In the multitude of options available for promoting brands, marketers are inundated with vast data. To navigate this complexity, zero in on specific metrics that clearly depict your brand’s standing, such as share of voice (SOV).
SOV represents your standing in the marketplace. It contextualizes all your additional social media metrics, enabling you to comprehend your brand’s position.
Is your brand part of crucial product discussions? Are you regarded as a frontrunner in your sector? If the answer is no, your brand may be struggling with its share of voice.
However, it’s vital to note: it’s not about being the loudest in every discussion. Genuine SOV is achieved by skillfully inserting yourself into conversations that resonate with your target demographic and contribute positively to industry narratives. Prioritize quality over quantity.
This article thoroughly examines this metric and offers strategies to enhance your share of voice across social media and beyond—the right way.
Bonus resource: Keep your executives updated on how your social strategy impacts your brand’s positioning and share of voice with the suitable competitive context using Sprout’s social media scorecard template.
Defining Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV) quantifies the market conversation ownership of your brand in comparison to its competitors. It gauges your brand’s visibility and influence in industry dialogues. An increased market share typically correlates with enhanced popularity and authority among current and potential customers. SOV is not a fixed number; it continuously shifts with consumer preferences and competitive landscapes.
While SOV can refer to a brand’s proportion of paid advertising within a competitive environment, its meaning extends to include various aspects of digital marketing and advertising, encompassing social media mentions and traffic tied to specific keywords.
Grasping your SOV grants insight into your brand’s standing in the current market, revealing avenues for growth.
The Need for Measuring Share of Voice
Measuring your brand’s share of voice allows you to see the overall landscape and your brand’s spot within it. It enriches your performance data, helping you uncover areas for growth and advancement.
Calculating your share of voice is advantageous for your business in multiple crucial ways:
Insights into Your Audience
Share of voice can serve as a gauge for how effectively your brand messaging resonates with your target audience. A solid share of voice usually indicates that your messaging aligns with your audience’s values. On the other hand, a low SOV might signal the necessity to reassess your messaging or content approach.
Share of voice data can uncover reasons why customers opt for your brand (or your rivals) and even spotlight unmined market segments.
For instance, consider you manage social media for a pet supply store. While analyzing your share of voice, you observe a pattern: customers frequently inquire about a certain kind of treat that none of your competitors appear to offer. This unfulfilled demand signals a potential opportunity—a market segment ready for you to introduce that desired treat.
Competitive Intelligence
Share of voice data can be your tactical ally in uncovering competitive intelligence. It sheds light on competitor strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and everything in between. Regular SOV assessments clarify your competitive terrain, offering data-driven insights for success.
With SOV data, you can:
- Spot industry leaders in relevant market dialogues.
- Track your SOV to gauge market share progression.
- Examine sentiment surrounding your competitors to identify chances for market share capture.
By assessing this data, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and brand differentiation. For a thoroughly comprehensive view of the competitive landscape, blend SOV data with additional analysis techniques, like SWOT analysis and market research. This integrated approach will enable better-informed decision-making and successful strategies.
Managing Your Brand
Share of voice data uncovers the volume and sentiment of discussions about your brand, enabling you to track and benchmark your brand reputation against the competition.
Moreover, this information provides an essential safety net. By gaining visibility over the entire spectrum of brand discussions, you can proactively tackle rising concerns and mitigate potential risks that might otherwise be overlooked.
With Sprout Social’s Listening capabilities, you can stay attuned to brand discussions and enhance your share of voice relevance and positivity. Utilize it to monitor changes in brand sentiment, allowing you to decipher the factors driving these fluctuations and respond appropriately.
Calculating Share of Voice
Having discussed the advantages of measuring share of voice, let’s examine how to assess it. Use the following formula to compute share of voice:
Share of voice = Your brand metrics / Total market metrics
This formula applies across all marketing channels, with minor variations in specific metrics. For instance, for social SOV, you may track brand mentions across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter), while media SOV is determined by the volume of brand mentions across media outlets. In this equation, “brand metrics” refers to the data points you track for your brand, while “total market metrics” incorporates the same data points for all relevant competitors.
