Most B2B tech companies have blind spots in their media presence they don't even know exist. And the cost isn't just missed coverage. It's lost pipeline, weaker competitive positioning and executives who aren't getting quoted while their competitors are.
That's the visibility gap. And in my experience working with B2B tech companies across IoT, healthcare IT, fintech, SaaS and enterprise software, nearly every one of them has one. Sometimes it's a messaging problem. Sometimes it's a media relationship problem. Sometimes it's a competitive positioning problem. Usually it's some combination of all three.
The frustrating part? The data to diagnose it already exists. A strategic media audit will surface exactly where your visibility gaps are hiding. But most companies either skip audits entirely, or they get back a pile of charts with no strategy attached. Neither moves the business forward.
A real audit, the kind that actually closes the gap, requires two things: knowing what to look for and having the same team that uncovers the gaps be responsible for closing them. When the audit lives inside one integrated agency partner rather than getting passed between disconnected specialist firms, the findings don't just sit in a shared drive. They become your strategy.
Here's where the visibility gap tends to hide, and how to find it.
(Looking for the data-point-by-data-point breakdown? Our companion post, How B2B Tech CMOs Can Use Media Analysis to Shape Category and Pipeline, walks through every category of information your audit should include. This post is about what to do with it.)
For a complete breakdown of what you should expect from five different types of audits, download our Media, Messaging & Marketing Audit Checklist.
The Gaps in Your Own Footprint
The first place visibility gaps hide is in your own media presence. This is the baseline, and most audits get at least some of it right. But "getting some of it right" isn't enough because the gaps that matter most are the ones that look fine on the surface.
Coverage volume is the starting point. How many times is your brand or your executives mentioned in the media? More importantly, what do those mentions actually look like? There's a significant difference between a dedicated feature article about your company, a passing reference inside a broader industry piece and your name showing up among a list of companies in the space. Volume without context is just a vanity metric, and a vanity metric can mask a real visibility gap.
Coverage sentiment adds the next layer. Is the coverage positive, neutral or negative? In B2B tech, where buying committees spend months evaluating vendors before anyone picks up the phone, negative sentiment can quietly erode your pipeline long before your sales team notices. Knowing the sentiment of your coverage helps you spot problems early and gives your team the data to course-correct before a narrative takes hold.
But here's where the most common visibility gap hides: most audits look at the brand but not the people behind it.
Executive visibility matters more than most B2B tech leaders realize. How often is your leadership team showing up in media coverage? Is it just your CEO getting quoted, or do your CTO, head of product and other leaders have a media presence? In a crowded market, the companies with multiple visible, quotable executives have a real strategic advantage. If your bench is thin, that's a visibility gap, and your competitors are filling the space you're leaving empty.
And visibility without quality is its own kind of gap. Executive messaging looks at what is being said when your leaders are covered. Are they delivering soundbite-worthy quotes that journalists want to use, or are they getting paraphrased into forgettable factual summaries?
We saw this play out clearly with Illumina, a leader in gene sequencing and molecular diagnostics. Despite being the largest player in their space, Illumina's media coverage lagged behind competitor Ion Torrent. The reason wasn't lack of access or opportunity. It was a messaging gap. Ion Torrent's CEO delivered bolder, more direct quotes that earned direct play in articles. Illumina's executives provided more factual information, but it was often quoted indirectly, buried in paraphrases that didn't move the reader.
Our recommendation: work with Illumina's leadership to develop more confident, soundbite-ready messaging, respond faster to news cycle opportunities, and own the conversation around cancer diagnostics and disease management, areas where Illumina already had a clear advantage.
This is one of the reasons an integrated approach matters so much for closing visibility gaps. The team analyzing your executives' media presence should be the same team crafting their messaging, preparing their talking points and placing their contributed articles. When those functions are spread across multiple specialist agencies, the insight and the execution live in different houses. The gap gets diagnosed but never closed.
The Gaps in Your Competitive Position
Your own media footprint only means something in context. The second place visibility gaps hide is in how you compare to competitors, and what analysts, customers and influencers in your market are saying about you.
Share of voice vs. competition is where things get really interesting. This data should be broken down across media categories; for example, mainstream media (national newspapers, television, broad-readership outlets), business media (Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc.), and vertical/industry media (the trade publications and blogs your buyers actually read).
Is your brand showing up as often, and in the same tone, as your competitors? Do you dominate in niche trade coverage but disappear in business media?
Go deeper. Look at specific topics tied to your market. Emerging technology categories, regulatory shifts, industry trends. Are you part of the conversation where it matters most?
When we conducted a media analysis for Zebra Technologies, we examined how the company compared to other major players in IoT media coverage. Zebra's visibility gap was category-specific: they held their own in vertical trade media, but fell behind GE, IBM and Cisco in general and business outlets. The data pointed to a clear strategy: rather than competing head-to-head with the "Big 4," Zebra should position itself as a complementary player in IoT adoption, targeting specific publications and conducting original research to fuel thought leadership in the category.
We uncovered a different kind of visibility gap for West's TeleVox Healthcare Solution. Comparing media mentions against Phytel, a primary competitor in healthcare IT, over a six-year period showed that West's original research drove nearly 400 pieces of coverage, roughly three times more than Phytel. When Phytel's numbers spiked in the final year, a deeper look revealed that more than 80% of those mentions were brief references in articles about IBM's acquisition plans. Not earned coverage. Not thought leadership. Just mentions. West, meanwhile, led in quality with eight contributed articles that year versus one from Phytel. Without that deeper analysis, Phytel's raw numbers could have created a false impression of a closing gap. This is the kind of nuance that only surfaces when the team analyzing your media is the same team leading PR.
