What is share of voice?

Impressions, clicks, views, shares, and branded search volume—these are just some of the numbers you can track to understand how well your marketing campaigns are performing. What they don’t tell you is how your brand stacks up relative to your competition. 

As the founder of accelerate agency, I’ve been helping companies across the world grow their brand for almost a decade. One thing I often recommend clients do when gathering competitive intelligence is look at their share of voice. It puts all of your key metrics into context, giving you a deeper understanding of where your brand stands in your industry.

Here’s everything you need to know about share of voice. 

Table of contents: 

What is share of voice?

Share of voice (SOV) is a way to measure your brand’s visibility compared to your competitors using channel-specific metrics (more on that in a bit). Over time, SOV has evolved from measuring only the success of your paid advertising to showing a more holistic view of your overall online presence, including social media and other forms of marketing.

Share of voice vs. share of market

Let me clarify another term that often comes up when talking about share of voice: share of market. 

While share of voice measures the percentage of brand awareness your brand or product holds in a given market, share of market (or market share) measures the percentage of sales attributed to your brand or product for that market.  

The two concepts tend to correlate with each other—for example, if your direct-to-consumer hair care brand is dominating the conversation in posts about #HairGoals (share of voice), there’s a greater chance that people looking for hair products will buy from your brand versus your competitors (share of market). 

How to calculate share of voice 

Here’s the general formula to calculate SOV: 

Share of voice = (Your brand’s numbers for a specific metric/total market numbers for the same metric) x 100

The metrics you use will vary depending on the category or channel, but common ones include:

• Organic keywords. This is the number of times your website comes up organically in the search engine results page (SERP) for a keyword. (If you’re wondering “how much does SEO cost?”, I’ve got you covered.)

• Pay-per-click (PPC) keywords. This refers to the number of times someone clicks on a paid keyword from the SERP. 

• Reach. This metric measures the number of unique users who have seen your ads or posts. 

• Impressions. This is the number of times people come across your posts, including repeat visits from the same users. 

• Mentions. This refers to the number of people who mentioned your brand name or branded keywords online. 

• Hashtags. This is the number of times your branded keywords are used across social media.

For example, if you want to calculate your hair care company’s social share of voice, you might take the number of mentions of your brand across all social media platforms divided by the total number of brand mentions (yours and your competitors’) multiplied by 100. 

How to measure share of voice 

You could manually count the number of times your branded keywords are used on social, and then do the same for your competitors to calculate your share of voice. But the risk of human error is high. Plus, who has the time for that? 

You’re better off using dedicated software to help you measure your share of voice. Here’s Zapier’s roundup of the best competitor analysis tools, which are grouped by what metrics they track—for example, your competitors’ social media performance, web presence, and direct marketing campaigns.

Once you’ve decided on your tool of choice, gather data for the metric(s) you want to input into your share of voice formula, and calculate away.

How to get the most out of monitoring your share of voice

Knowing the formula to calculate share of voice is one thing—using the formula effectively is another. Here’s how to get the most out of monitoring your brand’s share of voice. 

• Define your key metrics. You can track every metric under the sun. But what’s the point of tracking how many times your branded hashtags appear organically on social media when what you’re trying to understand is your brand’s paid share of voice? Define which metrics matter to your brand or for a specific campaign, and track those to get relevant insights. For example, if you’re focused on SaaS inbound marketing, your metrics will be different than a service-based small business that usually relies on cold outreach.

• Identify key competitors. Do some competitor research to identify your strongest and most relevant competitors. This way, you can understand how your brand’s SOV stacks up against theirs and identify any areas where you might want to dial up your efforts. Take our SEO growth agency, for example. We’ll look at traffic for a particular set of keywords and find out which brands are getting the highest organic search value. That way, we can show our clients who their main competitors are and use this as a starting point for improving their SEO efforts.

• Gather data regularly. Your audience’s behavior is constantly changing—so are the strategies of your competitors. Make sure you have a system in place to keep collecting data on the metrics you care about so that you’re always working with the most up-to-date information. 

• Analyze your data for trends. Metrics like organic reach can tell you far more about your marketing efforts than you might realize. For example, if you notice a consistent spike in sales around the time ad campaigns with influencers go live (versus ad campaigns without influencers), this could be a signal to invest in more of this kind of campaign.

Capitalize on opportunities to grow your brand

Monitoring your brand’s share of voice isn’t always straightforward, but it’s absolutely worth doing. By understanding your SOV, you’ll gain a stronger understanding of your audience, which, in turn, will help you identify what’s working, what’s not, and where there are opportunities to gain a competitive advantage.

In short, it’ll raise your marketing game, which is a big part of growing your brand and encouraging long-term relationships with customers. 

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