Have you ever been responsible for compiling reports for your marketing team? If so, are you familiar with the countless metrics you can track? One metric that is underestimated most of the time is the share of voice(SOV). Even though it is overlooked, share of voice can be valuable in evaluating your stand in social media, organic search, or paid advertising. As a marketer, you need to understand share of voice advertising because it is the key that reveals how your brand stacks up against the competition. Furthermore, I will explain more about share of voice advertising, including the share of voice calculator.
Key Point
- Share of voice advertising helps brands measure their visibility compared to competitors across various channels, providing a clear understanding of market influence.
- A personal experience highlighted the importance of balanced visibility, where focusing on social media alone wasn’t enough, and improving SEO boosted organic traffic and overall SOV.
- The SOV formula divides your brand’s ad spend by the total market ad spend to determine your industry visibility percentage, offering insights into your brand’s competitive position.
- Using tools and identifying relevant metrics simplifies SOV calculations, allowing for accurate brand performance tracking across different platforms while ensuring goals are aligned with the data.
- Analyzing data and visualizing SOV with charts or graphs helps clients understand their brand’s progress and adjust strategies to improve their standing in the market, ensuring long-term success.
Share of Voice Advertising
Share-of-voice advertising lets you measure how much your brand stands out across different channels than your competitors. This metric shows how your ads, social media buzz, and website traffic hold up against others in your industry. It also helps you understand the portion of the conversation your brand dominates, giving you a clear picture of your presence and influence in the market.
Some time ago, I worked with a client who kept bragging about their social media success because their posts were getting many likes and shares and a solid following. This made them assume that their brand was doing well across the board. However, when we decided to calculate their share of voice, we discovered that while they were successful on social media, their organic traffic was low.
This was an eye-opener because it showed that even though people noticed them on social media, they were missing out on potential customers searching for their services online. So, we focused on improving their presence in search engines by updating their website with content that answered common questions and used keywords their audience was searching for. Furthermore, we built relationships with other sites to gain more backlinks, which helped boost their website credibility.
After a few months, we saw a clear increase in organic traffic, and their overall share of voice became more balanced. This experience opened my eyes to understanding that your share of voice is more than just numbers. It gives you a complete picture of where your brand stands across different channels.
Read Also: 20+ BEST SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING EXAMPLES FOR 2024
Share of Voice Calculator
This tool helps you measure the level of visibility or the presence of a brand compared to its competitors. To use the share of voice calculator, you will have to enter your brand metrics, followed by the total market metrics. The tool or calculator will calculate your share of voice, offering you some information on how brand visibility is compared to others in the market. This can involve tracking your social media mentions, website traffic clicks, or ad impressions from sponsored campaigns.
I was once eager to see how my small business was doing online compared to the bigger company in my niche. Although I was determined to deliver quality content, I had no idea how much visibility I had compared to my competitors. Eager to know this, I was told about the share of voice calculators by a friend. As I learned about this tool, I entered my brand’s social media mentions, website traffic, ad data, and overall market data. I was shocked to see that my brand had a 15% share of voice when I began to calculate. Not only was it higher than I expected, but it also showed me where I stood. This helped me to fine-tune my strategies and increase my visibility.
How to Calculate Share of Voice Advertising
To calculate your share of voice in advertising, you will have to divide your brand measures by your total market measures.
Share of Voice Formula
The following is the formula for calculating the share of voice in advertising.
SOV= Your brand ad spend / Total market as spend X 100
Here, your brand ad spend is the amount of money your brand spends on advertising, while the Total market ad spend is the total amount spent on advertising by all the competitors in your industry or marketing. You get your results or answer in percentage, showing the part of the total advertising spend in the market attributed to your brand.
For example, imagine that your brand spends $50,000 on ads, and the total marketing spend is $200,000. Let’s calculate your share of voice:
SOV= 50,000 / 200,000 x 100 100= 25%
Your brand is responsible for 25% of the total ad spend in that market.
Read Also: Branding vs. Advertising: Understanding the Difference
Best Strategies to Calculate and Report Share of Voice to Clients.
There are many strategies you can apply when calculating the share of voice, but how do you pass all this essential information to your clients in an easy way to comprehend? No one wants to confuse their clients by presenting some numbers and percentages. Still, you can provide actionable advice and suggestions that will help guide your clients to make better business decisions, and you are essential to maintaining a long-term relationship with your company. Furthermore, I provided the following steps to assist you in calculating the share of voice for your clients.
#1. Understand your Clients’ Metrics and Goals
It is important to clearly describe or pinpoint what metrics are most important to your clients. Determining what you hope to calculate or track and why is also essential. Also, discover what exactly you are keeping an eye on. Are you watching social media mentions, online reviews, search engine visibility, paid ad impressions, or more?
