The Beginner's Guide to Share of Voice

If you've ever been in charge of gathering reports for your marketing team, then you know there are a plethora of metrics you can measure.

One metric that you might not think to use for several channels is share of voice. However, this is a versatile metric that you can use in a competitive analysis for social media, organic traffic, or even paid advertising.

As a marketer, share of voice is important because it helps you understand how well your brand is performing against the competition.

Below, let's review everything you need to know about share of voice.

While share of voice isn't the same thing as market share (more on that below), share of voice tends to correlate with market share and revenue. For instance, the more you're dominating in the conversation online, the more market share you'll have and the more authority you'll have among users.

This metric was mainly used as a way to measure success in paid advertising, however it's much more than that now. You can calculate share of voice for organic traffic and social media, in addition to paid advertising.

By calculating your share of voice, you'll have a better understanding of many people know about your brand, and you can identify areas to work on. For example, if you have a high share of voice in social media, but not as much in organic traffic, then you know you need to improve your organic traffic strategies.

Now, what's the difference between share of voice and share of market?

Share of Voice Formula

To calculate share of voice, divide your brand's measures by the total market measures. This could be your social mentions, paid advertising clicks, or website traffic.

To find these numbers, you'll need to use some of your marketing tools. You can look at your social media automation tool, for instance, to count how many mentions your brand has. Then, you can calculate how many mentions your competitors have. After you add all those together, you can divide your mentions by the total to find the share of voice percentage.

Calculating share of voice should help you learn which channels need your attention the most and how you stack up against competitors. Now, let's see which channels you should calculate share of voice for.

Share of Voice

Advertising

When it comes to advertising, it's important to find your share of voice to see how much ad space you're taking up compared to the competition.

To find this, you'll divide how well you did in a paid advertising metric (such as impression shares), by the total number in the industry.

For PPC ads, you can look at impression shares, which represent the amount of times your ads were shown to users compared to the number of times your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings.

Share of voice is important in advertising because it will help you budget, measure campaign effectiveness, and give you a competitive advantage.

Social Media

Social media is one of the main channels where you can use share of voice as a measure of success since social media is where consumers go to be heard.

With social media, you can measure brand mentions, hashtags, reach, impressions, or even sentiment.

To calculate, use a social media tool to measure brand mentions. Calculate yours, your competitors, then add those numbers together and divide your mentions by the total.

Share of voice is important in social media because it will help you determine which competitors are getting mentioned more, so you can analyze what you do versus what they do. This will help you identify gaps in your strategy. Ask yourself, what platforms are working for your competitors, which influencers talk about them, and where they're the most popular.

Now, you might be wondering, "How can I generate these reports?"

Share of Voice Reports

To create a share of voice report, you should be able to use your marketing automation tool to gather the numbers. You can simply create an excel sheet and begin calculating share of voice for several channels including social media, advertising, or organic traffic.

Calculating share of voice is a great way to learn how well you perform against your competitors. The best part is that you can use this metric for several marketing channels, from advertising to social media.

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