Understanding Share of Voice In Digital Markets

To get a truly competitive edge as a digital marketer or advertiser, it’s important to understand and use the concept of share of voice . Simply stated, share of voice is about how much of the pie you’re getting; what percentage of the digital space is yours? How much of all online content and conversations is from or about your company?

Even if you’ve heard the term before, you may have only heard it as applied to a traditional model. In a digital environment, there are more competitors and more marketing channels. It’s important to take into account all the different social media platforms, the pay per click model, banner ads, and search engine optimization.

A study done by Millward Brown  found that brands that increase their digital SOV are more likely to increase their market share over time.

In this study, Millward Brown looked at over 4,000 brands from 28 countries in 56 different categories. For each brand, they measured the brand’s overall share of voice (both digital and traditional) and digital share of voice. They then computed the changes in the SOV scores from 2009 to 2010 and compared them with the changes in the brands’ Consumer Value scores during the same time period. (Consumer Value is an estimate of market share that is highly predictive of actual share.) They found that the correlations—r=0.29 for overall share of voice with CV and r=0.22 for digital share of voice with CV — were statistically significant. Clearly, digital share of voice has a significant relationship with market share growth.

Businesses who measure their success and their share of voice tend to profit quite a bit more and do better overall than those that don’t. American company New Belgium Brewing Company  makes it a point to measure their share of voice, and that of their competitors, and then to use this information to their advantage. In 2013, the company found that its Facebook fans were bringing in $50.7 million annually, a great return on investment since they had spent just over a quarter of a million on social media as a whole.

These figures again drive the point that the digital marketing world is considerably more convoluted than that of traditional marketing, so it’s important that you make share of voice a part of your strategy. BrightEdge has a great tool for measuring share of voice that will help you not only measure your share of voice, but will help you discover share of voice of your competitors. You’ll be able to find new competitors, perform detailed competitive analysis , find competitive benchmarks, discover trend predictions, and find other helpful metrics.

When using BrightEdge’s share of voice  you’ll find how much of the digital pie is yours, and you’ll know where to invest your time and money to get the most ROI on your marketing efforts. Maybe you find, that as a result of your marketing efforts, that mention of your company on Twitter goes from 100 to 200 mentions per day. This may seem like a win, but what if mentions of your competitors are closer to 1,000 per day? You would be missing out on a large slice of the pie, and you might not know unless you look into share of voice.

There are so many different avenues in which to market online,which means there are a lot of different channels to spend money on. Before duping a massive budget on different marketing channels, it’s best to know what will bring you the greatest ROI. Really understanding your share of voice will help you make better decisions and come out ahead of the competition.

Digital marketing has come a long way in making the craft more measurable, but there is still a lot of room for things to slip through the cracks.

The BrightEdge platform allows you to measure the right metrics to see how well your content and organic search is performing . The Massive data repository in the DataCube allows business leaders to analyze marketing data to more informed decisions based on maximizing return on spend and increasing revenue from all your digital marketing efforts.

How do I get my share of voice and a personalized BrightEdge demo for my website?