I recall working with a client focused on tracking social media mentions, online reviews, and visibility in search engines; she was interested in tracking everything. After I had a deep conversation with her, she realized her true goal was brand awareness.
Afterward, we focused on social media mentions and organic search visibility, which yielded meaningful results aligned with our goals. So, the key is to ensure the metrics match the client’s goals. You need to know whether it’s brand awareness or keeping track of competitors so that you can stick to it and see results.
#2. Choose a Tool to Simplify your Workflow
You need your team to spend most of their time on payable tasks. Use tools to monitor and calculate your client’s share of voice.
This strategy calculates where you will need the right tools, depending on where your clients are more active. You may need social media analytics, SEO tools, ad platforms, and social listening tools to cover all the required parts.
To keep things simple and reduce costs, you must consider automated tools like AgencyAnalytics. This tool helps to organize all the essential share of voice metrics, giving you a clear view of your client’s performance across different platforms while making your marketing efforts efficient.
#3. Identify Your Client’s Competitors
In this strategy, you must determine the competitors you wish to monitor. You can base your monitoring on the company’s expertise, client feedback, or competition analysis. Your goal here is to discover how your competitors’ brands are seen and how much of the conversation they dominate online.
Some time ago, while working with a client who thought she knew her main competitors, I assisted her in conducting a deeper analysis. We discovered a few emerging brands that are making waves in discussions online. Considering that they had no clue about this earlier, they shifted their strategy, which enabled us to stay ahead and focus on the right competitors in the industry.
Here’s a handy competitor analysis checklist to help you identify and track your competitors’ share of voice.
Competitor Analysis Checklist for Share of Voice
#4. Collect the Data
Start by collecting data over a set period this could be weekly, monthly, or whatever schedule works best for your analysis. Has your client just launched a new product or service? Do they operate in a seasonal industry? These time frames matter when comparing the data to see how their brand stacks up against competitors.
I had a client in the travel industry who was completely unaware of how seasonal trends impacted their visibility. By adjusting our data collection during peak vacation times, we captured a more accurate picture of their brand’s performance, helping us fine-tune their strategy.
#5. Calculate Share of Voice
After collecting all the data, the next step is calculating your client’s Share of Voice. In this approach, you will use a formula that depends on the platform or channel you’re tracking. For example, if you’re looking at SEO Share of Voice, the formula would be:
SOV = Your brand’s organic search visibility / Total organic search visibility of all competitors X 100.
This will give you a percentage that shows how much of the conversation your brand owns with its competitors in search engine results. See the video below
#6. Visualize and Make Sense of the Data
Use visuals like charts or graphs that simplify the information to present your data effectively. After that, you look closely at what the numbers tell you. A higher Share of Voice (SOV) often indicates greater visibility, but context is key; more mentions don’t always mean good news.
I learned this the hard way with a client who was thrilled to see a spike in their brand mentions. But when we dug deeper, we realized many of those mentions were tied to a negative customer experience that had gone viral. It taught me the importance of reporting the numbers and analyzing what’s behind them. Always monitor trends and shifts over time to share accurate, meaningful insights with your clients.
#7. Compare Against Goals
When you are done calculating your Share of Voice, it’s essential to see how it aligns with your client’s goals. So, ensure that they are reaching the visibility they want. Are they staying ahead of the competition? Afterward, use the data to provide valuable insights into their marketing performance.
Some years ago, I had a client, James, who was focused on growing his website’s organic traffic. To achieve that, we set a clear goal and tracked his Share of Voice to monitor his progress. Over time, his website traffic increased as visibility grew. When we compared the data to our target, it was clear how their Share of Voice drove actual results, helping them achieve their growth objectives.
What Does Share of Voice Mean in Advertising?
The share of voice, or SOV, measures your brand’s market share compared to its competitors. It verifies your brand’s exposure and how much you control the conversation in your sector.
What Is an Example of Share of Voice Marketing?
Share of voice is typically calculated over a specific time, such as 24 hours or 30 days. For example, if you’re reading an article on a popular newspaper website and see five advertisements from different businesses on the page, each advertiser has a 20% share of voice.
How Do You Create a Share of Voice?
Divide your brand’s measurements by the overall market measures to get a share of voice. This could be social mentions, paid ad clicks, or website traffic. You’ll need to use some marketing tools to find these figures.
What Is SEO Share of Voice?
SEO share of voice evaluates your brand’s awareness compared to your competitors’ SEO visibility and search engine rankings. Your brand’s traffic divided by overall market traffic is your brand’s share of voice.
What Is the Difference Between Impression Share and Share of Voice?
Impression share allows you to track the audience engagement of your advertisements. On the other hand, share of voice evaluates your total brand awareness. This indicator is generally used to measure the performance of pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.
References
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