The digital world is saturated. Standing out from your competitors requires more than just great products or services. It demands strategic visibility. Share of Voice (SOV) is a critical metric that helps marketing and comms pros understand how much of the conversation their brand owns compared to competitors across various channels.
Share of Voice measures your brand’s visibility relative to your competitors within a specific market, timeframe, or channel. It’s the percentage of total brand mentions, coverage, or advertising presence that belongs to your company versus the entire competitive field.
This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Share of Voice:
- What it is
- Why it matters
- How to measure it across different channels
- How to improve it to drive meaningful business results
Whether you’re managing social media campaigns, optimizing SEO strategies, or coordinating PR efforts, understanding and leveraging SOV will give you the competitive edge you need.
What is Share of Voice?
Share of Voice is a visibility and brand dominance metric. It shows how much of the total conversation, coverage, or advertising space your brand captures compared to competitors. In other words, it answers the question: “Out of all the mentions, impressions, or coverage in our market, what percentage belongs to us?”
In digital marketing, SOV applies across multiple channels and contexts:
- PR and earned media: it shows your share of news coverage and editorial mentions.
- Social media: it measures how often your brand is mentioned versus competitors.
- Paid advertising: it reflects your ad impressions relative to total available impressions.
- SEO: it indicates your visibility in search results for relevant keywords.
The beauty of Share of Voice lies in its versatility. It provides a standardized way to measure brand presence across different channels. This gives you a holistic view of your performance. Unlike engagement rates or click-through rates, which measure interaction quality, SOV focuses on presence and visibility. This makes it an excellent indicator of brand awareness and market positioning.
Share of Voice vs Market Share
While Share of Voice and Market Share are related concepts, they serve different purposes:
- Market Share represents your company’s actual sales as a percentage of total market sales. It’s a measure of business performance and market dominance.
- Share of Voice measures presence. It’s a leading indicator that often predicts future market share changes. A brand with high SOV but low market share might invest heavily in awareness campaigns to capture future customers. Whereas a brand with high market share but declining SOV might be at risk of losing ground to vocal competitors.
The relationship between these metrics is crucial for strategic planning. Research consistently shows that brands with a SOV higher than their market share, tend to gain market share over time. And those with a SOV lower than their market share often lose ground.
Why Share of Voice Matters
Share of Voice is like a health check for your brand’s marketing and PR effectiveness. Here’s why it should be a cornerstone of your measurement strategy:
Builds Brand Authority and Trust: Consistent visibility across channels establishes your brand as a thought leader in your industry. When your brand appears regularly in conversations, search results, and media coverage, it creates trust with your target audience.
Reflects Marketing Strategy Effectiveness: SOV shows how well your integrated marketing efforts are working. If your social media campaigns, SEO efforts, and PR initiatives are aligned and effective, you should see your SOV increase across channels simultaneously.
Predicts Market Share Growth: Numerous studies have established the correlation between Share of Voice and future market share. Brands that maintain SOV above their current market share typically see business growth. While those with declining SOV often face a decline in market share.
Uncovers Improvement Opportunities: SOV analysis reveals where competitors are outperforming you. It also helps to identify untapped channels or conversation topics. This intelligence helps prioritize resource allocation and strategic focus.
Enables Competitive Benchmarking: Regular SOV monitoring provides real-time insights into competitor activities, campaign launches, and market dynamics, allowing you to respond quickly to threats or opportunities.
How to Calculate Share of Voice
The basic Share of Voice formula is straightforward:
Share of Voice = (Your Brand Metrics / Total Market Metrics) × 100
However, the specific metrics vary by channel and objective. Here’s how to calculate SOV for different channels:
Social Media: Count brand mentions, hashtag usage, or reach across platforms, then divide by total mentions of all competitors in your analysis.
PR and Earned Media: Count media mentions, coverage volume, or estimated reach from news articles, blogs, and editorial content.
Paid Advertising: Use impression share data from platforms like Google Ads, which shows your impressions as a percentage of total available impressions for your target keywords.
