Every marketer needs to be familiar with the concept of share of voice. But what exactly does it mean? It refers to the market share that your brand currently holds. In the pre-digital era, this meant how much of a market’s advertising your brand dominated.
One of the most crucial marketing indicators is the share of voice (SOV). You can use it to assess your brand’s visibility compared to your rivals—the more authority inside your industry, the higher your SOV.
The concept of “share of voice” has changed in the digital age to encompass everything from digital PR to digital advertising, social media mentions, and website traffic. In other words, every measurable form of brand awareness in your specific market, whether that’s an industry or a geographic area.
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This blog will explain “share of voice” and how it’s measured. Let’s start now!
The simplest definition of share of voice (SOV) is the ratio of the number of times a brand is referenced online to that of its rivals.
As it indicates how frequently a brand is visible online and how well its customers connect with its content, it encompasses brand awareness and customer engagement.
Share of voice was solely about advertising activities or a brand’s share of the overall advertising market. However, thanks to social listening techniques, the share of voice can now accurately reflect all online visibility, including PPC and feedback from actual users.
To determine your actual share of voice today, you’ll need to consider various factors, including online traffic, social media participation, and much more. Even if you’re a novice in the field, calculating SOV is not difficult with the correct tools.
In the end, the share of voice analysis offers trustworthy competitor information and customer insights. This research is crucial in a world where almost everything takes place online.
Whatever marketing discipline you’re working in, the following general formula can help you determine your share of voice:
Share of Voice (SOV) = Your brand’s measures / Total market measures
Your goals will now determine the metrics you use to compute your SOV. The three main topics covered on this blog are as follows:
Social media has become an effective medium for customers to be heard and seen. Anyone can publish content, express opinions, and interact directly with brands. Around the world, there are 4.65 billion social media users or more than one in every two people.
Marketers must pay attention to the daily dialogue on social media platforms. Discover how your brand is being discussed on social media. Metrics like hashtags, mentions, post reach, and consumer sentiment are all trackable.
Utilize a share of voice tools specifically designed to track these metrics at scale, such as calculators.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is crucial for assisting users in finding your website through natural search results. The higher you rank organically, the more “free” website traffic comes. You don’t need to pay to appear in search results because organic indicates that it occurs spontaneously.
It would be best to compare how frequently you and your competitors show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) to calculate your SOV in organic search. Both clicks and impressions can be used to quantify this.
Additionally, you may see which organic keywords you outrank your rivals for. Your chances of showing up in your audience’s search results increase as you rank for more keywords.
Your backlink profile should also be monitored. A backlink is a link that leads to your website from a different website. Because it resembles a seal of approval from the publisher, backlinks are signs of authority.
Organic search is the antithesis of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC allows you to buy exposure to your desired demographic. When you run a paid search campaign, your ad will typically appear before the organic results at the top of the SERP.
To determine your SOV for a PPC campaign, select a relevant measure (such as impressions), divide it by the industry average, and multiply the result by 100.
Finding your PPC share of voice is simple with Google Ads. Go to your account, then click Modify under Campaigns. To compare yourself to competitors, select “competitor metrics” and tick the boxes next to each. Apply the modifications and start tracking your impression statistics.
You may use your PPC keywords, clicks, and revenue as analytics, just like with organic search. Knowing your SOV can help you plan your advertising budget and gauge the success of each campaign when you invest money in it.
Conclusion
“Share of voice” is now a much more complicated and lucrative metric. By calculating SOV for all facets of your digital marketing plan and further segmenting it based on data analytics, you obtain more than just a starting point for business strategy.
You thoroughly analyze how things are now with your business and the market. The decisions you make regarding your products and marketing can then be supported by the insights you find. Furthermore, monitoring the changes in your share of the vote over time will show how these choices have affected things.
For assistance with your research, get in touch with the QuestionPro team of professionals. You can use QuestionPro to get the most out of your data and receive guidance.