report card on past performance. We see it as a strategic map for the future. It shows us exactly where our competitors are dominating the conversation and—more importantly—where they're silent. Those are the gaps we can jump into.

Why It's a Strategic Moat

Tracking SOV isn't just about keeping score against the competition; it's about building a defensive moat around your business. A strong share of voice creates powerful brand recall. That recall eventually gives you more pricing power and a real, lasting competitive advantage. To see the full picture, you have to understand the critical link between share of market vs share of voice.

For any founder, putting resources into growing your SOV is a direct investment in your brand's long-term authority and survival.

Why Share of Voice Should Be a Founder's Obsession

As a founder, you're constantly fighting two wars: one for your customers' attention and another against your own dwindling resources. Every dollar and every hour has to count. That’s why focusing on your share of voice in marketing isn't just a good idea—it's one of the smartest strategic moves you can make.

It's not about yelling the loudest. It’s about being part of the right conversations, right when your potential customers are ready to listen. Think of it as owning mental real estate. When someone has a problem that you solve, you want your brand to be the first one that pops into their head. That kind of instant recall is gold, and it pays dividends in higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs down the line.

Find the Gaps Your Competitors Are Missing

Here’s where tracking SOV gets really interesting: it doubles as a powerful competitive intelligence tool. When you analyze where your rivals are making noise, you get a clear picture of their playbook. But the real magic is in finding what they’re not doing.

You can spot the channels they're ignoring, the keywords they haven't touched, or the customer frustrations they've completely overlooked. These are your openings. At BillyBuzz, this isn't a vanity exercise; it’s how we find our next move. It shows us where we can join a conversation and actually add value, instead of just trying to outspend a bigger, more established player. To really dig in, a solid competitor analysis is your best friend. We've put together a guide on how to conduct a comprehensive competitor analysis for emerging businesses that walks you through it.

For a founder, SOV isn't just another metric; it’s a compass. It tells you where to point your budget, what content to create, and how to build a marketing strategy that leads to real, sustainable growth.

Turning Conversations into Market Share

The connection between share of voice and actual market share isn't just wishful thinking—it's backed by some serious data. Especially in noisy, crowded markets, a strong SOV is often a powerful predictor of future growth.

For instance, a major 2019 Nielsen study in the U.S. found that for every 7% of SOV a brand had above its market share, it could expect about 1% of revenue growth the following year. Fast forward to 2023, and you see this playing out in real-time. In the cutthroat smartphone industry, social listening tools showed that Apple and Samsung together captured over 60% of all brand mentions on platforms like X and Instagram, mirroring their dominance in sales. Cision has some fantastic insights on the impact of SOV in PR if you want to go deeper.

This shows that growing your share of voice is about more than just awareness. It’s a systematic way to capture the attention that leads directly to sales and customer loyalty. It builds a brand that not only attracts customers but can also command better pricing because you’ve become the name in your category. Investing in SOV is investing in a brand that's built to last.

Alright, let's move past the theory and get our hands dirty. Here’s a look under the hood at how we actually measure our share of voice in marketing at BillyBuzz.

As a founder, you don't need a massive budget or enterprise-level software to figure out where you stand. You just need a practical, repeatable process that gives you a clear picture of your position in the market. This isn't about creating some dense, 50-page report that collects dust; it's about building a simple dashboard that tells you, at a glance, if you're winning or losing.

We keep things focused by breaking our SOV measurement down into three core channels: Social, Organic (SEO), and Paid (PPC).

Tracking this shows you how grabbing more attention translates directly into real business results—from stronger brand recall to having more say on your pricing.

Think of this as the journey from just being seen to building a stronger, more profitable brand.

How to Measure Social Share of Voice

Social SOV is your most immediate pulse check on the conversation. It directly answers the question, "Of all the chatter happening in our industry online, how much of it is actually about us?"

We focus on tracking brand mentions because it’s a raw, unfiltered signal of awareness.

