The importance of evaluating share of voice
Updated: Jul 7, 2022
Share of voice is the measurement of a company's market brand visibility against its competitors. The brand's share indicates just how much a company dominates the conversation in its industry. The more brand mentions a company has, the greater the brand awareness, popularity and authority it projects to its current as well as future customers. Great digital marketing efforts are required, both paid and organic, in order to achieve a strong share of voice.
The benefits of measuring your share of voice
By measuring the share of voice, a company can get a better understanding of its current market position as well as its challenges. Then the company can plan its next market actions, to be carried out in different marketing channels, in order to achieve better growth, revenues and profits. To calculate share means to collect data on each and every one of the company's actions and from multiple platforms, such as keyword and campaign settings or social media reactions. Once such data is gathered and analyzed, the company can gain valuable insights into its online visibility as well as its offline market share. The three benefits of measuring the share of voice are:
1. Customer feedback and insights: by collecting customer feedback, via social listening tools, from review boards or news websites, the company can measure what customers are saying about its products or services. Consumer insights and customer engagement can largely affect brand reputation, future media spending, and product planning.
2. Brand management: with measurable brand awareness, the company can gain insights into what is working and what is not with regard to its marketing efforts. Digital marketing and offline actions can then have a better focus in order to improve brand awareness.
3. Competitor research: Measuring share with competitive metrics can show a company how it performs against its competitors. Consumer insights about what the competition does can tell where the brand stands and reflect on the company's future plans and actions.
Methods of measuring your share of voice
Understanding share of voice means calculating share in every target metric that represents the brand. In order to dive deeper into marketing campaigns or advertising efforts, each category of the brand's mentions must be analyzed. A great starting point would be to tackle online mentions by category and calculate the share in each one separately. The share of voice for each of those categories would accumulate to form the full social mentions picture and thus the share of voice.
The share of voice formula means to take the number of mentions of your brand, divide them by the total number of brand mentions (yours + your competitors) and multiply by 100.
For example, if your brand post impression share columns show the number 600 compared with 1000 times for the whole market, then your impressions share is 60% of SOV, meaning you are leading your market in this category.
Calculating share in each of the following categories can all add up to achieving your overall share of voice:
1. Share of voice in social media
Website traffic and social media mentions, such as Instagram stories, are key in calculating a company's share of voice. One can measure impression share, evaluate posts' likes and shares, and measure organic traffic of the brand by itself and against its competitors. Social networks are one of the major areas within total market measures and social channels must be tracked to present the true voice of the brand. Social media share makes up your social SOV.
Companies also aim to have high-quality content in order to drive more traffic into their social media and improve their brand name and share of voice. In addition, operating and then measuring the share of influencers' talk can add to the bottom line. When online visibility improves, the share of voice improves. Finally, using social listening tools can help to monitor all social media actions and voice measures.
2. Share of voice in PPC
Paid advertising leads to PPC (pay-per-click) share and is key since it involves the company's investment and risking its budget. That leads to measuring the search results and figuring out the company’s PPC share. Together with the organic search and when measured against competitors, the search results full picture can reflect the PPC share of voice.
3. Share of voice in the media
PR efforts make up another important part of a company's share of voice efforts. If the latest industry news includes articles about the company, it can then measure the share of those articles against the total number of industry news items and find out its share of voice there. When industry experts discuss your brand name, that mention is calculated against conversations of your competitors.
4. Share of voice in SEO
Organic search plays an important role in a company's advertising efforts and share of voice. Calculating the share of SEO contributes to the overall evaluation of the brand's share and to share of voice.
6 ways of how to improve share of voice on social media
Companies can use the following to enhance their share of voice results:
Create great content: posting interesting and relevant content can increase social media mentions and customer engagement.
Publish content consistently: when your audience is happy with the content you write, they may want to come back for more, thus increasing social media share which contributes to a larger share of voice.
Build customer relationships: engaging with your customers, by replying to their comments on social media or by offering deals and discounts helps build your ties with them.
Partner and collaborate to gain exposure: companies sometimes do collaborative campaigns or partner with other companies to increase exposure and therefore enlarge their brand's share of voice.
Go outside of social media: PR efforts or offline advertising can be some of the right tools to drive in more exposure and improve one's brand results.
Enlarge your community: feedback measurement can be enlarged also through various community efforts, such as special deals and campaigns, polls around brand topics, or club parties.
How Affogata contributes to your share of voice
Share of voice is an important factor in every company's marketing actions. To measure share, a company must track and monitor every platform and every path it chooses to operate. Calculating the SOV can be difficult since a number of actions must take place overall, such as collecting the data from many different platforms and analyzing it as best as possible in real-time, all the time. Affogata's customer feedback platform can do all that and so much more, therefore enabling companies to know their share of voice constantly and in real-time.
Here are three key points of why customer-obsessed brands should use Affogata to deliver value to their customers every day and improve their market brand and share of voice:
Enabling companies to understand their share of voice: voice matter and voice reports and analysis is Affogata's specialty. Affogata’s AI tracks and monitors the voice of customers from all channels from the open web. The data updates in real-time and counts every conversation, be it positive, negative or neutral.
Measuring a company’s share of voice against its competition: share of voice is measured by itself and against the company's competitors. That enables the company to evaluate its market position with users compared. By understanding the conversation in the open web, Affogata lets you see the respective share of the conversation for each of the compared searches. The dataset in each search is broken down across channels and over time, allowing brands to analyze and compare the conversation volume across each of those dimensions.
What companies can do to improve their share of voice: digital marketing channels are tracked by Affogata so that companies can measure and evaluate how their brand is performing. Using Affogata's analysis of the brand performance can lead a company to understand what it does right and what needs to be improved. Improving campaigns or counter-programming a rival using competitive metrics are two examples of what companies can do to improve their brand reputation. Affogata supplies measurable brand awareness for an improved share of voice so that companies can conclude and decide about their next brand actions.