Share of Voice: Definition, Calculation, Tools [2024 Guide]

What happened between May and June 2024? Nike, maintaining its role as the industry leader, got an overwhelming 94.4% share of voice and effectively left behind Reebok’s 5.6%. This digital dominance was no fluke but a continuation from the previous month, where Nike had a 92.8% share compared to Reebok’s 7.2%.

A high SOV reflects a brand’s conversation dominance and often correlates with market share and sales performance. Monitoring this metric can help you identify the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies, recognize shifts in consumer interest, and respond proactively to competitive dynamics. 

So, are you ready to get to know your SOV?

Share of Voice (SOV) helps you determine your brand’s visibility against your competitors. It shows how much a particular digital marketing channel is dominated by it. It gives an overall view of a brand’s position in the market. SOV applies to various marketing channels, including traditional ones. The higher the SOV, the more authority you have within your business niche.

This article will answer all your questions about this digital marketing metric.

I’ll discuss how to track it, how to measure it, and, finally, what you can do to improve it using the specialized share of voice tools.

Let’s dive in!

• Share of voice definition
• Market share vs. share of voice
• Share of voice calculation
  • Share of voice formula
  • PR share of voice
  • PPC share of voice
  • SEO share of voice
• AI Share of Voice tools
• Share of voice tools
• How to increase the share of voice?
• A quick recap

Share of voice definition

SOV measures your brand’s visibility across different marketing channels against your competitors, helping you measure your share in the market. It gives you an overview of your brand’s share in the whole market.

You can use this metric to calculate the percentage of a brand’s visibility regarding:

• Volume of mentions
• Pay-per-click (PPC)
• PR
• SEO
• Social media

By tracking these metrics over time, companies can see how their SOV is changing and what steps they need to take to improve their position in the market.

Market share vs. share of voice

While the two concepts are often used interchangeably, they are actually quite different.

Share of voice (SOV) measures the percentage of brand awareness within a given market that is attributed to a particular brand, company, or product.

Market share or Share of Market (SoM) is the percentage of sales within a given market that are attributed to a particular brand, company, or product.

While market share is a valuable metric for determining your brand’s sales in the marketplace, the share of voice is important for understanding how often your target consumers see and hear your brand name.

It’s also a much broader metric that shows how your marketing campaigns spark conversations and improve your visibility.

How to calculate the share of voice?

How to measure the share of voice? To calculate SOV, you must divide your brand’s measures by the total market measures.

It could be your social media mentions, website traffic, link clicks, or paid advertising clicks.

Share of voice formula:

Share of Voice = (your brand metrics / total market metrics) x 100

It might seem challenging, but luckily, you no longer need to do it by hand. You can use share of voice tools to do the job for you.

As the share of voice can be tracked across various channels, including social media, traditional media, and online search, you can implement this formula to measure:

• PR share of voice
• PPC share of voice
• SEO share of voice

Share of voice in PR

The share of voice is a great metric to assess the results of a PR campaign.

Calculating the share of voice you generate while conducting organic PR activities is a bit trickier than measuring the paid share of voice. 

You have to know the social media reach of every single post, the type, and the number of interactions and compare these metrics to the whole industry. 

Yep, that is a lot of work. 

A helping hand is a media monitoring tool.

Such tools collect and analyze the data needed to calculate the SOV and can analyze the metric for you.

If you’re looking for the best SOV tool – move on to the “The best Share of Voice tools” paragraph

The share of voice in paid advertising

Of course, the easiest way to calculate the PPC share of voice is to use a dedicated tool.

However, there is also a way to measure it without using a paid tool. It’s not easy, though.

I’ll do my best to make the whole process as easy as possible!

To calculate SOV in PPC you must divide your brand advertising by total market advertising.

PPC Share of Voice = (your brand advertising / total market advertising) x 100

Using Google AdWords, you can track impression share columns to determine how often your ads are shown compared to the total available ad space, providing insights into your campaign’s effectiveness and competitive advantage.

What metrics will you need?

• List of your keywords or your competitors’ keywords (if you’re conducting a competitor analysis)
• The total value of your market
• CTR

The first two metrics are relatively easy to find, especially if you use an SEO tool.

The CTR for each keyword, on the other hand, is hard to assess. Many external factors influence the CTR, for example, your domain authority or any changes in the Google algorithm. And that’s just for the share of voice of a single keyword.