Our process is dead simple:

Define Your Keywords: First, we list our own brand ("BillyBuzz"). Then we add the names of our main competitors and a few key, non-branded industry terms that our customers use (like "Reddit marketing" or "social listening for startups").
Set Up Alerts: We use our own tool, BillyBuzz, to keep an eye on Reddit. For the wider web and other social platforms, we lean on free tools like Google Alerts and a paid subscription to Brand24 to track our keyword list across places like X (formerly Twitter) and blogs.
Calculate the Numbers: Every week, we tally the mentions for our brand and our top three competitors. The formula is as basic as it gets: (Your Mentions / Total Industry Mentions) x 100 = Social SOV.

At our core, we believe that if you're not part of the conversation, you don't exist. Tracking social mentions is the fastest way to know if your message is cutting through the noise or just fading into the background. It’s our real-time feedback loop.

Getting these alerts set up is non-negotiable. If you need a hand, our guide on setting up real-time social media alerts will walk you through it so you never miss a conversation.

This is more important than ever. Social listening tools are projected to process millions of brand mentions every single day by 2025. To put that in perspective, during a major launch, a brand might see 500,000 mentions in one week. If the total industry conversation hits 2 million mentions, that brand has captured a solid 25% SOV. You can learn more about the technology behind measuring share of voice on talkwalker.com.

How to Track Organic and Paid Search SOV

While social media reveals the conversation, search engines reveal intent. Being visible on Google is all about capturing people who are actively looking for a solution you provide.

We measure our Organic and Paid SOV separately, but the goal is the same: own the digital shelf.

Share of Voice Measurement Channels and Tools

To keep it all straight, here’s a quick breakdown of the channels we track, the specific metric we care about for each, and the tools we use to get the job done.

Channel	Key Metric	Our Go-To Tool(s)
Social Media	Brand/Keyword Mentions	BillyBuzz, Google Alerts, Brand24
Organic Search (SEO)	Keyword Visibility / Share of Voice	Ahrefs
Paid Search (PPC)	Impression Share	Google Ads

This simple stack gives us a holistic view without overcomplicating things. Let's dig into the search-specific methods.

For Organic SOV (SEO)

Our north-star metric here is keyword visibility. In plain English, this tells us what percentage of all possible clicks we're likely to get for a specific group of keywords, based on where we rank.

Our Tool: We live in Ahrefs for this. We've loaded our top 50 commercial and informational keywords into its tracker.
The Metric: Ahrefs has a "Share of Voice" feature that does the heavy lifting. It automatically calculates our visibility score and stacks it up against our main competitors, showing who's really owning the search traffic for that keyword basket.

For Paid SOV (PPC)

With paid search, the measurement is even more direct: impression share. This metric is sitting right there inside your Google Ads account, waiting for you.

Our Tool: Google Ads. It’s built-in, and it’s free.
The Metric: We keep a close eye on the "Search impression share" column. If our impression share is 40%, it means our ads were shown in 40% of the searches they were eligible for. The other 60% of the time, the impression went to a competitor, or no ad was shown at all.

By consistently watching these three areas—social mentions, organic visibility, and paid impression share—we get a well-rounded, actionable view of our share of voice. It's a founder-to-founder blueprint that gives us the data we need to make smarter marketing decisions, without needing a massive analytics team.

Our Playbook for Winning Conversations on Reddit

Let's be blunt: generic brand promotion is the fastest way to get exiled from a community like Reddit. These platforms aren't just marketing channels; they're digital town squares where real people gather to share problems, celebrate wins, and ask for genuine advice.

Our entire strategy for boosting our share of voice in marketing on places like Reddit is built on one simple rule: be more helpful than you are promotional.

