Companies will continue to find new platforms and channels to promote their brand. It means that there will be new data and metrics that marketers will need to measure. The amount of information you need to monitor is enough to make you feel overwhelmed. You want to know which numbers greatly matter to your business and what requires your focus. SOV (Share of Voice) is basically a metric that illustrates your position in the market. It will be a perfect place to start if you want to measure how effective your social media marketing, PR, SEO, and PPC campaign are.
What is Share of Voice?
With SOV, so many questions will be answered; for instance, it will let you know if your brand name is coming up in social conversations or if they consider you as someone trustworthy in this industry. Share of Voice is defined as the share of the market that your brand owns compared to your competitors. It helps you measure brand awareness, reputation, and customer engagement rate. This will help you understand how your brand is doing in the competition.
Traditionally, you can describe SOV as your media spending compared to your competitors. With the evolving digital channels, the definition of Share of Voice Metrics is also bound to change. For instance, it now includes the brand’s online visibility. It also has various facets of digital advertising and marketing, such as the mentions you receive on social media and the organic traffic from search engine sites.
What is the Purpose of Measuring Share of Voice?
Accurate computation of your brand’s SOV is necessary to see the bigger picture of your online visibility and reputation. It helps you understand where your company fits into. It also introduces essential insights into your performance data allowing you to identify opportunities for development and growth. Below, we will enumerate some areas wherein measuring the Share of Voice will be beneficial for your brand.
Audience Insight
Share of Voice metrics found in social media helps you extract essential information from authentic conversations. It will look at what people are saying about a particular brand or product and use those information to pinpoint the preferences and needs of your target audience. Once you have the data, you will be able to determine why the audiences are choosing your brand over your competitors. For example, you can be offering a more cost-efficient solution than your rivals. Or your competitor’s website may offer a more straightforward navigation process than yours. It is probably the shipping cost. Knowing these factors will help you understand how to sell your products better to your audience. Apart from this, you can also use SOV to reach out to the untapped market and find new business opportunities.
Monitor Your Competition
Understanding your competitors in the industry enables you to find ways to make your brand stand apart. It is crucial to remain unique in a crowded market. The metrics help your brand identify your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). It will be vital to develop a comprehensive plan to help you stay on top of the competition.
Reputation Management
The data on analyzing the Share of Voice metrics will help you understand the various conversations around your brand. It will help you easily stay on top of your online reputation. You need to ensure that you have a generally positive reputation and that it surpasses your competitors. If there are some noticeable changes in the numbers, it could be related to a potential issue that could lead to a social media crisis if you don’t address it immediately. If you are running a fresh campaign, it is always important to be aware of the latest numbers. With this, you will be adequately prepared and execute the appropriate response to the situation to preserve your brand reputation.
Calculating the Share of Voice
Learning how to calculate Share of Voice will require you to understand a few factors, particularly your market and brand metrics. Usually, it can be as simple as dividing your market metrics into your brand metrics. There may be some variations in other data, such as measuring SOV on social media, PPC, organic search, and brand mentions. If you find it difficult, some tools will help you automatically compute your SOV and provide you with more accurate insight. Usually, the primary areas we will mention below require your complete focus.
Social Media SOV
Conversations of the consumers happening on all social media platforms will be crucial in understanding what is Share of Voice. It is pretty accurate when understanding your SOV because you are measuring actual conversation by your audience. While manually doing this can be too daunting for you, there are social media analytic tools to simplify the whole process. They will automatically identify and collect all the conversations with product and brand mentions. Once done, compare it with the SOV of your competitors to understand your current position. We’ve mentioned before the different social listening tools that you may use. Be sure to check our past article about this. Choose a tool that will present you with the numbers breakdown according to the sentiment, unique author, impression, and engagement. It must also come with an option to narrow your search results according to keywords, networks, and additional advanced filters.
