You're Spending Enough on Marketing. You're Just Spreading It Too Thin.

Here's what most small businesses do with their marketing budget.

They run Google Ads. They post on Facebook. They pay for SEO. They send some emails. They sponsor the local footy team. Maybe they dabble in LinkedIn. Every channel gets a slice. Every slice is too small to matter.

The budget isn't the problem. The distribution is.

There's a single marketing metric that predicts business growth more accurately than ROAS, more reliably than conversion rate, and with more empirical support than almost anything else in the field. It's called Excess Share of Voice. And unless you spend time reading marketing science papers, you've probably never heard of it.

The Metric That Actually Predicts Growth

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed nearly 1,000 advertising effectiveness case studies from the IPA Databank, spanning three decades of real campaigns across categories and countries. Their finding was remarkably consistent: for every 10 percentage points your share of voice exceeds your share of market, your business grows by approximately 0.5% in market share per year.

They called this Excess Share of Voice (ESOV). The concept is straightforward. If your business holds 5% of the market but accounts for 15% of the advertising voice in that market, you have 10 points of excess share of voice. The data says you'll grow.

The reverse is equally true. If your share of voice sits below your market share, you'll shrink. Not might. Will. Across categories, countries, and decades, this relationship held with remarkable consistency.

This isn't theory. It's the most empirically validated marketing framework available. And it has a brutal implication for most small businesses.

Most SMEs Are Whispering in a Stadium

The average Australian SME spends 2-3% of revenue on marketing. For a business turning over $1 million, that's $20,000-$30,000 a year. Spread across five or six channels and you're looking at $300-$500 a month per channel.

At $500 a month on Google Ads in a competitive local market, your impression share (the percentage of available searches where your ad actually appears) will sit around 15-20%. That means for every 10 people searching for your service, 8 of them never see you.

You're not competing. You're not even in the room for most of the conversations happening in your market.

The competitor spending $2,000 a month on the same keywords isn't doing 4x better work. They're not 4x smarter. They just show up 4x more often. Over time, that consistency compounds into familiarity, then trust, then market share. The Binet and Field research confirms it: this gap isn't something cleverness can close. Only visibility can.

We've written before about why your marketing budget should be managed like an investment portfolio. The ESOV framework adds a critical dimension to that thinking. It's not enough to diversify intelligently. You need to achieve dominance somewhere. A portfolio of five underweight positions doesn't hedge risk. It guarantees irrelevance.

Why Buyers Don't Need the Best. They Need the Most Familiar.

This is where behavioural economics explains why share of voice works.

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, draws a sharp line between maximising and satisficing behaviour. Maximisers exhaustively compare every option to find the absolute best. Satisficers choose the first option they're confident won't be a disaster.

His favourite example is McDonald's. Nobody walks into McDonald's expecting the world's finest meal. They walk in because McDonald's is reliably "good enough." The consistency eliminates risk. That's worth more to most buyers than excellence they haven't experienced yet.

For local service businesses, this insight is gold. Your potential customers aren't running a detailed evaluation across every plumber, dentist, or marketing agency in the city. They're searching, seeing a few options, and picking the one that feels most familiar and least risky.

The brand they've seen most often is the one that feels safest. This is Byron Sharp's concept of mental availability at work: the probability that a buyer will think of your brand when a purchase trigger fires. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that when a brand doubles its mental availability while keeping physical availability constant, market share grows by 30-50%.

Share of voice is the mechanism by which mental availability gets built. Every ad impression, every search result appearance, every social post that gets seen is another small deposit into the memory bank. Do it enough, in enough buying-related contexts, and you become the name that surfaces when someone thinks "I need a [your service]."

The 95% You're Not Reaching

Here's where ESOV intersects with one of the most important findings in modern marketing science.

Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (working with the LinkedIn B2B Institute) demonstrated that at any given moment, only about 5% of your potential customers are actively in the market to buy. The other 95% aren't shopping today. But they will be, eventually.

We explored this in depth in our piece on why 95% of your future customers aren't Googling you right now. The implications for share of voice are profound.

If only 5% of buyers are in-market right now, then most of your marketing spend is reaching people who won't buy today. That's not waste. That's the entire point.