As a founder, your authentic expertise is your most powerful asset. At BillyBuzz, we don’t just watch conversations—we get in the trenches. It’s a systematic approach that turns genuinely helpful comments into brand awareness and, eventually, paying customers. This isn’t about spamming links. It’s about strategically finding moments where you can solve a real problem for someone, which naturally builds your brand’s authority.

Finding the Right Conversations

You can't win a conversation if you show up in the wrong room. For us, that means zoning in on subreddits where founders and marketers talk shop.

Inside BillyBuzz, here are the actual subreddits we monitor:

Broad Startup Hubs: r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, r/SaaS for general founder pain points.
Niche Marketing Groups: r/marketing, r/PPC, r/GrowthHacking for specific, tactical discussions.
Problem-Specific Forums: r/sociallistening, r/B2BLeadGen, and communities around our competitors’ products. This is where the real gold is.

Once we’ve mapped out these communities, we set up a precise monitoring system to catch relevant discussions the moment they pop up.

Setting Up Our Alert System

Speed is everything. A conversation that’s two days old is a missed opportunity. Inside BillyBuzz, we run alerts 24/7.

These are our exact alert rule filters:

Direct Competitor Mentions: We track our top three competitors by name. "Brand X" OR "Brand Y"
Pain Point Keywords: This is our highest-converting source. We use keyword clusters like: ("how to" OR "find" OR "get") AND ("customers" OR "users") AND "Reddit"
"Looking For" Phrases: These signal clear buying intent. ("tool for" OR "alternative to" OR "recommendation for") AND ("social listening" OR "Reddit marketing")

These alerts get piped directly into our team's Slack channel, allowing us to qualify and respond in minutes.

This is a perfect example of a conversation where someone is asking for tool recommendations—a prime opportunity for us to engage. The key is to respond with genuine help first, not a sales pitch, to build that crucial trust within the community.

Our Response Templates: The Anti-Sales Pitch

Having a "template" doesn't mean sounding like a robot. It’s a framework to ensure we lead with value.

Here is the BillyBuzz Response Framework we actually use:

Acknowledge & Validate: "Great question. Finding your first users on Reddit can be tough because most communities hate self-promo."
Provide Actionable Value (No Strings Attached): "Here are two things that worked for us: 1) We identified 5 niche subreddits where our ICP hangs out and just started answering questions. 2) We set up keyword alerts for pain points, not just our brand name. This was a game-changer."
Subtle, Contextual Mention (The 'P.S.' Method): "P.S. We actually built BillyBuzz to automate the keyword monitoring part because doing it manually was a huge pain. Happy to share more if you're curious, but the two tactics above should get you started."

This approach has led to comments that drive significant referral traffic. For a deeper dive into this process, check out our complete guide on how to get customers from Reddit in 2025. To explore these engagement tactics further, it's worth reading up on a comprehensive Reddit marketing strategy. This founder-to-founder playbook is exactly how we systematically increase our share of voice where it matters most.

How We Increase Organic SOV with Targeted Content

A person using a laptop with Ahrefs competitor analysis data on the screen, symbolizing strategic content creation.

While jumping into communities on Reddit is a brilliant way to build brand authority from the ground up, organic search is where you build a lasting competitive moat. A powerful SEO presence puts you in front of high-intent customers at the exact moment they’re searching for answers. At BillyBuzz, our strategy for growing organic share of voice in marketing is all about surgical precision, not just cranking out content.

We don't just "write great content." We have a system for spotting competitor weaknesses and creating assets specifically designed to knock them out of the top search results. It’s a founder-led approach focused on stealing search territory, one valuable keyword at a time.

Identifying High-Impact Keywords

It all starts with finding the right battleground. We look for keywords where our competitors are ranking but are clearly vulnerable. This isn't about trying to outrank HubSpot for "content marketing" on day one. Instead, we hunt for long-tail keywords with strong commercial intent, where the top-ranking content is just okay.

For this, we practically live inside Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. We’ll plug in our main competitors and filter for keywords where they rank somewhere in positions 3-10. These are the sweet spots—they have proven traffic potential, but the top result often isn't an impenetrable fortress.

