Many metrics can help you keep track of your place in the digital marketplace today.

One of these metrics is share of voice.

Share of voice, or SOV, refers to a measure of a percentage of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors.

But why is share of voice important?

It is a gauge of your brand’s visibility and your domination over the conversation in your industry or niche.

It includes various aspects of advertising and marketing such as traffic, mentions in social media, etc.

Knowing your SOV helps you understand challenges, your current position in the market, your growth as a brand, and ways to get to users.

You need to perform a share of voice analysis for your brand to determine its voice’s strength.

What is Share of Voice?

Let’s refresh on what share of voice is again, shall we?

Share of voice is a marketing metric used to determine how much sway your brand has compared to your competitors in the same marketplace or niche.

It provides you with information on how popular your brand is among your target audience.

A high share of voice implies you have more brand visibility, popularity, and authority among your customers.

There are several ways you can calculate your share of voice to know your position in the marketplace.

This allows you to find ways to improve this metric to get more out of your audience.

Below is a sample of SOV analysis for global airlines.

Metrics You Can Use To Measure Share Of Voice?

Organic Keywords

Organic keywords refer to those keywords used to attract traffic to websites using SEO optimization techniques.

They are keywords inputted by potential customers seeking to get specific information from google on services or products.

Take, for instance, a Google user searching for “BiQ’s keyword tool” on Google’s search engine.

“BiQ’s keyword tool” is a specific organic keyword connected to a particular website.

It contains detailed information that is beneficial to the user.

The number of users searching for that specific keyword can determine the website’s SOV in the niche.

Suppose more people search for that particular keyword or any related keywords.

It means that the website is authoritative for that specific niche, and it holds sway in its audience’s conversations.

Pay Per Click Keywords

To calculate the PPC for your keywords, you need to divide your business’s brand advertising spending by the total market advertising spending and multiply the results by a hundred.

You’ll need a list of your keywords, the market’s total value, and a click-through rate.

Vs= (A/∑At) x 100%

Vs= Voice of search

A= Advertising spending

T= Total

Example:

Vs= (5000/50000) x 100%

Vs= 10%

The percentage you get, 10% in this case, may be good or bad depending on the number of competitors you have on the market.

For instance, if there are many competitors, then 5% is a good ratio.

But you may be getting a return on investment if there are few competitors.

Traffic Shares

Traffic share refers to the percentile traffic sent to a website.

This metric can be used to indicate your website’s SOV by determining the number of shares your audience makes to their friends and even on social media platforms.

The more the traffic redirected to your website, the higher your SOV.

Improving other metrics such as your social media presence and creating exciting topics for your audience can help improve your traffic shares and boost your share of voice.

Impressions

Impressions refer to when ads are picked from their source.

The advertisement doesn’t have to be clicked for it to count as an impression.

It just implies that the content was delivered to a user’s feed. Impressions are calculated in cost per mille, CPM.

One mille is equal to 1000 impressions.

For instance, an ad may have a CPM of 5$.

This means that the website’s owner receives 5$ every time an ad placed on their website is displayed 1000 times.

Below is a sample table of impressions, CPM, and SOV.

Naturally, the more your ad is displayed on websites, the bigger your share of voice since you’ll be reaching more potential customers with your advertising.

Revenue

The amount of revenue you get as a company is directly correlated to the strength of your share of voice.

If you critically look at it, you’ll notice that very few people buy products from brands they are not aware of.

A brand with a high and positive SOV implies genuineness and quality in its products or services.

It means that several people have done business with the company with successful results, which convinces more people to buy your services or products.

If you want to increase your company’s revenue, you need to increase your brand’s SOV and raise its awareness among potential customers.

Mentions

Mention refers to the number of times your brand is referenced on the web.

While this metric is used on social media platforms, the metric can also gauge a brand’s visibility and perception on the web by the number of times it’s mentioned in blogs or publications.

Several tools can be used to track this metric, such as Google Alerts, Hootsuite, and social mentions, among others.

Measuring this metric is essential as your brand grows to know how many potential customers you’ve reached directly and indirectly.

#Hashtags

Hashtags have become increasingly popular, especially on social media and eCommerce.

They are used to connect content to a specific topic.

You could use hashtags to make your content more visible.

However, it would be best to go about it the right way to achieve the best results.

You could then use the hashtags to analyze and find out the number of people talking about your brand and even get some feedback in the process.

The more people reposting with your hashtag, the better engagement you’ll have.

It also means that your brand has a better share of voice.

Calculating SOV For Organic Search

To measure your share of voice for organic search, you need to divide your brand’s target metric by the total in your market and multiply the number you get by 100 to get the percentage of your share of voice.

