What Is Share of Voice? Definition, Types, and How to Measure

The significance of share of voice (aka SOV) is vital to achieving success. To see your business thrive, you’ll need to understand how your marketing tactics stack up against the competition. This is where the concept of share of voice comes into play.

So, what is share of voice within marketing, and why is it essential for understanding your strategy’s effectiveness? In this article, we’ll explain SOV, discuss the different types of share of voice across marketing channels, and how you can calculate it. We will also discuss the importance of this metric for marketers like you.

Share of Voice Definition

Share of voice (SOV) is a marketing metric that helps you understand your brand’s presence and visibility in the market. It quantifies your brand’s share of the market in relation to your competitors by comparing multiple elements, such as:

• Ad space
• PR campaigns
• Social media
• Mass media

Taking the time to calculate your brand’s SOV will provide you with valuable insights into your marketing strategy’s effectiveness. It will show your brand’s level of customer engagement and, ultimately, reveal how well your business is achieving its objectives.

Metrics for Measuring Share of Voice

• Impression share: The percentage of ad impressions your ads receive compared to the total number available.
• Ad coverage: The percentage of times your ads show up on the first page of search results.
• Ad rank: The position of your ads on the search results page.
• Brand mentions: The number of times your brand is mentioned in search results, social media, and other online channels.
• Social media mentions: The number of times your brand is mentioned on social media platforms.
• Backlinks: The number of external links pointing to your website or content.
• PPC share: The percentage of paid clicks your ads receive compared to your competitors is called PPC share.
• Competitive metrics: Competitive visibility: the visibility of your brand and products compared to your competitors; competitive share of voice: the percentage of voice your brand has in the market compared to your competitors.

Importance of Share of Voice

The share of voice metric can offer valuable insights into your marketing’s effectiveness and help you hone your competitive edge. Think of it like measurable brand awareness.

Taking the time to calculate share of voice can deliver advantages, such as competitive analysis, a better understanding of customer engagement, and more.

Let’s take a look at some of the most significant ways that measuring your company’s SOV can be beneficial.

Provides Competitive Analysis Insights

Understanding the current landscape of your industry requires thorough market research and competitive analysis. Calculating SOV can provide insights into the areas where your competitors are succeeding. This, in turn, can help inform your marketing decisions and help you understand what strategies resonate with your target audience.

Enhances Marketing Efforts

Measuring your market share across different channels allows you to evaluate your marketing efforts’ effectiveness and make improvements accordingly.

For instance, if your share of voice is high in organic search but low on social media, you can identify gaps in your social media strategy and better allocate resources. This will help you optimize your campaigns to increase your overall share of voice.

Highlights Customer Engagement Opportunities

A high market share often indicates a strong resonance with your audience, increased brand visibility, and robust customer engagement.

Analyzing your business’s share of voice will allow you to identify opportunities for improvement and focus on strategies that can effectively boost your brand’s presence in the market.

Identifies Areas of Improvement

In addition to understanding the overall landscape of your industry, share of voice also offers insights related to your target audience.

Examining how your share of voice is distributed among different marketing channels will allow you to identify gaps in your communication and areas that need improvement. This helps you create a better-targeted marketing strategy that resonates with your ideal audience.

Different Types of Share of Voice

When you decide to assess your brand’s market share, there are several platforms you’ll need to take into account. To gain an understanding of your overall brand presence, you’ll want to consider all of the marketing channels you’re using, including traditional, digital, and social media.

Let’s discuss all three of these channels in greater detail and examine what metrics you would need to calculate SOV.

Traditional SOV

This category relates to your brand’s presence across traditional marketing platforms such as:

• Print
• Television
• Radio
• Outdoor advertising

To measure your brand’s presence in this category, you should examine metrics such as media spending, PR efforts, and advertising campaigns. You will need to compare this information against your competitor’s spending in the same channels.

Digital SOV

Digital share of voice takes into account your brand’s presence on online channels, such as Google search or display advertising. This includes organic search results, as well as paid advertising.

To determine your SOV in organic search, you would measure factors like search engine rankings and website traffic. For paid advertising, you should measure clicks and impressions on Google Ads or similar platforms. Comparing your brand’s performance with that of your competitors within these digital channels will provide you with your digital market share.