A keyword where a competitor ranks #7 with a thin, outdated article isn't a threat; it's a target. This is our signal to go in and build something ten times better. We see these as invitations to capture a new slice of organic share of voice.

This tactical approach allows us to pick our battles wisely, focusing our resources where we have the highest probability of winning. It's a game of inches that compounds into major gains over time.

Pinpointing Competitor Content Weaknesses

Once we've locked onto a target keyword, we dissect the top-ranking articles. This isn't a quick skim; it’s a deep, structured analysis to find every single angle for improvement. We even use a simple checklist to keep our analysis consistent and, most importantly, actionable.

This process transforms a vague goal like "make it better" into a concrete to-do list. For instance, if a rival's article is all theory with no practical examples or uses outdated stats, those gaps become the pillars of our new, superior piece of content.

Our Competitor SEO Content Analysis Checklist

Here’s a look at the internal checklist we use at BillyBuzz to break down a competitor's article and map out our content plan. Think of it as our blueprint for creating content that’s engineered to rank.

Analysis Point	What to Look For	Actionable Tactic
Content Depth	Are there unanswered questions? Is the coverage surface-level?	We identify gaps and create a new section that provides a more thorough explanation or adds a unique perspective.
Freshness & Data	Is the data old? Are the examples from five years ago?	We find the latest statistics, include up-to-date examples, and explicitly mention the current year in the content.
Practicality	Does it explain the 'what' but not the 'how'? Is it too theoretical?	We add step-by-step instructions, real-world case studies, or founder-to-founder insights that readers can apply immediately.
Formatting & UX	Is it a wall of text? Does it lack visuals?	We break up text with short paragraphs, add custom graphics, include tables, and use blockquotes to improve readability.

This checklist ensures we move beyond just matching our competitors and instead focus on comprehensively outperforming them on every level.

Building Topic Clusters to Establish Authority

Winning individual keywords is just one part of the battle. To truly dominate a niche and build a defensible share of voice, you need to prove your authority to Google. We do this by building topic clusters.

A topic cluster is simply a group of interlinked articles that all revolve around a central "pillar" topic. For us, a pillar piece might be something big like "The Ultimate Guide to Reddit Marketing." From there, we'd create several "cluster" articles that dive deeper into specific sub-topics, such as "How to Find Your First 100 Customers on Reddit" or "Analyzing Reddit Sentiment."

Each of these smaller cluster posts links back to the main pillar page. This tight-knit internal linking structure signals to search engines that we have deep expertise on the entire subject. In turn, it helps the whole cluster rank higher, capturing a much larger share of search traffic for that topic. This is the repeatable framework we use to methodically expand our online presence.

Common SOV Mistakes Most Founders Make

Learning from other people's mistakes is the ultimate growth hack. When you're in the trenches building a business, you simply don't have the time or money to waste on unforced errors, especially when it comes to grabbing your share of voice in marketing. Here are some of the most common pitfalls we've seen—and, let's be honest, made ourselves—that you can now sidestep.

The biggest mistake? Channel obsession. A founder lands one early win on a platform like Reddit or X, and suddenly they're pouring 100% of their energy into that one basket. It makes sense to double down on what’s working, but completely ignoring other channels leaves you dangerously exposed. You're effectively building your brand's entire visibility on rented land that you have no control over.

At BillyBuzz, we have a simple rule: never let a single channel drive more than 60% of our inbound mentions. It's a forcing function that keeps us diversified and helps us build a more resilient brand presence that isn't at the mercy of one algorithm.

Another classic blunder is confusing sheer volume with actual value. It's tempting to get a thrill from seeing a spike in mentions, but if those mentions are all from low-quality sources or are negative in sentiment, your SOV metric is just a vanity number. Chasing high mention counts often leads people down the path of spammy, aggressive tactics that almost always backfire, especially in community-focused spaces.