SEO: Measure keyword visibility by tracking rankings for target keywords and calculating the percentage of total search visibility you capture versus competitors.
The key is maintaining consistency in your measurement approach and timeframes. Whether you’re measuring weekly, monthly, or quarterly, ensure you’re comparing like-for-like data across all competitors and channels.
Channel-by-Channel Share of Voice Breakdown
PR & Earned Media Share of Voice
PR Share of Voice measures your brand’s presence in news coverage, editorial content, and earned media compared to competitors.
Key Metrics: Number of mentions, estimated reach, publication authority, and sentiment. Weight mentions by publication quality and audience relevance, not just volume.
Professional Tools: Onclusive’s robust media monitoring platform provides comprehensive monitoring, sentiment analysis, and detailed SOV analytics. With over 28 million mentions captured across print, online, and broadcast channels every day, it offers exhaustive content coverage.
Strategic Applications:
- Use PR SOV to measure the impact of your campaigns, identify key journalists and publications, and track competitor activities.
- Monitor SOV around key events, product launches, or crisis situations.
Social Media Share of Voice
Social media SOV measures how much of the conversation you own across all social platforms – whether it’s conversations about your industry, products, or brand topics.
Key Metrics: Brand mentions, hashtag usage, reach, impressions, and engagement. Don’t forget that positive sentiment mentions carry more weight than negative ones.
Essential Tools: Onclusive Social offers market-leading social listening capabilities. With sentiment analysis, competitor benchmarking, and robust AI-powered analytics, you have access to the real-time insights you need at the touch of a button.
Strategic Applications:
- Use social media SOV to benchmark against competitors, monitor campaign performance in real-time, and identify trending topics or conversations.
- Track SOV before, during, and after major campaigns to measure impact.
Paid Advertising (PPC) Share of Voice
PPC Share of Voice is sometimes referred to as Impression Share. It measures how often your ads appear compared to the total number of times they could have appeared for your target keywords.
Measurement Method: Google Ads provides Impression Share data directly in your account. It shows the percentage of impressions you received out of the total you were eligible for. This metric is available at campaign, ad group, and keyword levels.
Strategic Value: Impression Share helps optimize bidding strategies and budget allocation. Low impression share might indicate insufficient bids or budget constraints. High impression share suggests strong competitive positioning.
Optimization Opportunities: If your impression share is low due to budget constraints, consider reallocating spend from lower-performing keywords. If it’s due to ad rank, focus on improving Quality Score through better ad relevance and landing page experience.
SEO Share of Voice
SEO Share of Voice measures your visibility in search results for keywords relevant to your business compared to competitors.
Measurement Approach:
- Track keyword rankings across your target keyword set.
- Then calculate the percentage of total search visibility you capture.
- This means you need to analyze both ranking positions and search volumes.
Recommended Tools:
- Ahrefs provides comprehensive keyword tracking with competitor analysis and visibility metrics.
- SEMrush offers similar functionality with additional competitive intelligence features.
- Google Search Console provides first-party data on your actual search performance.
Strategic Focus:
- Monitor SOV for high-intent commercial keywords as well as informational terms that drive top-of-funnel awareness.
- Track trends over time to identify whether your SEO efforts are gaining or losing ground against competitors.
AI Tools for Share of Voice
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how we measure and analyze Share of Voice, making it more accurate and actionable than ever before.
AI-Powered Capabilities: Market-leading tools like Onclusive use AI to automatically categorize mentions, detect sentiment nuances, predict crises, and identify trending topics.
Advanced Analytics: AI-powered tools can process vast amounts of unstructured data from social media, news sites, and forums to provide real-time SOV insights. They can identify context, detect sarcasm, and understand industry-specific terminology that traditional keyword-based tools might miss.
Automation Benefits: AI-driven SOV tools can automatically generate reports, send alerts when SOV changes significantly, and provide competitive intelligence without manual monitoring. This allows PR and marketing teams to focus on strategy rather than manual data collection.