If you want to calculate the SOV for a whole group of keywords, take a look at the monthly search volume (you’ll find it in Google Analytics).

To calculate your share of voice, divide brand traffic by total market traffic.

The disadvantage of calculating your SOV is that you have to do it manually. That’s not only a time-consuming process, but it is easy to miss important brand mentions. You also need to know your media spending and paid advertising.

Some SEO tools will calculate the SOV for you and will do it on a regular basis. You’ll be able to compare the fluctuations in the brand’s share over time and, ultimately, increase the share of voice for your brand.

SEO share of voice

To measure SEO share of voice, you need the assistance of SEO tools that compare your search visibility to competitors. To measure SEO share of voice effectively, you need to track various voice metrics such as impressions, clicks, and organic keywords to understand your brand’s dominance in search results. Let me explain this process using Ahrefs, the tool I use daily for SEO purposes.

First, you need to pick keywords and set up a rank tracker. Then, you can add your main competitors. As a result, the tool will compare your visibility to competitors’.

Try AI Share of Voice tools

AI now rules the world. AI lovers, AI friends, and… AI assistants.

Well, I think we can all agree that artificial intelligence does simplify our work. And it can do the same with measuring SOV.

Let’s talk a bit about a Brand24s Brand Assistant. It’s an absolutely incredible feature for monitoring online presence and benchmarking against competitors.

It combines the knowledge of ChatGPT with the data it collected in your projects. That’s why you get a very broad perspective and the most accurate data you can imagine.

The Brand Assistant works like your personal data analyst. You can ask him:

1. How has [your brand] SoV changed over the past quarter compared to the same period last year?
2. What percentage of the online conversation within the industry is dominated by [your brand] versus [your competitor]?
3. What are the top sources of mentions contributing to [your brand]’s SoV, and how do they compare to [your competitor]’s sources?
4. Are there specific campaigns or events that have significantly impacted [your brand]’s SoV?
5. How do influencer and celebrity endorsements affect [your brand]’s SoV?

I asked, “What is the SoV of Nike compared to Rebook?”

And that’s the analysis I got:

It can even create a chart to present how the number of mentions differs for your brand and your competitor:

The best share of voice tools

As I mentioned earlier, measuring the share of voice manually may take a lot of your time and effort. Fortunately, some tools can do it automatically for you.

These tools can help you track your brand’s share of voice across various channels, providing insights into your brand’s visibility and market position.

Depending on what data and information you are looking for, you can use different types of solutions to measure the SOV.

I prepared a list of social media monitoring tools that you can check out for this purpose.

01 Brand24

Free 14-day trial.

Brand24 is one of the most robust and affordable social listening tools on the market. It monitors brand mentions in real-time, but it is a web monitoring tool with an advanced analytics section.

The tool covers various sources, including:

• major social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch)
• review sites
• news sites
• blogs
• newsletters
• podcasts
• other publicly available Web sources

Brand24 measures the share of voice, online presence score, sentiment, and other metrics that can give you an idea of how your company or PR efforts or campaigns perform.

With Brand24, you will discover the percentage share of the most influential authors in discussions on social media. Also, the tool will allow you to compare your share of voice to competitors.

You can easily detect total, social media, and non-social media share of voice.

How to measure the SOV using it?

Just set up projects for your own brand and your competitors. That way, you can conduct competitor research and measure the SOV.

You can calculate the share of voice manually or take a look at the tool dashboard:

You can also get a list of the 10 most active profiles to compare the share of voice your brand generated to the SOV of your competitors.

Furthermore, it will help you to detect which topics interest your audience:

Brand24 will also give you the components of the metric, such as estimated reach or the total number and type of interactions.

Combine all the data with sentiment analysis, and you have all the information you need about your brand’s online presence.

Plus, you can set up a project for your competitors. Not only will you get the information about your company, but also about all the brands you’re competing with.

You also get access to your personal Brand Assistant that I mentioned earlier.

02 Brandwatch

Brandwatch is an enterprise-level social media listening tool. It offers a wide range of functionalities, but it is one of the most expensive tools on the market.

Brandwatch can be useful for measuring a brand’s share of voice, as it will give you ready-to-implement insights that could boost your business online presence, help you make more informed decisions, and, ultimately, increase your market share.

Brandwatch does not offer a free trial period, and there is no information about its pricing on the official website.

Here is an article about Brandwatch alternatives. If you don’t want to spend that much on a social listening tool, you may want to check it out.

