Share of Voice PR: Amplify Your Brand's Media Impact"

What Is Share of Voice in PR?

Share of voice is one of the core indicators of success when it comes to branding your business or profile. If people aren't talking about you, then they're probably not thinking about you. If they're not thinking about you, then you're out the loop.

It's a PR's job to ensure their brand or client stays relevant and in the loop. One of the biggest metrics to use when determining your relevancy is share of voice.

It tells you how much you're being talked about compared to your competitors, how widely your messages are amplified, and is applicable to practically all industries that need public relations.

For example, you can gauge the share of voice of a global sportswear brand within a specific sport. Nike's share of voice in women's soccer is huge, but rival sportswear giant adidas is catching up. Or you can determine the share of voice an influencer or celebrity has in a particular market. For example, two TikTok influencers might command an 80% share of the conversation in a niche beauty market.

Share of voice can be tracked across different channels like social media, news sites, traditional media like TV and radio, and online search results. By harnessing media monitoring, it's possible to keep tabs on a campaign's effectiveness and see where your brand stands against your rivals. You can also spot trends in brand mentions that help you understand your position in the wider market.

Why PR Pros Need to Show Share of Voice

In this guide, we'll look at exactly how to measure share of voice. This is aimed at PR professionals, marketing managers, and business owners who are determined to grow their brand's share of voice the right way.

Do it correctly and you can increase the attention your brand receives and the influence it wields. You'll also be more flexible when it comes to adapting your strategy in the future.

PR teams need this flexibility more than anyone, especially when working for brands and individuals. These clients want attention and influence, whether that's to drive sales, make an impact, or just get noticed. A PR team's job is to make that happen and share of voice is a great metric to gauge progress.

How to Measure Your Share of Voice

Measuring share of voice starts with picking the platforms you want to track. This could be social media, news sites, blogs, TV, newspapers, anything in the media landscape.

You then need to figure out a timeframe. A month is a good amount of time to understand where a brand sits within its industry, although you could opt to take a snapshot of your current situation.

Either way, you'll need to gather data using media monitoring tools like CisionOne. It's almost impossible to determine share of voice without a powerful tool because the software can track mentions of your brand and competitors far easier than doing it manually.

Once you have your data, you can calculate share of voice with this simple formula:

Your brand mentions / Total industry mentions x 100 = Your share of voice %

That means if your brand got 50 mentions and your industry had 200 total, your share of voice would be 25%.

You can break this down by channel too. Maybe you have 30% share on X, but only 15% on news sites.

Tools like CisionOne can automate this process, saving you time and giving you more detailed insights. It's easier to gather comprehensive share of voice metrics and conduct thorough competitive analysis to understand your brand’s performance.

A robust tool can then complete the share of voice analysis by tracking sentiment, reach, and other voice metrics. You can quickly map out your brand visibility and how large its voice share really is.

Increasing Your Brand's Share of Voice

Now, let's look at how to actively increase your brand's share of voice. Below are eight simple strategies that will help.

1. Know Your Target Audience

This is the best place to start. Your brand, its products, and the marketing content you create around it all needs to align with your target audience.

Start by looking into your existing audience's demographics. Pinpoint things like age, gender, political views, spending power, and attitude towards your brand. Find anything and everything you can about your audience with a tool like CisionOne and know them inside out.

From there, you can begin to align your content to the audience and increase your voice share.

2. Diversify Your Marketing Channels

Are you restricting yourself to too few marketing channels? Get people talking about your brand by being proactive and expanding into different areas.

It's good to have a strong social media presence across multiple platforms, and make sure other owned channels like your website and blog are fully up to date. For brands, LinkedIn can be a growth channel where you can rapidly expand your B2B voice share.

3. Create Valuable Content

Quality content is more likely to get shared, which in turn boosts your share of voice within your industry. You don't need to go viral with every social media post, newsletter, or ad campaign you run.

Instead, it's important to create consistent content that people value. This could be how-to guides that show your brand is an expert in its industry, or audience activations that bring your customers closer to you.

4. Engage With Your Community

If you want to increase your share of voice, engagement at a community level is really important. You can't have a share of the conversation if nobody is talking!

Get your audience talking by ensuring you're right there in the comments, speaking to people and answering their questions.

Thinking of relevant questions to put forward in a poll can be good for this, too.

