When it comes to your business, you want nothing but the best. And to manage and improve the performance of your brand, it is important to consider your share of voice (SOV).
Share of voice refers to the market share your business controls compared to other brands. This term is a way to measure the visibility of your business and its importance in its industry. If you experience increased market share, it equates to more popularity and authority. Therefore, you are bound to have more potential customers. This concept focuses on paid advertising and other elements of advertising and marketing, such as mentions on social media, as well as traffic for particular keywords.
If you’re not familiar with the term, don’t worry. This concept is fairly easy to understand. In any advertising environment and marketing channel, the competition is tough. However, if you know what SOV is and how to measure it, you can better determine strategies for further growth. Brands who calculate their SOV are expected to increase their market share.
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This post was updated in May 2021
What Is SOV?
While the multifaceted nature of digital communications is great, it has confused many business owners. It is difficult to determine where to focus their marketing efforts. Understanding the competitive landscape is an integral part of this decision-making process. When brands make an effort to manage and examine their marketing campaigns in the digital and traditional world, including how they stack up against their competitors, they are able to produce more successful campaigns.
Share of voice or SOV is not a new concept. It has been used as a planning strategy even in traditional media. Share of voice leads to improved market share.
With more companies expecting to increase their content marketing budget, SOV is proving an integral part of the playing field. As companies become more strategic in targeting their audience, the competitive landscape gets tougher.
If you know your share of voice, your business will have a better chance of understanding your current position, as well as how to overcome marketing challenges. Through this, you can gain more insight on how to attract more customers.
How to Calculate SOV
Now that you know what SOV is, it’s time to learn how to calculate this important performance measure. SOV allows you to determine the presence of your brand in your industry. This concept includes how much your brand is talked about compared to other competitors, and if you have a significant share of your customer’s industry association. Usually, the share of voice is measured in a specific period, such as one day or one month.
For example, a newspaper that contains three advertisements from various brands on each page results in each brand controlling a 33.3% share of voice. But if one brand increases its placement to two of the three advertisements, the brand will double its share of voice. SOV can also determine the presence of a brand in terms of pay per click (PPC). This term refers to the ads on search engines and social media. This concept comes in handy if you want to know if your competitor is dominating discussion on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
Although it is quite hard to get an accurate measure of your share of voice, it is an important measure of the current standing of your brand. The basic formula in calculating the share of voice is as follows:
SOV = brand advertising spending / total market advertising spending
Organic search
In terms of organic search traffic, SOV refers to how the brand ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs) for a specific keyword. You can either measure this through the number of clicks or impressions.
First, choose the keywords that you want to calculate their share of voice. Then, consider your competitors. After this, note the rankings of your keywords. Only measure the top 20 results since the first 10 results would receive the most clicks, and the remaining results stand a fair chance of moving up in the rankings.
Once you’ve done this, it’s time to calculate the SOV for the keywords. Different SERPs have a different number of clicks. For example, if you had 2 keywords in the top 10 results, and so does your competitor, it does not mean that you have the same SOV. The final result depends on the rank of each term.
Use the average click-through rate (CTR) for organic searches to calculate the share of voice. Then, add up the CTR numbers to reach your total SOV. If you only have one rank, then this represents your SOV.
Social media
The SOV for social media refers to the measurable social activity which surrounds your brand. This concept includes the efforts performed by your business as well as those initiated by your audience. This number is divided by the data for your competitors to determine your SOV. It also measures the user-side activity such as mentions and shares.
Although the easiest way to measure this is through paid tools, you can do this yourself by tracking the mentions to the combined total of the mentions of your competitors. Then, divide this by 100 to find out the percentage of the total voice for the sector. After, divide your brand’s tally by the figure from the previous step, and you’ve determined your brand’s SOV.
PPC
The best way to calculate the share of voice of your paid ads is through Google Adwords. This function will let you find out the percentage of the times your ads were seen by users compared to the times your ad could have been shown based on the campaign keyword and settings.
Why Is SOV Important?
SOV provides many important insights regarding the engagement between your business and your audience. It is important to consider this information for more effective marketing efforts and to grow your business.
SOV Gives you an edge
When you determine your share of voice, you will have a clear picture of what your customers and audience think about your business and your competitors. Chances are, not everyone in your industry is doing this important analysis, so you can use this to your advantage.
By knowing the competitive landscape and how people view your brand, you can identify areas to work on. And you can also find areas to further exploit to your advantage in growing your market share.
Resource allocation
Business is a game of money and strategy. Once you figure out your SOV, you can better determine strategies that will provide your company with the desired results. For example, if you have enough engagement and SOV on Instagram, but you lack representation on Facebook, you should prioritize this channel when you next choose how to allocate your resources.
Campaign effectiveness and engagement
Tracking your SOV can do wonders for your brand. This step is vital if you want to know how well your ads and campaigns are doing. If your market share increases after a campaign, it means that your campaign is successful. If not, you can work on areas that you think need extra work and changes.
Another importance of measuring SOV is that you can let your customers know that you are listening to their opinions, comments, and suggestions. This step is essential in building strong consumer relationships. Also, customer insight analysis will improve your company’s voice and engagement plans moving forward. Therefore, you can generate better content in the future.
How to Increase Your SOV
Every advertiser’s goal is to increase their share of voice. To do this, you need to follow certain steps and strategies. Here are some surefire ways to boost your share of voice.
Be engaging
One of the most vital things you need to do if you want to improve your SOV is to keep your customers aware of your brand and the services and goods that you offer. Since most industries are quite saturated, people see a huge number of brands every day, and they won’t remember your brand if your content is not consistent and effective. Reinforcing your marketing efforts through consistently delivering your message to your audience is key to making an impression.
Let your customers and audience know that you are listening to them, and make content that they want to talk about. This way, their awareness is piqued on various platforms. When your customers see your brand across numerous marketing channels, they will be more likely to remember you and your content. It is integral for all brands to make an effort to grow their presence on the internet, especially on social media platforms.
There’s no way you can do this is if you have an inactive presence on different channels. Your audience will be more engaged if they know someone will reply to them. If you think improving your presence is challenging, you can try creating a social media content calendar to help you not miss any important dates, such as Black Friday or Easter. These types of events have higher social traction and are important opportunities to seize. Plan your content on these events and make sure that you don’t post the same content for every special event.
Reward your audience
Nobody wants to make their customers unhappy. If you want to improve your SOV, you have to deliver relevant and interesting content to your audience.
A great way to keep your audience happy is to spark conversations with them, take a stand on important topics, and ask them questions. These methods can help increase your social media mentions, especially on Twitter.
For example, when Fenty Beauty by Rihanna launched almost 50 foundation shades, they asked their customers which shade of foundation that their customers preferred. They received thousands of replies. Great content will always be shared by your customers. Add images, videos, and graphics interchange format (GIFs) to catch their attention, or make memes.
It also helps to empower people for creating content for your brand, whether this is positive or negative. For example, if someone posts a review of your products that goes viral, track them down and send them a thank you note or a coupon. If you get a negative review, ask what you can do to make their experience better.
Budget well
When you track your SOV, you will have a better idea of where to allocate your funds for sponsored content, partner with celebrities and influencers, or give way to other support advertising elements. If you prepare your social media strategy effectively, your SOV will greatly improve.
SOV: How Is Your Business Performing?
SOV is a straightforward measure to assess your market standing. Share of voice is a fantastic tool to assess your performance compared to competitors in your industry. The valuable insights from determining your SOV should be used to improve marketing performance and increase market share.
So if you want improved performance and market share, leverage the important insights from SOV.
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