Want to know your company’s position in the market? Share of voice is an important and easy-to-measure metric for market analysis, competitor intel and much more. With the right tools, finding your share of voice takes a matter of minutes, and provides useful insights for data-based decision making across your business.
What is Share of Voice (SoV)?
Share of voice is essentially a measure of popularity: how visible is your brand compared to your main competitors? The more people are conscious of and familiar with your brand, the more likely they will consider investing in one of your products or services.
Share of voice by media expenditure
For many decades, share of voice was exclusively a measure of media spending. Some companies still use this method and it can be useful to compare social media engagement with ad expenditure.
To calculate your share of voice the traditional way, divide your total advertising spending by the sum of all market advertising spending for the same type of product or category. Multiply this figure by 100 to convert it into a percentage.
There are two main problems with this metric:
- It’s impossible to get accurate media spending figures from your competitors. Companies have to do a lot of guesswork, and use media spend averages to get an approximate figure. Some SEO tools can give you statistics on, for example, Google and Meta ad expenditure, but this only tells part of the story.
- Media spending doesn’t accurately reflect campaign success. Just because a company forks out on advertising, it isn’t necessarily an indicator of customer engagement or brand recognition.
Most companies now prefer to turn to social media to measure share of voice.
Share of voice by social media engagement
Generally, social media share of voice compares the number of times your brand is mentioned on social media with the sum of your mentions and your main competitor’s mentions. It’s then expressed as a percentage
Here’s the calculation:
Your brand mentions / [your brand mentions + SUM competitor brand mentions] x 100 = Share of Voice
You can also cross-tabulate brand mentions with relevant topics. For example, you can compare how many people who talk about vacuum cleaners mention Dyson vs Miele.
Unlike the traditional method of measuring share of voice, it is both a measure of brand recognition and customer engagement. Additionally, it’s much easier to get accurate data from social media, which is publicly and freely available.
With the right tools, it’s easy to parse useful information from your competitor’s social media channels to find out who is dominating online conversation and how your brand compares.
Our technology at Symanto makes it easy to compile and analyse useful data from multiple social media sources including review sites and forums.
Share of Voice as a KPI
The share of voice metric is a useful indicator of performance and competitor intel. Here are some examples of how share of voice can help you shed light on your business and your industry.
Assess your market
Get a clear overview of the landscape of your market. Discover which brands are gaining popularity, which are the dominant players, and which brands are losing traction in your industry.
Competitor insights
Compare your competitors’ predicted media expenditure with social media engagement. Get an indication of whether your competitors are growing organically, or if their growth heavily relies on paid media investment. Social listening tools can also help you track the origin of mentions to help you discover your competitors’ influencers and brand ambassadors, and the success of their campaigns.
Brand health
By itself, the share of voice metric is a measurement of brand awareness. If people are talking about your brand, it’s safe to assume that they’re aware of you. But share of voice can be made even more useful by also measuring sentiment.
55% of online consumers read four or more reviews before making a purchase. So measuring brand sentiment is critical for gauging brand health and predicting future performance.
Evaluate marketing and product strategies
Did your latest product or campaign get people talking? Product and campaign rollouts are a useful time to track brand share of voice over time. Use this information to assess your marketing and product development strategies.
Share of Voice With Symanto
Symanto technology makes it easy to gather and analyse your data and competitor data from multiple sources including all popular social media channels, review sites and forums. Symanto’s cutting edge natural language processing (NLP) AI measures topic and brand sentiment more accurately than equivalent social media listening and monitoring tools. Unlike other NLP technologies, it doesn’t require lengthy training.
Within minutes, you can get highly useful insights into your brand and your competitors including share of voice, customer pain points, consumer intelligence and more.
Get Started
To find out more about the potential of our technology for your brand, get in touch, or book your free demonstration today.