Analyst commentary adds another dimension, and often reveals the most surprising gaps. What are industry analysts saying about your brand? Their perspective on product strength, competitive positioning, marketing effectiveness and financial performance carries real weight, especially if you're publicly held or operating in a market where analyst reports influence buying decisions.
Comparing analyst sentiment to your media coverage can reveal blind spots you'd never catch otherwise. That's exactly what happened with Qualcomm. At the time, Qualcomm was widely known as a chip (hardware) company, but the market wasn't recognizing the software that powered those chips. That was their visibility gap: a disconnect between what the company actually delivered and how the market perceived them. Using direct feedback from industry analysts, we developed a SWOT matrix that showed where
Qualcomm could tie its software story into a broader company narrative, staking claims around not just product strength, but strategic vision for the future of the industry.
For B2B tech companies, this kind of analysis often highlights the need to tell your story to multiple audiences. Not just customers, but also analysts, investors and the media outlets they read.
Customer and influencer commentary rounds out the competitive picture. In B2B tech, your customers aren't just users. They're potential validators. A comprehensive media audit should capture what customers, industry bloggers and other influencers are saying about your brand, because that commentary increasingly shapes how prospects evaluate you during the research phase.
We saw one of the most clear-cut visibility gaps in this area with Cornerstone OnDemand. Their media analysis showed they trailed two key competitors in overall visibility, but the most revealing gap was customer references in coverage. Only one Cornerstone OnDemand article during the review period included a customer quote.
Their top competitor? Customers were featured in 13 of 33 articles. The recommendation was straightforward: if Cornerstone wanted to close the visibility gap, they needed to bring real customer voices to the table in their media engagement.
The Gaps in Your Media Relationships
Data about volume, sentiment and competitive positioning tells you what is happening. This next piece tells you who is making it happen, and where the relationship gaps are.
Top writers and media outlets are the journalists and publications already giving your brand regular, positive coverage. Knowing who they are lets you nurture those relationships strategically and identify opportunities for contributed articles, executive interviews and deeper partnerships.
When we analyzed media coverage for MobileIron and benchmarked it against industry peers, we developed a ranked list of the journalists and outlets that had consistently covered the company across a five-month period. That list became a roadmap for targeted outreach: not just maintaining existing relationships, but expanding into adjacent B2B tech publications where MobileIron had opportunity to grow.
Underperforming writers and media outlets are the flip side, and often the biggest visibility gap of all. Which journalists and outlets cover your space but rarely mention your brand? Understanding why, whether it's a visibility gap, a relationship gap or a messaging gap, gives you a clear action plan.
A JONES media audit for Freescale Semiconductor identified specific writers and outlets who consistently covered the industry but underrepresented Freescale in that coverage. That was their visibility gap: the conversations were happening, the journalists were covering the space, and Freescale simply wasn't in the room.
The result was a targeted outreach list. Not a generic pitch strategy, but a specific plan to build relationships with the journalists who should have been covering them but weren't.
This is where the value of a single integrated agency partner becomes especially clear. Identifying media relationship gaps is useful. But the real value is in closing them, and that requires the same team to be handling your research and media analysis, should be handling all of your PR, executive visibility, analyst relations and (ideally) your content .
(For a detailed breakdown of every data point covered in this post, including what specifically to look for in coverage volume, sentiment, share of voice and media relationships, see our companion post: How B2B Tech CMOs Can Use Media Analysis to Shape Category and Pipeline.)
Closing the Gaps: Turning Data Into Strategy
Diagnosing the visibility gap is the first step. Closing it is what matters. A comprehensive media analysis, the kind that actually moves your business forward, should give you more than a diagnosis. It should give you a strategy you can execute against starting next week. Here are the three strategic outcomes your audit should deliver:
1. A targeting strategy for media outlets and specific writers. Your audit should map directly to an outreach plan: which outlets to prioritize, which relationships to build and which messages to lead with across channels. When your integrated agency partner is handling both the analysis and the execution that strategy translates to action without the delays and translation loss that come from coordinating across multiple firms.
2. Trending topics your brand needs to own. After examining share of voice, competitor positioning and emerging conversations in your market, your audit should point to the topics your brand needs to address to stay relevant. In B2B tech, these topics shift quickly. AI, regulatory changes, category convergence, new competitive entrants. Your media analysis partner should be identifying these inflection points and connecting them directly to your content and PR strategy.
3. Recommendations for increasing executive visibility. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to show executives how they can improve their media presence. Your audit should include specific recommendations for developing your leadership team as industry authorities, from crafting soundbite-ready talking points to identifying speaking opportunities, to recommending media training to sharpen on-camera and in-person delivery.
Finding the Visibility Gap Is Not Enough, You Have to Close It.
The visibility gap doesn't close itself. And it doesn't always close when the team that finds it is different from the team responsible for doing something about it.
Media audits are one type of assessment you might consider to evaluate your current communications effectiveness. Other audits that deliver benchmarks and actionable strategy include messaging and positioning audits, marketing success audits, marketing content audits and analyst audits.
Find a complete breakdown of what you should expect from each in our Media, Messaging & Marketing Audit Checklist. If you aren't getting everything on that list, you aren't getting what your brand needs.
If you need support identifying and closing your visibility gaps, feel free to book some time on my calendar here.
