Share of voice: How can you measure your marketing activities?
PR & Marketing
Posted 21 Jun 2018
Share of voice might not be familiar to everybody. However, it is a good 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, we should first clarify what share of voice actually is. It describes the share of your own advertising activities in comparison to those of your competitors. In the online age, online visibility is a main focus, including organic search, PPC (pay-per-click) and social media. The share of voice is calculated by dividing your own advertising expenditure by the total market advertising expenditure. Contrary to what you might think, behind share of voice lie more than just brand mentions. For this reason, we would like to show you a few possibilities to measure share of voice on different channels.
Measuring 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” you can find out which cars consumers think are stylish. The results can be useful to evaluate how successful campaigns have been with the aim of increasing product popularity. In addition, it can be used to find out how and whether 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 really was the case.
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 commonly used metrics for measuring social media performance. Many companies have certain hashtags that they regularly use for specific topics. If you compare the share of voice of the hashtags from your company and the competitors, you can see how successful the 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 really 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 how high the share of voice responsible for traffic on the website is. This share of voice can be a performance indicator of how “shareable” the website content is and 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. You will find more about this on our blog soon!
– This article was written by an intern at HBI