How to Improve Your Share of Voice
Increasing your Share of Voice requires a coordinated approach across multiple channels and consistent execution over time.
Strengthen SEO Foundation:
- Develop content strategies that target both head terms and long-tail keywords in your industry.
- Invest in link-building to improve domain authority and search visibility.
- Create pillar pages and topic clusters on your website to establish topical authority.
Amplify Social Engagement:
- Increase posting frequency and engagement quality across social platforms.
- Partner with industry influencers and thought leaders to expand your reach.
- Encourage user-generated content and employee advocacy to multiply your brand’s voice.
Build Strategic PR Relationships:
- Develop relationships with key journalists, bloggers, and industry publications.
- Create newsworthy content through original research, expert commentary, and thought leadership.
- Respond quickly to industry news and trends with expert perspectives.
Optimize Paid Media Strategy:
- Increase budget allocation to high-performing channels and keywords.
- Improve ad quality and relevance to boost impression share.
- Expand into new platforms or ad formats where competitors have less presence.
Leverage Employee Advocacy:
- Train employees to become brand ambassadors on social media and in industry discussions.
- Their authentic voices can significantly amplify your SOV, especially on platforms like LinkedIn.
Create Consistent, Quality Content:
- Develop a content calendar that ensures regular, valuable content across all channels.
- Focus on topics that generate discussion and engagement, not just promotion.
Reporting & Benchmarking Share of Voice
Effective SOV reporting transforms raw data into actionable insights that drive strategic decisions.
Dashboard Creation:
- Build comprehensive dashboards that display SOV across all channels in one view.
- Include trend lines, competitor comparisons, and alerts for significant changes.
- Tools like Onclusive can integrate data from multiple sources in real-time.
Segmentation Strategy:
- Break down SOV data by channel, geography, product line, or campaign to identify specific areas of strength and weakness.
- This granular analysis helps allocate resources more effectively.
Stakeholder Communication:
- Create executive summaries that highlight key SOV trends and their business implications.
- Use visualizations to show competitive positioning and progress toward strategic goals.
- Include specific recommendations for improvement.
Benchmark Development:
- Establish baseline SOV metrics for each channel and set realistic improvement targets.
- Compare performance against industry standards and top competitors to stay clear on your market position.
Common Pitfalls & Misconceptions
Avoid these common mistakes when measuring and analyzing Share of Voice:
Volume Over Quality: Don’t focus solely on mention volume while ignoring sentiment, context, or audience relevance. This can lead to misguided strategies. A smaller number of positive mentions from influential sources outweighs high volumes of neutral or negative coverage.
Cross-Channel Comparisons: Comparing SOV across unrelated channels (like social media versus print PR) without considering channel-specific contexts produces misleading insights. Each channel has unique dynamics and audience behaviors.
Competitor Tunnel Vision: Obsessing over specific competitors while ignoring broader market trends or emerging players can create blind spots. Include both direct and indirect competitors in your analysis.
Short-Term Thinking: SOV is a long-term metric that requires consistent measurement and patience. Expecting immediate results from SOV initiatives can lead to premature strategy changes and missed opportunities.
Conclusion
Share of Voice is a crucial bridge between PR and marketing activities and business outcomes. It provides the insights you need to build stronger brands and capture market share. By understanding how to measure, analyze, and improve SOV across all channels, you can create a strategy that drives sustainable competitive advantage.
The key to SOV success is consistent measurement, strategic patience, and integrated execution across all channels. Establish baseline metrics, identify your primary competitors, and set realistic improvement targets. Then, implement the strategies outlined in this guide while continuously monitoring and adjusting based on performance data.
Remember that Share of Voice is not just about being louder than your competitors. It’s about being more relevant, more valuable, and more present in the conversations that matter. Focus on quality engagement and strategic visibility to build a Share of Voice that translates into real business growth.
Transform your Share of Voice strategy with Onclusive’s advanced monitoring platform. Get real-time insights, competitor analysis, and AI-powered sentiment tracking across all channels. Book your personalized demo to see how we can amplify your brand’s market presence