5. Collaborate With Influencers

Influencers know all about share of voice. After all, they've become influencers because they've cracked the secret of dominating a topic, trend, or industry. Influencers naturally have a large voice share within their community, so collaborating makes sense.

Partnering with a few influencers is a good starting point to get audiences talking about your brand. Some brands go straight to influencer collaboration when they launch their first product, to generate immediate attention.

If they're talking about your brand, the people in their comments will know more about you. That should lead to more conversations where your business is mentioned.

6. Monitor and Analyze Your Performance

Once you know about share of voice, you can analyze your performance to see where your brand stands compared to others.

It's a good idea to check where your share of voice sits to begin with, then see how that changes as you implement specific strategies to give it a boost. That way, you'll know if your strategies are working.

A tool like CisionOne helps you track mentions, engagement, and sentiment, so you can see these metrics all in one place.

7. Align With Google

Search engine optimization (SEO) is inescapable these days. Brands have to ensure Google tracks and amplifies their content if they're really going to make a splash.

After all, the more people who can find your content, the more people will talk about it. Google has the power to determine some of this reach.

You might also consider improving your website’s technical SEO. This will probably involve getting your tech team involved or enlisting a specialist to help.

8. Seek Out Good PR Opportunities

Lastly, it's important to be proactive with your share of voice and build media coverage yourself. Getting mentions in a few different press sources is a great way to get started, and from there social media could amplify your brand further.

A good PR team will create relationships with journalists, craft press releases that resonate, and pitch strong stories to their media partners. If you're struggling here, read our comprehensive guide to pitching.

Share of Voice Vs. Share of Market: Understanding the Difference

Share of voice (SOV) and share of market (SOM) form a core part of PR campaigns. They're closely related, but they measure different aspects of your brand’s performance.

Share of voice looks at how visible your brand is compared to competitors. It tracks things like mentions across millions of social media accounts, news sites, etc. You can calculate it by dividing your brand mentions by total industry mentions.

Share of market focuses on your actual sales and revenue. It shows what percentage of the total market your brand captures. To find it, divide your sales by total industry sales.

Why track both? SOV can actually be a bit of a crystal ball by predicting future market share gains. If your SOV is higher than your SOM, you may soon enjoy sales growth. That's because market share is often a result of voice share.

Paid advertising plays a big role in SOV and therefore your overall SOM. Optimizing your keyword and campaign settings in Google Ads can really boost your impression share and overall share of voice. Your Google Ads and other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns contribute to your overall share of voice. The more ad space you occupy, the higher your SOV.

But there is one caveat worth noting: a high SOV doesn’t always mean high sales. Instead, it's one of the factors that can facilitate boosted SOM. It's a good indicator of brand awareness and potential growth, and gives brands confidence to push forward with campaigns.

If you keep an eye on both SOV and SOM, along with website traffic, audience sentiment, and organic search, then you'll get a fuller picture of your potential PR success.

How to Integrate Share of Voice Into Your PR and Marketing Strategy

Being able to measure share of voice through data is great for understanding your brand's current situation. However, this data is fairly useless if you don't allow it to shape your future marketing campaigns.

Any PR and marketing strategy relies on growth in data points. Things like brand mentions, click-through rates, conversions, and improved customer sentiment could all be part of a campaign. The SOV data you obtain needs to feed into your strategy and align with these types of goals.

You can do this on a platform like CisionOne, where you can pull SOV data from social media platforms, website traffic, and traditional media into one place. From here you can fully understand your current share of voice, and weave these findings into your future projects.

For example, an automobile brand might realize its share of voice among 18 to 24-year-olds is almost non-existent. No one from this demographic mentions the brand on social media, and they don't read the newspapers or watch the TV shows where the automobile is advertised.

The solution is to change strategy and seek to boost SOV among that age demographic by targeting their media platforms. With a bit of work, you might see share of voice increase among this demographic, which in turn may lead to a boosted share of the market.

Case Studies: How Brands Have Increased Their Share of Voice

Let's look at some real-world examples of brands that boosted their share of voice through smart PR strategies. We've picked out three of the best, but there are thousands of brands who have conducted successful media monitoring and SOV analysis to realign their PR efforts.