03 Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social listening and analytics company. It is used for social media monitoring by the biggest brands and agencies from all over the world. It offers multiple features to provide advanced results to all clients. 

It offers analytics, so it will surely help measure the share of voice.

The basic plan aimed at smaller brands or owned media-focused companies costs $9,600 yearly. The prices of the two remaining plans, Corporate and Enterprise, are discussed on request.

Here is a post on Talkwalker alternatives if you are interested in trying different solutions.

04 Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a media management tool that can be used for monitoring as well.

The tool collects mentions of your brand across major social media platforms. It offers social media automation that will help you manage your online presence but also get the social listening insights you need to boost your business, including the information about your share of voice.

Here is a post on Sprout Social alternatives if you want to try different solutions.

How to increase the share of voice?

Once you measure your SOV, you’ll know whether you need to improve it.

Compare your SOV to your competition. The comparison will give you benchmarks, and you will be able to correctly assess your SOV levels.

When people look for a certain service or product, they should think about your company. If your brand is not as recognizable as you wish it were, don’t worry!

Optimizing your keyword and campaign settings in Google Ads can significantly impact your impression share, helping you increase your share of voice in paid advertising.

Social media networks gave us, besides distractions and cute kitten videos, great platforms to broadcast your message.

Here are our tips and tricks on how to increase your SOV.

01 Develop your social media accounts

The first tip sounds like a no-brainer, yet it’s still a surprise for many companies. Mainly because building a robust social media presence takes a lot of time, and you don’t see the results right away.

But choosing the right social media platform, posting regularly, and engaging with your audience is the best way to improve your share of voice on social media.

02 Don’t sell right away

The beauty of social media? It’s about being social – talking to your friends, sending GIFs, and sharing photos.

That’s why the primary purpose of your social media presence should be natural customer engagement with your audience. Thank them for their comments, reply to their complaints, and share their posts. People will come and buy your product, even if you don’t sell to them directly.

Read more: What is Social Selling? Generate Better Leads

03 Invest in share-worthy content

The more people see your posts, the higher your SOV will be. That’s why it’s important to invest in content that people want to share.

If you have no idea what type of content works best in your industry, explore your competitors’ pages. They either already discover what works, and in that case, you can get inspired by their posts.

Or they’re completely lost, in which case you can learn from their mistakes.

04 Think beyond social media

Traditional media is not dead! You can raise your online share of voice by promoting your business offline, increasing organic search traffic, and improving your online advertising and digital marketing efforts. It does sound crazy, doesn’t it?

But it works!

Many people bring the conversation from offline to online. If your campaign is well-executed and interesting, there will be an online buzz around it. You can expand your reach by being featured on one of the news sites.

Moreover, you can invest in SEO of your website so that your home page or blog will rank high in Google search results. This will boost your visibility.

05 Become an industry leader

Being part of the conversation is one thing, but leading the industry will boost your share of voice.Michał Sadowski, CEO and founder of Brand24, has been active in social media for many years. Right now, he is one of the most recognized marketing experts in Poland.

How about building your online presence to become an industry expert?

It’s the most time-consuming tactic of building the SOV, but it will yield the highest results. Start with initiating talk on your social media profiles.

What is the best way to build your industry leader position and spark a conversation?

Start asking questions! 

Nothing makes your business profile more approachable than showing a little behind-the-scenes footage. It makes people feel connected to your brand and humanizes it.

If you’re offering a tangible product, for example, clothing or cosmetics, there are plenty of opportunities to ignite a conversation. From the top of my head, you could:

• Ask how you should name your product.
• Ask which color you should produce next.
• Show what production looks like. Customers are more aware of the ecological and economic impact their purchases have on the environment.

The list can go on and on! The sky is the limit.

A quick recap

Let’s sum up what you know.

SOV acts as a key performance indicator and can help you evaluate your marketing strategy, detect shifts in consumer interests, and adjust to stay ahead of competitors.

1. Share of voice (SOV) compares your brand’s visibility to competitors across different marketing channels.
2. AI tools can greatly simplify measuring SOV and provide you with insights into competitive analysis.
3. Measuring the SOV will help you better scale your marketing efforts and improve campaign effectiveness.
4. You can try to measure the share of voice yourself, but it will be time-consuming and less effective than using a specialized tool.
5. By comparing your results to competitors, you can track progress over time.

So, how prominent is your brand in the industry conversation? Try the Brand24 tool for free!