Why social media & PR matters
Why social media & PR matters
Share of market V share of voice
This week’s email is shorter and more in the format I plan to stick to long term, with the occasional longer email like last week’s! One topic, links to keep you inspired, and career advice. Let’s go.
Share of voice
We’re all familiar with market size, total addressable market, and market share — all important concepts. But not enough focus is placed on share of voice (SoV), yet it’s a key component to driving growth.
SoV is how loudly you’re yelling about your startup/business. How much noise are you making? Now compare that to the amount of noise your competitors are making. This is everything you’re putting into the market, every social media post, every media mention, every interview, every ebook, every ad. Everything.
Here’s a graph to sum it all up:
When your SoV is bigger than that of your competitor, you will grow faster.
But what you’re filling your SoV with also matters, don’t be putting crap out there. Quality matters just as much as quantity here.
The last note I want to add to this week’s topic is you must spend on SoV. It’s not a free game. Organic social media posts alone aren’t enough to increase your SoV. If you post 100 times to an audience of 10 people, and your competitor posts 1 time to a thousand people, who’s really making a better use of their time?
Growing an audience takes time and patience and budget. Investing in a freelance PR is one of my top recommendations for where your budget should go.
A great local example of who is focusing on SoV is Bae Juice. They’re a B2C Melbourne based FMCG brand selling a Korean pear juice hangover cure and just signed a national deal with Woolworths. But they have been everywhere you look well before they got in front of Woolies.
Tim O’Sullivan, co-founder of Bae Juice, told me their media coverage happened organically;
I think one thing we have always done is gone with the momentum of things that are working for us. For example we had an article written about us in August 2019 that generated lots of online sales and site traffic so we decided to go harder at this and pitch as many people as possible.
The podcasts and other features have been great to give people some honest insights into what it's like starting a business and launching a product. Being honest and authentic has helped our business grow and people to be able to connect with our brand on a deeper level. It's really rewarding opening up on these platforms to help encourage others.
He also added that he googled “how to write a press release” and from that wrote a pitch that got picked up by Broadsheet, urbanlist, and the Daily Mail.
Got a question about any of this? Send it in:
Cool things
This article covers the elements of a good opinion piece and having a face/spokesperson for your brand, very in line with the Bae Juice example today!
Locked up in Melbourne? Here’s a murder mystery role playing game designed specifically for Zoom (but best played over Discord, and written by yours truly)
Want a small creativity warm up? Try these paper snowflake templates. I always wondered how the really nice ones were made…
Got 16 minutes and need to stop taking startups so seriously? Watch this dark comedy about a founder trying to get into “B Combinator”. (Also written by yours truly!)
Next week I’ll be covering copywriting for all different areas - product copy in particular is by far the hardest to get right!
Submit a question about copy, writing, or career advice!