Although this formula provides a fundamental insight into SOV, remember it doesn’t encapsulate everything. Qualitative factors, such as the significance and relevance of mentions, also play a vital role.
Typically, four major areas warrant focus when calculating share of voice:
Social Media Share of Voice
Let’s hone in on an essential aspect of share of voice: social media. Your social media share of voice reflects consumer dialogue across platforms, making it an invaluable metric for grasping audience sentiment and brand perception.
Social listening tools streamline the process of monitoring social media SOV by gathering all brand or product mentions across platforms. Comparing your brand’s performance with that of competitors aids in understanding your standing.
Sprout’s Listening tools allow you to visualize and analyze the data, breaking it down by engagements, impressions, unique authors, and sentiment. You can filter results by network, keywords, and additional criteria.
Media Share of Voice
Media share of voice indicates which publications mention your brand, the context of those mentions, and your overall prominence among respected sources.
By juxtaposing your media SOV with competitors, you can pinpoint key publications for outreach and PR efforts. This data can guide your content strategy and help you craft messaging that resonates with specific media outlets.
While social listening tools like Sprout’s are excellent for tracking social media engagement, specialized public relations and earned media tools are necessary for accurately measuring media share of voice. At Sprout, our team integrates social media share of voice and media share of voice for a more precise assessment of our brand performance.
PPC Share of Voice
Your PPC share of voice assesses your ad’s visibility relative to its maximum potential reach.
Google Ads calculates this through Impression Share, factoring in your campaign and keyword configurations. To locate this data within your Google Ads account:
- Navigate to the Campaigns tab.
- Click on the columns icon.
- Select Modify columns.
- Click on Competitive metrics.
- Choose the Impression Share columns you wish to track.
By analyzing your Impression Share, you can derive valuable insights regarding your PPC performance and recognize areas for visibility enhancement. For example, a diminished Impression Share might indicate that your bids are too low or your targeting too narrow.
SEO Share of Voice
In addition to paid advertising, understanding your share of voice within organic search is essential. To gauge SEO share of voice, specialized tools are required to evaluate your search visibility in comparison to competitors.
Measuring this requires specialized search optimization (SEO) tools that review your rankings for relevant keywords. These tools yield insights into how much organic search traffic for those keywords channels to your site versus your competitors.
By evaluating this data, you can discover opportunities to refine your SEO strategy, target valuable keywords you might be overlooking, and ultimately increase organic traffic to your site.
Metrics Measurable with Share of Voice
Share of voice quantifies your brand’s involvement in wider market discussions. Marketers can utilize SOV data to track overall brand recognition, identify industry movements, and benchmark their performance against competitors. A robust overall SOV typically signifies a healthy level of brand awareness and engagement.
To extract even more profound insights from SOV data, consider segmenting it by vital brand priorities. This approach enables you to tailor your analysis to specific business objectives and unveil intricate audience insights. For example, an automotive brand looking to measure its presence among electric vehicle fans should focus on the particular conversations within that segment to derive valuable conclusions.
At Sprout, we leverage custom Listening Topic Themes to comprehend how our messaging resonates across critical brand priorities. If you’re not familiar with Themes, here’s a brief explanation:
Diving into this segmented data allows us to communicate a more nuanced narrative about our brand’s market share to senior leadership. This detailed level of analysis bolsters more data-informed decisions, optimizing our content for maximum effect.
Strategies to Boost Your Share of Voice on Social Media
Social media stands out as an effective channel for actively enhancing your brand’s share of voice, yielding quicker and more measurable results.
Assessing the effects of your SEO and PPC campaigns can be time-consuming, thus delaying your SOV evaluation. Furthermore, your media SOV requires collaboration with third-party publications, giving you less control.
Conversely, social media SOV is simpler to manage and modify. Plus, it allows real-time performance measurement, enabling adjustments to optimize your efforts.
Implement these five strategies to specifically uplift your social media SOV.
Organize Your Content Calendar Around Key Brand Priorities
Struggling to keep pace with the crowded world of social media by constantly producing fresh content can be tiring and unfeasible. Given content’s fleeting nature today, this tactic could lead to burnout. Rather than chasing temporary trends, collaborate with your leadership team to clarify your organization’s main focus areas.