(Your brand metric/ total market metric) x 100

SOV For Pay-Per-Click

Share of voice was traditionally used to measure a company’s share of advertisement.

Therefore, it’s only logical that digital marketers use this metric to measure your PPC’s share of voice.

Fortunately, it’s quite simple.

You can measure share of voice and check out the statistics on Google Ads.

Impression share is the other metric equivalent to PPC’s SOV.

Impression share is the percentage that represents the number of times your ads are shown to Google users compared to the number of times they could have been shown.

These calculations are based on your keywords and campaign settings.

Impressions/ Total eligible impressions= Impression share

Tips To Improve Your Share Of Voice

1. Create Good Content

If you want to achieve a more significant share of voice, the first thing you have to do is create great content that resonates with your audience since the content is your campaign’s spine.

So, you have to develop shareable content ideas that are fun to read and helpful to your target audience.

You don’t have to write about the features of your products or services necessarily.

Instead, you could try focusing on your audience’s problems and how your product or services could help them solve the problems.

Doing this helps make the customer feel valued and appreciated.

To get a detailed analysis of the keywords you need to use, the content structure, and other useful tips that can help you improve your content, you can use BiQ’s Content Intelligence tool.

Content Intelligence enables you to understand the essential aspects you need to cover when creating content.

Typically, content creators have to go over to Google any time they have to create some content.

They’ll then type in the keyword, open several tabs to find inspiration for their content.

Well, there is one problem with this strategy; it’s time-consuming and hectic.

BiQ’s Content Intelligence tool analyzes the keyword against top-performing content on Google and gives you a breakdown of similar keywords, keyword usage, and sample sentences.

You can use this analysis to craft your article’s outline.

2. Perform Keyword Analysis For Your Content

Before you write great content, you need to have the right keywords to rank better on search engine results pages, SERPs.

Better rankings help you get more traffic and a bigger and more targeted audience that is more likely to convert.

You can get the best-related keywords using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence tool.

Related keywords don’t just make your articles more comfortable to read.

But they also help reach out to a broader audience that may be searching for your content.

The related keywords on Keyword Intelligence come with various statistics such as keyword value that help you decide on the right keywords you could use in your article.

BiQ Cloud will help bring more traffic to your website at a much lower competition.

3. Grow Your Social Media Accounts

Social media platforms have an exponentially rising user base.

This has also been directly linked with the steady increase in revenue.

According to Statista, social media platforms generated 17.65 billion dollars in 2019’s third quarter.

This means that the popularity of social media platforms can be used to rake in even more profits.

How do we do this?

Choose the right platforms

You need to make an SOV analysis and choose one or two of the best platforms that work great for your brand.

After getting the right brands, you should dedicate your time to posting engaging content on the platforms regularly.

This is to create a good rapport with your audience.

Engage with your audience

It doesn’t matter if your content is good or if you are offering your audience great products.

It pays to interact with them and engage them in the comments or through other means.

Otherwise, your competitor may come up and sweep them from under your feet with excellent customer support.

4. Focus On Featured Snippets

Featured snippets refer to search results that Google chooses to feature on top of Google’s organic results right below the ads in a box.

These featured snippets aim to answer the user’s questions right away directly.

At least 98 million keywords have no featured snippets.

Getting featured in this section will mean more brand exposure and an opportunity for more traffic.

You can create new content.

You can also optimize the old content with the best keywords so that you can appear in the featured snippet.

You could use BiQ’s Rank Tracking to monitor your keywords.

If you are currently ranking on a featured snippet, you don’t want your competitors to snatch them.

You could assign a tag to them and watch them for ranking.

You can also track featured snippets that your competitor ranks for, analyze their volatility, and determine what potential keywords you are most likely to rank for.

You can monitor keywords for SERP features at the Rank Tracking dashboard.

5. Lead industry conversations

To lead the conversations in your niche, you have to be active on social media platforms.

You should post engaging content that your audience looks forward to.

You should also be informative and update your audience whenever any relevant information or news comes up.

It would also work better if you engaged with your audience by asking and answering questions effectively.

It would work best if you did not rest until your audience is satisfied and their problems solved.

Doing this will make you a respected authority in your niche, and your brand will be leading the conversation.

Conclusion

There is no singular calculation for share of voice.

Share of voice has various measures for various channels.

This means that you have to do as many calculations as you need with as many relevant metrics as you need to know your brand’s SOV.

In the long run, share of voice will help you understand your brand’s strength.

This can be used as a reflection of its strength and authority among your competitors, your brand’s growth rate, and its impact on your audience.