Marketers often use the term “Share of Voice”. So what is it – an important metric or just another buzzword? Don’t we already have a lot of other metrics to measure and analyze? And if you do try to measure this, what benefits does it bring to your business? Let’s dig in.
What is Share of Voice (SOV)?
Share of Voice is the measure of your brand’s visibility. This is often measured in comparison to your competitors’ SOV across multiple channels. This gauges your brand’s dominance within the industry-specific conversations. So the more your market share is, the more popular you are. SOV refers to a brand’s share of paid advertising. But now, in a broader definition, it has come to include other digital marketing elements too. SOV now considers social media mentions, traffic for keywords et cetera. An understanding of your brand’s share of voice, only helps you understand how dominant your current position is, in the marketplace.
SOV can be calculated for:
- Impressions and reach on social media pages
- The organic traffic on your site
- PPC
- Revenue
- The volume of mentions across the Internet.
Why is Share of Voice Important?
If you are investing all your energy and resources into a business, you wouldn’t profit from it if people aren’t even aware of your brand. Share of voice helps you measure the level of awareness for your brand. This in turn tells you what percentage of your target audience you are reaching, through your marketing initiatives.
The benefits of knowing your share of voice include:
- Competitive analysis: Get a true picture of your standing in the market, your affinity to your customers, and how you are performing when compared to your competition.
- Market segmentation: Calculating your SOV can bring out useful insights into the regional markets and the demographics of your target market. Organize this information, analyze and know all about your weaknesses and strengths.
- Measure the success of your campaigns: When you run campaigns, one of the major goals is to increase your brand awareness. So, measuring the share of voice helps you gauge the success of a specific campaign.
- Improve future marketing campaigns: When you measure the SOV of your current campaigns you have access to all the data. Analyzing them can help you to make improvements to your future campaigns. Social listening tools store all historical data from your previous campaigns and provide precise insights into your areas of improvement.
How to Measure it?
To know your current position in the market, you need to calculate your share of voice. So how is it done? Easy! Divide your target metric by the total metric for your market/industry. Multiply the result with 100 to get the percentage of your market share.
(Your target metric / Total industry metric) x 100
For instance, if your brand hashtags appear 10 times among the industry total of 50, you have a 20% SOV. This means 80% of the market is taken by someone else and you are yet to catch up before you become a market leader.
All this seems easy until you realize that calculating the total number of industry keyword mentions manually is almost impossible. AI and SEO tools like Google Analytics or social listening tools can easily monitor and calculate the SOV for you. They even provide a comparison between the fluctuations in your SOV. These insights help you in your future campaigns.
Quick Recap
Share of voice mostly refers to the advertising a company does. However, it has now come to measure other elements of digital marketing. Measuring and monitoring your SOV over time will help you better equip for and scale your marketing campaigns.