Nike and Colin Kaepernick

Nike sparked widespread conversation in 2018 by featuring NFL player Colin Kaepernick in the 30th anniversary ad for the “Just Do It” campaign. Kaepernick had recently “taken a knee” to protest against racial inequality and police brutality in the U.S., and the action had been widely divisive.

The ad paid off. Nike enjoyed a huge spike in brand mentions across social media and news outlets, generating record followers and likes on social media. It was a big shift from the negative news stories Nike was associated with back in the 2000s.

While there were some who called for a boycott of Nike products, that criticism was ultimately drowned out by support. Instead, Nike's stock reached record highs and its voice percentage in the market went through the roof, too.

Dove's "Real Beauty" Campaign

Dove's "Real Beauty" is another great example of a marketing campaign that really got people talking. By featuring real women and their real bodies in their ads, they challenged beauty standards and celebrated diversity.

The campaign is now 20 years old, but still going strong. In fact, Dove has actually found ways to keep that conversation rolling and keep it fresh. To celebrate the 20-year anniversary, the brand renewed their commitment to never digitally alter the people in their ads or use AI-generated content.

Over the years, the continued conversation has resonated with many people and received lots of positive media coverage.

Airbnb's Pandemic Response

The peak of the COVID-19 pandemic could have been a time when Airbnb's share of voice plummeted. Since hardly anyone was leaving their homes or traveling, it's unlikely that people would be taking much about a platform that allows people to rent out their properties for those on vacation.

Instead, Airbnb turned a crisis into an opportunity by offering free housing to healthcare workers. Unsurprisingly, the generous move lead to loads of positive press and social media buzz. Rather than seeing a decrease in their share of voice, it sky rocketed to 89%.

What these examples show is that taking a stand on important issues can really boost your share of voice. It's not just about selling products - it's about connecting with people on a deeper level.

Common Challenges in Measuring and Growing Share Of Voice

Measuring and growing your share of voice can be tricky. You might face issues with data accuracy and collection. It’s also hard to get a full picture of your brand’s presence across all channels without accurate voice metrics.

Tracking organic search share can be complex. That's your share of searches on platforms like Google. It involves monitoring lots of keywords and competitors. To get it right, you need to gather this data regularly.

Sentiment analysis is another hurdle. It’s tough to gauge customer feelings accurately. While automated tools will help you track sentiment at scale, they can miss nuances in language and context.

Paid advertising clicks also don’t always reflect true share of voice. They can skew results if not balanced with organic metrics.

Campaign effectiveness is hard to isolate. Many factors impact your share of voice. It’s tricky to link specific actions to changes in your metrics.

Competitor research presents its own challenges. You might lack access to their internal data. This makes it hard to get a complete competitive picture. Effective competitive research can help bridge this gap.

But it's not all bad! Being aware of these challenges is the first step to overcoming them, and robust analytics tools will provide the most trustworthy results.

Most of these obstacles can also be successfully navigated by using different data sources, and combining quantitative and qualitative metrics (that involves looking at the stats and the context side by side).

Frequently Asked Questions

As we reach the end of this guide, let's address some frequently asked questions to make sure that there are no gaps where shape of voice is concerned.

How Does Share of Voice Impact Brand Awareness and Consumer Perception?

In case you hadn't guessed, these two things are definitely linked! A strong share of voice means a lot of people are talking about your brand, and this leads to increased brand awareness. When people see your brand mentioned more often, they're more likely to remember and recognize it.

This visibility can shape consumer perception, and of course it does depend on exactly what's being said about your brand.

If the conversations people see or hear are positive, it will make your brand seem more trustworthy and influential in your industry. On the flip side, if people see lots of criticism of your brand, it will likely put them off.

Can You Explain How Share of Voice in Public Relations Differs From Share of Voice in Pay-per-Click Advertising?

That's a good question, as these two things are actually quite different.

PR share of voice focuses on earned media coverage and organic mentions, typically across social media and traditional media. It measures your brand's presence in news articles, social media discussions, and other unpaid channels.

PPC share of voice, on the other hand, looks at your brand's visibility in paid search results compared to competitors.

What Methods Are Recommended for Tracking Share of Voice in Digital Media and Social Media Mentions?

Media monitoring tools are great for tracking online mentions of your brand and competitors, but it is possible to start small. Even a simple tool like Google Alerts is a good way to track key terms.

Share of Voice PR: Boosting Your Brand's Media Impact