Growing Your Brand’s Share of Voice
What is Share of Voice
Share of Voice (SOV) is the amount of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors. Share of Voice is also referred to as Market Share. Your brand’s SOV is measured by how much your brand dominates the conversation in a larger e-commerce context.
Small or large, your brand should measure your SOV – it gives you valuable insight into where you are as a company and how you can improve.
A great way to measure your SOV is through social listening. Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations your customers are having about you and your industry. There are a few valuable reasons to practice social listening:
- Engage: It’s important to make sure that as a brand (and as individuals within your company) you are engaging with those that mention your brand. If someone mentions your company in a blog post, share it on LinkedIn and thank the author. Encouraging dialog between your brand and the consumer increases your exposure and solicits long-term, loyal customers.
- Evaluate: Understand where your brand fits within the larger landscape. How are others covering your competitors in the news? What messaging are your competitors sharing? Are major publications talking about your competitors? Monitoring what others are doing to stay informed but not to copy.
- Measure: You should perform social listening to follow your brand’s progress over time. It’s great information to share back to your team and senior leadership when you are tracking your goals.
Why is Share of Voice important?
Share of voice is a vital metric your business can use to better understand the competitive landscape. From it, you can gauge your brand’s visibility and influence. With that brand awareness data, you can make more informed decisions for your business.
Tools to Measure Share of Voice
- News Monitoring with Google Alerts: Google Alerts allows you to set up notifications for specific keywords. You can adjust the frequency, relevancy and region.
- Social Listening with Sprout Social: Social listening can get expensive, however, Sprout Social has a great publishing platform with reporting and listening capabilities.
Share of Voice Formula by Channel:
There are different types of SOV. Each channel has specific ways to measure the share of voice. Calculating by channel can help to determine where your attention is needed most and how your site compares to your competitors.
Paid Search:
Organic Search:
Social Media: Your Brand Metric / Total Market Metric X 100
Common metrics used to calculate SOV
- Organic keywords
- Pay per click (PPC) keywords
- Impressions
- Reach
- Revenue
- Mentions
- Hashtags
How to Increase Share of Voice
Paid Growth
- Advertise wisely: Advertising does not mean defeat. Algorithms and a cluttered market can make organic growth difficult at times. If you can’t consistently advertise, do so around the most relevant times of the year for your business depending on your goals.
- Get social: Running an ad on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn can be a relatively low cost solution to push specific posts. If you have an important blog post or case study you’re looking to highlight, you can run an ad for anywhere from $100-300 depending on your goals to help spread the word.
Organic Search Growth
- Stay active: Use your social listening tools to engage with others that mention you, your brand or a topic that relates to your industry.
- Be genuine: Treat others online the same way you would in person. While it’s important to engage with others, you have to do it in an authentic way. You wouldn’t try to sell someone your product after meeting face-to-face once, so don’t do it on LinkedIn either.
- Know your audience: Just because you’re using LinkedIn doesn’t mean you have to be buttoned-up 24/7. You can share a funny photo or meme, just make sure it has a purpose. You want to be memorable.
Share of Voice on Amazon
Amazon Share of Voice is the percent of your brand’s market share that is visible on the first page through paid traffic. This is dependent on the amount of spend on sponsored products, brands and video ads.
SOV on Amazon is calculated by:
Total number of products / the total number of products that appear of a placement
Contact Macarta to Help Increase Your Business’s Share of Voice on Amazon!