PPC SOV
With your PPC SOV, you are basically measuring the visibility of your Ad campaign. You can calculate your Share of Voice metrics by comparing the times your ads could potentially show up against the times they actually appeared. Google will refer to this number as Impression Share. The platform will consider this factor together with other elements to identify your brand visibility. Here’s how you can find this information. Head to your account on Google Adwords and click the Campaigns option. You will then notice different columns; choose Modify and tap on the Competitive Metrics. The impression share will then be shown, and simply select the metrics you want to monitor. With this, you can quickly determine how impactful your PPC campaigns are. You can also identify if you need to fine-tune your strategy.
Calculating the Search Engine Share of Voice will be a little more complex, but it can be efficiently completed using the different SEO tools of today. Make sure that it comes with a feature that enables you to compare your search presence on the different keywords that your business uses compared to your competitors in the industry. Start by creating a comprehensive list of keywords related to your brand. These are the keywords your potential clients will use to search for your company. Afterward, you can use a tool that allows you to track the SERP of these keywords. You should also enter the URL of your competitors. This will help you determine your SEO SOV. These are basically all the clicks from the list of keywords that you are tracking. With your data, you will determine if you have any gaps in your advertising strategy. This metric will also be handy if something is missing with your visibility and on the topics. It will help you improve the competitiveness of your online visibility.
Media SOV
The Media Share of Voice Metrics allows you to keep track of your brand mentions on various channels and platforms. You will know it when a publication mentions your brand and the context of their article. You will keep track of the number of journalists and industry experts talking about you and their perception of your business. This will give you an accurate idea of how popular your company is in your industry. Moreover, you can also use this strategy to identify how the industry perceives your competitors. You will be aware of how many of these publications mention your competitors compared to your brand. With this, you will understand whether you should pay more attention to a specific journal to improve your PR and outreach efforts.
To learn how to calculate Share of Voice on your media, you could use the social listening tools to measure your Social Media SOV. Most of these tools will include blogs and news agencies in their analysis. You will only have to include the right filter that helps you be more specific in your media mentions.
Ways to Improve My SOV
Apart from knowing what is Share of Voice, you must also understand how to improve it. Social media would be an excellent way to enhance your efforts since it may take some time to determine the efficacy of your PPC and SEO campaign. With Media SOV, you don’t have complete control over this because it requires working with a third-party publication. It would be easier for you to influence the audience and adjust and control your strategy with social media. You also have the necessary tools that help you analyze your performance results and implement changes to optimize your approach. Here are some of our tips to improve your SOV on social media.
Be Active
To ensure that your brand will continue to gain an online presence, you will have to be active on various platforms. One post each day on these channels may not be enough to boost your visibility, especially when there are a million new conversations on these platforms. Moreover, they have unique algorithms that prioritize regular posting and active engagement. If you don’t remain active here, it will be difficult for you to cut through all the noises that are happening online. Your competitors can use this as an opportunity to improve their Share of Voice. Be sure that you post often and consistently examine the numbers to understand what time you are experiencing the best engagement.
Engage with Your Audience
Your social media post is more than just a form of content that you will distribute on your different social media accounts. It is a community where you can interact and connect with your potential customers to improve your Share of Voice. Therefore, apart from regular posting, be sure that you will also engage with them. Be sure that you will respond to their messages and comments. Provide them with the best response, whether to provide them with customer support, address their complaint, or answer their queries. Apart from these, respond to any of your positive brand mentions. Use this opportunity to thank them for being loyal customers. You can also add polls, use hashtag marketing, share stories, etc. You can encourage your audience to participate by sharing their user-generated content.
Develop Compelling Content
One effective way to improve your Share of Voice metrics is by creating content that will encourage your audience to share it. It is an ideal way to start the conversation about your brand. There are different ways to do this; you can entertain, inspire, and educate them. Consider providing them with motivational quotes or practical tips that your audience will find relevant. You can even share any latest news in your industry or even jokes and memes that they can relate to.
By monitoring your share of voice, you can understand how your business is doing compared to your business rivals. You will learn the current state of your brand reputation and determine how effective your SEO and PPC efforts are.
Tags: reputation management