Once you’ve identified these priorities, employ share of voice data to create a data feedback loop. Assess which subjects generate the most excitement and how sentiment shifts across those topics, then optimize accordingly.
This data-centric approach may not garner the same attention as going viral, but you cannot dictate virality. Instead, you can generate specific, value-driven content tailored to the platforms where your audience resides.
Strategically Leverage Trends
While it’s unnecessary to latch onto every trend, you should strategically engage with those that could amplify your share of voice. Trends may be informal, yet they can wield significant influence. According to the 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report, social users chiefly seek entertaining content from brands.
Nevertheless, engaging with a trend without aligning it to your brand identity and audience may dilute your brand, distancing your audience and damaging the trust you’ve built with customers. To mitigate this risk, analyze your SOV data to discern if and why particular trends resonate with your audience.
Strategic trend evaluation is essential. By identifying which trends are gaining momentum and aligning them with your brand values, you can engage authentically and forge meaningful connections with your audience. Emphasize what you learn to spot relevant trends with greater speed and accuracy in the future, allowing you to proactively engage and beat competitors to the punch.
Produce Share-Worthy Social Media Content
Creating share-worthy content is among the most effective methods to ignite discussions around your brand.
When your audience finds your content valuable, they’re more inclined to share it with their networks, extending your reach and amplifying your message.
Exceptional social content both entertains and educates, inspiring action and fostering conversations. Consider the types of content that resonate best with your audience—examples include practical tips, how-to guides, the latest industry updates, or even well-chosen memes and light-hearted jokes.
For instance, rather than merely posting game highlights, the Chicago White Sox craft share-worthy content during baseball’s off-season by engaging with other local events, like the basketball season’s start and creatively connecting them to their brand.
This strategy not only maintains audience engagement but also elevates the brand’s visibility during typically quieter times.
Collaborate with Relevant Influencers
Partnerships between brands and influencers are generating increasing earned media attention. As consumer-influencer relationships continue to shift, influencer activations are becoming more notable and often rival traditional celebrity endorsements.
This transformation is propelled by the trust consumers place in influencers, significantly impacting their online actions. The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report confirms that trust in influencers remains strong and is even increasing in certain demographics.
When executed effectively, influencer campaigns can prompt algorithms to favor your brand, organically raising the visibility of your content. This enhanced visibility can lead to increased engagement, brand advocacy, and ultimately, a stronger share of voice.
Launch an Employee Advocacy Program
Employee advocacy programs can markedly elevate a brand’s share of voice. By motivating employees to share organizational content, you can leverage their networks to broaden your reach and boost brand visibility. This strategy introduces your brand to fresh audiences while ensuring a more genuine online presence.
Employee advocacy enables ongoing brand conversations and maintains visibility. Employee-shared content typically achieves greater engagement, as people tend to trust and interact more with posts from individuals they know.
In essence, employee advocacy transforms your workforce into brand ambassadors, amplifying your messaging and fostering trust.
Advantages of Share of Voice Measurement
Some of the key benefits of measuring share of voice include:
- Conduct a competitive analysis on a broader market scale. Attain a comprehensive view of market competitiveness, indicating whether you are a rising contender or a dominant entity in the sector.
- Utilize SOV as a method to categorize your target audience. Calculating SOV is a potent strategy for audience analysis, allowing for further segmentation of the data for improved understanding of strengths and weaknesses. Examine your SOV across essential regional markets, demographics, and more.
- Assess the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. After launching a campaign, ascertain if you’ve experienced gains in your SOV that suggest your marketing message and strategies were successful.
- Enhance future campaigns using insights derived from SOV reports. Leverage findings from your analytical reports to expand your outreach, participate in social discussions, and secure your voice across marketing platforms.
Leverage Your Share of Voice Data
Your social data is filled with valuable insights regarding your brand’s share of voice and how to augment it. Harness this intelligence to broaden your reach, fortify your brand, and uncover deep customer insights.
However, don’t keep these insights to yourself! Effectively present your social media performance to your leadership team with this social media scorecard template. This ready-to-present resource offers a structured way to showcase your advancements, highlight your achievements, and exhibit the worth of your social approach.
The article Share of voice: What it is and how to measure it originally appeared on Sprout Social.
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