Share of voice: How can you measure your marketing activities?
Marketing
Posted 20 Apr 2021
Share of voice might not be familiar to everybody. It describes an efficient method for measuring the results of marketing efforts. The possibility to monitor every click, every post and every mention can be overwhelming sometimes. By measuring the share of voice, you can gain a good overview of the business environment and bring order to chaos.
Before discussing various measurement options, it should first be clarified what is meant by share of voice. Share of voice is a key figure in marketing. It describes the share of your own advertising activities in comparison to those of your competitors. In the digital age, online visibility stands in the focus, along with organic search, PPC (pay-per-click) and social media platforms. The share of voice is calculated by dividing your own advertising expenditure by those of the total market. Contrary to what one might think, behind the share of voice lies more than just brand mentions. For this reason, we would like to show you a few possibilities how to measure share of voice on different channels.
Measuring the share of voice with certain keywords can provide context on how consumers discuss a brand compared to its competitors. Examples of such keywords include style, reliability, security and cost. As a car manufacturer, for example, the keyword “safety” could be used to find out which car brands customers consider being particularly safe. With the keyword “style” one can find out which cars consumers think are elegant. The results can be useful for the evaluation on how successful campaigns have been with the aim of increasing product popularity. In addition, it can be used to finding out if and how the product perception has changed after a campaign.
Share of voice filtered by location can show which regional markets are most familiar with the brand. This can be helpful to prepare relevant content for location-based social media campaigns and to see how brand awareness is changing in different markets.
Share of voice normally measures the share of mentions of a brand compared with the total number of posts. However, this does not show how many individual users talk about the brand or how many followers these users have. Therefore, it is also important to compare potential impressions and reaches. The reach measures how many users will potentially be able to see posts that mention your brand. Impressions show how often this was the case indeed.
This percentage measures how often the brand is mentioned together with its competitors. If companies are rarely named together with other brands, this may indicate a high degree of brand loyalty. A high percentage often occurs with brands that are highly competitive.
Share of voice is one of the most used metrics for measuring social media performance. Many companies have certain hashtags that they use regularly for specific themes. If you compare the hashtags’ share of voice from the company and their competitors, you can see how successful these hashtags are. Coca-Cola provides a successful example. The company launched a campaign with the hashtag #ShareACoke. The bottles that were sold during the campaign contained prints of different first names, descriptions, cities, and song lyrics. Many users posted their Coca-Cola bottles on Instagram and other social media platforms using the hashtag #ShareACoke. The campaign was so successful because it integrated both mass personalization (without being quite personal) and a community feeling.
If you filter for posts that link to your own website and those of your competitors, you can find out about the share of voice’s responsibility for traffic on the website. This share of voice can be a performance indicator on a “shareable”-worthy website’s content, how well social media accounts and marketing activities have been integrated into the website.
Applying some of these measures will give you a deeper insight into the discussions about the company. In addition, you get an impression of how certain marketing measures have affected brand perception. The newly acquired information can then be used specifically for new measures. By the way, share of voice can also be used in terms of media monitoring.
More to come on our blog soon!
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Alexander Hencel has been part of HBI’s marketing team since 2018. He is responsible for content management such as the creation of specialist articles, managing social media channels and supporting online marketing campaigns for customers and HBI.