As Dawes explains: "Advertising mostly hits people who aren't going to buy anytime soon. And that tells us about how advertising works: it mainly works by building and refreshing memory links to the brand. These memory links activate when buyers do come into the market."

Most SMEs focus exclusively on capturing the 5%: Google Ads, SEO, "call now" messaging. That's physical availability in Sharp's framework. It's essential. But it has a ceiling. The pool of people searching right now is finite. If you're already showing up for those searches, more activation spend hits diminishing returns fast.

The businesses that break through are the ones investing in being remembered by the 95%. When those buyers enter the market next quarter, next year, or in three years, the brand with the highest share of voice is the one that comes to mind first.

The 60/40 Mistake Almost Every SME Makes

Binet and Field's research established an optimal budget split: approximately 60% brand building, 40% sales activation. Campaigns near this ratio outperformed those at either extreme, producing sustained increases in market share, profit margins, and pricing power.

Most SMEs run the inverse. 90% or more of their budget goes to activation: Google Ads, direct-response Facebook ads, "get a quote now" landing pages. Brand building gets whatever's left over, which is usually nothing.

Short-term, this looks efficient. You can trace every dollar to a lead. The ROAS looks healthy. The dashboard glows green.

Long-term, you're on a treadmill. Every lead has to be bought fresh because nobody remembers you between purchases. Your cost per lead creeps up year after year because you're competing for the same small pool of in-market buyers against every other business doing the same thing. We've covered this dynamic before in our piece on why your ads get more expensive every year.

The fix isn't to stop running Google Ads. It's to recognise that Google Ads is physical availability. It catches the 5% who are ready right now. But without brand building (the 60% that creates memory in the other 95%), you'll never grow the pool of people who search for you by name, tell friends about you, or think of you first when the need arises.

The Small Room Strategy: How SMEs Actually Win

Here's the practical reframe for a business without Coca-Cola's budget.

You can't dominate the national conversation. You can dominate a local one. The ESOV maths works identically whether the "market" is Australia or a single suburb. The question isn't "how loud can we be?" It's "how small can we make the room?"

A plumber in Adelaide doesn't need share of voice across all of Australia. They need it in the northern suburbs. A B2B software company doesn't need SOV across every industry. They need it among accounting firms with 10-50 employees.

When you narrow the market definition, the budget required for excess share of voice drops dramatically. $2,000 a month is invisible nationally. In a specific local market for a specific service category, that same budget can buy you 60%+ impression share on the keywords that matter. Research suggests that above 40% impression share is competitive, and above 60% is dominant. For branded terms, anything below 90% means a competitor is buying your name, and you need to act immediately.

Here's how to apply this:

What This Means for Your Business

The most important number in your marketing isn't your budget. It's your budget relative to your competitors' budgets within your specific market.

$3,000 a month on Google Ads in a market where three competitors each spend $1,000 gives you roughly 50% share of voice. The Binet and Field data says you'll grow. That same $3,000 in a market where two competitors each spend $10,000 gives you under 15%. The data says you'll shrink.

The strategic response isn't always "spend more." Often it's "compete somewhere smaller." Find the market segment, the geography, or the service niche where your current budget achieves excess share of voice. Dominate there. Then expand.

Sutherland puts it cleanly: "It doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical." Every other business in your category is spreading their budget thin across every channel. The counterintuitive move is to pull back, concentrate, and own one room completely.

The loudest voice in a small room beats a whisper in a stadium. Every time.

Further Reading

• The Long and the Short of It: Binet & Field's Framework Explained - comprehensive breakdown of the IPA effectiveness research that established the 60/40 rule and ESOV framework
• The 95-5 Rule (LinkedIn B2B Institute) - Professor John Dawes' research on why 95% of buyers aren't in the market right now, and what it means for advertising strategy
• Excess Share of Voice: The Evidence-Based Growth Framework (INVRSN) - detailed walkthrough of the ESOV data with practical applications
• Mental vs Physical Availability: Operational Guide 2026 (Deep Marketing) - Byron Sharp's two growth levers with current measurement approaches
• Share of Voice in 2026 (Orr Consulting) - why SOV remains the most predictive growth metric in a fragmented media landscape