The Aggressive Promoter Trap

We've all seen it. A founder dives into a subreddit or a forum with a "helpful" comment that's really just a thinly veiled sales pitch. They think they're "engaging with the community," but this approach doesn't just fall flat—it actively damages your brand's reputation. People in these communities are smart; they can smell a self-serving comment from a mile away.

The Mistake: A founder spots a question about a competitor and jumps in with, "Our tool is way better, you should check us out here [link]."
The Result: The comment gets downvoted to hell, the account often gets banned, and now the brand is synonymous with spam.
What to Do Instead: Live by the 90/10 rule. Ensure 90% of your contributions are pure, genuine help with no strings attached. For the other 10%, you can drop a subtle, relevant mention of your product, but only when it is the direct solution to the person's problem.

Focusing Only on Your Brand Name

Lastly, a massive blind spot for many founders is only tracking exact mentions of their brand name. You're missing out on the vast majority of relevant conversations where potential customers are describing their problems or asking for recommendations. These are golden opportunities to jump in.

Instead of just listening for "BillyBuzz," we track dozens of "pain point" keywords like "find customers on Reddit" or "social listening tool for startups." This approach gives us a much broader view of the entire conversation, letting us capture share of voice in discussions where our brand hasn't even been mentioned yet. Steering clear of these common mistakes will help you build a much more strategic and sustainable marketing engine from day one.

Frequently Asked Questions

We talk to founders about share of voice constantly. Over the years, we've noticed the same questions pop up again and again. Here are our straight-to-the-point answers to the most common ones we hear.

How Often Should I Measure My SOV?

This really comes down to the speed of the channel you're watching. Some conversations move at a snail's pace, while others fly by.

For the fast-paced world of social media and Reddit, a weekly check-in is your best bet. It’s frequent enough to catch important trends and see what competitors are up to, but not so often that you get bogged down by meaningless daily fluctuations.

When it comes to slower channels like organic search (SEO), think bigger picture. A monthly or quarterly review makes much more sense. SEO is a long game, and looking at it day-to-day will just drive you crazy without telling you much.

What Is a Realistic SOV for a Startup?

Let's be blunt: you're not going to out-shout the established giants right out of the gate. That's a recipe for burning through cash with little to show for it. The smarter move is to completely redefine the battleground.

Instead of fighting for a tiny 1% of a massive market, find a specific, underserved niche and aim to own it. Forget the whole SaaS industry; focus on becoming the go-to name for "social listening for bootstrapped founders." Your initial goal could be a commanding 30% SOV within that tiny, focused conversation.

Win that specific niche first. Become the biggest fish in a small pond. Then, and only then, should you start looking for bigger ponds to conquer.

How Can I Increase SOV with a Tiny Budget?

A small budget isn't a weakness; it's a filter that forces you to be creative and focus on what actually works. Your expertise is your greatest weapon, not your ad spend.

Here are three high-impact, low-cost strategies we've seen work time and again:

Be a Guest Expert: Don't just guest post. Find the blogs and newsletters your ideal customers religiously read and offer to share genuine, non-salesy expertise. You're not just getting a backlink; you're borrowing the trust and audience that someone else spent years building.
Dominate a Community: Find one or two key subreddits, Slack groups, or forums where your audience hangs out. Then, show up consistently and be the most helpful person there. Answer every relevant question you can, not with a link to your site, but with a real, thoughtful answer. People will notice.
Weaponize Your Praise: Every time a customer says something nice about you, that's a gift. Turn that tweet into a testimonial on your homepage, that email into a short case study, or that comment into a social media post. This is User-Generated Content (UGC)—it’s more credible than anything you can say about yourself, and it costs you nothing.

Ready to stop guessing and start winning the conversations that matter on Reddit? BillyBuzz uses AI to find your next customers by monitoring the communities where they're already looking for solutions. Find your first leads today.