What cooks a marketer’s brain? It could be deciding on the metrics to measure the effort they put in and whether it has paid off or not. If you are also facing a similar problem, ‘share of voice’ is an excellent spot to start as it provides insights about your business landscape. Moreover, if you have the appropriate tools, you can explore further and gain information that will benefit you in the long run.
What Is Share Of Voice?
Before the online boom, the share of voice was calculated by defining how huge your cut of advertising is opposed to your competitors. Today, the share of voice cannot be calculated just by taking advertising into account as online presence has become very crucial. This includes organic searches, social media, and PPC.
Social media is a reflection of the customers’ opinion thus contributing to share of voice. Depending on the area of marketing, Share of voice is mostly calculated with some variations on the basic formula. The formula is Advertising of your brand/ Whole Market Advertising
Compared to earlier days, the share of voice can be calculated more precisely with broader avenues like Social media, PPC and SEO. There are many analytics tools present to help you keep you always updated with your share of voice.
Share Of Voice – SEO
The influx of SEO tools can be considered a boon as they make calculations easier. They automate the calculation and provide us with at-a-glance comparison. These tools have access to a database which might contain even thousands of keywords. This way, you can understand the broader landscape of organic searches.
You will be able to find out which competitor of yours is concentrating on SEO by taking a look at the search results page. You can also find out whether you and your competitor are focusing on similar keywords.
If you do not have the budget for these tools, you can calculate this manually as well. The average search volume per month for the keywords can be obtained through Google Analytics. Multiply it with the click-through rate (CTR).
This can provide you with a projection about the traffic your label might attract for that keyword in a month. Now total the traffic estimate of all the keywords and divide it with the whole market traffic to manually calculate the SEO share of voice.
Share Of Voice – PPC
The share of voice of pay-per-click can be calculated through Google AdWords by tracking impression share. It calculates the percentage of times users saw your ads to the number of times it could have been screened. It depends on campaign and keyword settings.
To get impression share, sign into your account (AdWords) and go to campaigns tab. In the columns section, there will be a modify column option where you can find competitive metrics. Add impression share from here.
Share Of Voice – Social Media
Social media offers the perfect platform to harness the opinions of your customers. According to Social Media 101 – How To Turn Your Small Business Into A Huge Enterprise, social media success can translate into other mediums as well. Social media analytics tools like Buffer are the easiest and most efficient way to collect the voice of your clients on social media. This client-centric approach is poised to bring out the following positives.
1) You measure the outcomes of your effort rather than how much you paid for advertising or your distinctness on Google searches.
2) It enables you to gain critical insights about your consumers and your competitor’s strategies. It helps in brand monitoring as well.
The social media analytics tools can let you know where your brand is mentioned online. Here, you can get a general idea about how broad the reach of your product or brand is and how much it is compared with your competitors, etc. That is an estimated calculation to determine who took the larger chunk of the online conversation.
The voice of the consumer allows one to break it down into many ways. For example – An MNC with a strong footprint in many markets might give out a share of voice on the basis of geography. Another way to break it down is by taking a look at the analytics gained from the demographics of your audience. Consumer insights can be revealed by interest, profession, gender, etc. of the audience. Here, you can also look into the difference in coverage between you and your competitor.
What do you rely on for crisis communication? How do you market your campaign? Valuable information about these questions can also be gathered by monitoring the analytics data over time. An overall comparison can be taken into consideration by understanding the view of your consumers. This can help in learning the association customers have between your brand and other players in the market.
Now you know where to start to track the environment your brand functions in. Your efforts can be benchmarked by calculating SEO share of voice and PPC will be of great help on competitive intelligence. Social media can directly gather the opinion of the consumer thus giving a detailed idea about brand perception. You get an opportunity to explore more and discover consumer behaviours and competitive strategies.
Author:
Nancy Grace is a social media writer at iDigic.net who also contributes for hundreds of other blogs. Her articles predominantly focus on social media and are widely followed by readers from all over the world.