Social Media SOV

Lastly, social media share of voice examines your brand’s presence across all major social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

In this scenario, your share of voice will factor in the number of brand mentions (both organic and sponsored), social media mentions, and other engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Compare these figures to those of your competitors to gain an overview of your social media share of voice.

How to Calculate Share of Voice

While you already know that you’ll need to gather data to calculate your brand’s share of voice, you might be wondering exactly what formula to use. This section will discuss the formulas commonly used to measure share of voice, tools that can assist with this process, and examples of how these calculations can be made.

Share of Voice Formula

How you measure SOV differs depending on the marketing channel you’re examining, but the general formula is as follows:

SOV = Your brand’s measures / Total market measures

For instance, in traditional marketing, share of voice might be calculated by comparing your brand’s ad spend or PR efforts against the total market measures for those same elements.

In digital marketing, organic traffic compared to total organic traffic and paid advertising clicks compared to total clicks can be used in calculating SOV. Likewise, in social media channels, share of voice is determined by comparing your brand’s mentions and overall engagement with that of your competitors.

Tools for Measuring Share of Voice

To streamline this process and automate the gathering and analysis of data, there are several tools you can take advantage of. For instance, Google Analytics can provide valuable information on your website’s organic traffic and visibility.

Additionally, social media monitoring tools and social listening tools such as Mention, Brand24, or Sprout Social can be great assets for tracking and comparing social media brand mentions, engagement, and overall presence.

Examples of Share of Voice Calculation

Let’s walk through an example calculation for each marketing channel:

• Traditional Marketing: Suppose your brand spends $50,000 on television ads while your competitors cumulatively spend $200,000. Your traditional marketing share would be ($50,000 / $250,000) x 100 = 20%.
• Digital Marketing: If your website receives 5,000 organic visitors per month, and the total organic traffic in your niche equals 25,000 visitors per month, then your digital share of voice would be (5,000 / 25,000) x 100 = 20%.
• Social Media: Let’s say your brand receives 1,000 mentions on Twitter in a month, while your competitors collectively receive 4,000 mentions. In this case, your social media share of voice would be calculated as (1,000 / 5,000) x 100 = 20%.

How to Improve Share of Voice

As mentioned earlier, optimizing your marketing strategy across various channels can improve your share of voice. Here are a few suggestions on how to do so:

Optimize Marketing Channels

To enhance your brand’s presence in the market, focus on improving your share of voice across multiple channels: organic search, paid advertising, and social media.

This can be achieved by implementing effective SEO practices, testing and optimizing paid ad campaigns, and developing a robust social media strategy with engaging content.

Conduct Sentiment Analysis

Understanding the context of your brand’s mentions and the emotions they elicit is crucial for assessing your marketing impact. Sentiment analysis can help you determine whether positive, negative, or neutral emotions are associated with your brand, allowing you to make better-informed decisions and tailor your marketing messaging accordingly.

Integrate PR and Marketing Efforts

A coherent and consistent brand message is essential for cultivating enhanced customer engagement and improving your share of voice. Integrating your PR efforts with your marketing campaigns will help you amplify your brand’s visibility, and ensure your message reaches your target audience with greater impact.

Track Social Media Metrics

Social media is a major driver of share of voice, and tracking social media metrics is key to understanding how your brand performs online. Metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and follower growth can give you an insight into your brand’s popularity and visibility on your social media accounts and beyond.

Social media analytics tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer can help you track these metrics and gather insights to inform your marketing strategies. That’s why you should track metrics on every social media platform.

Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a great way to boost your share of voice and expand your reach online. Partner with influencers with a strong social media presence that aligns with your brand’s values and messaging. This will help you tap into their audience, attract new followers, and increase your brand’s visibility. Use a social listening tool to track the success of your influencer campaigns and measure their impact on your share of voice.

Final Thoughts

Boosting your share of voice across various channels will result in enhanced brand recognition, heightened customer engagement, and, eventually, greater accomplishments for your brand. Now that we’ve answered the question, “What is share of voice?” and explained why measuring it is so beneficial, you can start tracking this essential metric.

So, track your share of voice and make data-driven decisions to stay ahead of your competition.