Share of Voice: What It Is and How to Get More

If you're familiar with marketing or social media, chances are you've heard of the term "share of voice." In this article, BidX breaks down what this metric means and how you can increase your own to get more customers.

Share of Voice (SOV) is a metric used to determine how high the visibility of a brand or product is compared to its competitors in the digital context. It serves as an indicator of how much a company dominates an industry and how popular a brand or product truly is.

Companies that can track their share of voice are able to understand their position in the market better and can draw comparisons to competitors. In some cases, you'll want to know the share of voice for individual products. Other times, it pays off to measure the share of voice for an entire brand.

How is Share of Voice Calculated?

First things first, use this share of voice formula to find out your own figures:

Here's an example of a share of voice calculation in action. Imagine that you see 40 placements of various brand names and yours appears 10 times. You would have a linear share of voice of 25%.

Of course, you can also look at share of voice in another way by assigning different values to different placements. The upper placements would therefore have a "higher" value than the lower ones. If you use this weighted method, the SOV would be higher if you have the first 10 placements on a page rather than if you have the last 10 placements.

Why is Share of Voice Important?

Keeping an eye on the competition is one of the most important challenges for companies - especially on Amazon. This also includes categorizing yourself in the competitive environment and recognizing opportunities and threats. This is exactly what share of voice marketing can do for you.

Performing a share of voice analysis can help you understand:

• How visible your own brand or individual products are
• How effective previous marketing activities were
• What competitors are doing better or worse than you

Share of voice is particularly interesting to look at on Amazon, since the competition there is extremely high and continues to increase.

As a company, you want to make sure that your product appears when someone searches for a relevant keyword and work to stay ahead of your competition.

Is your listing failing to show up in Amazon's search results? Sign up for SellerPulse's listing suppression alerts to be notified when Amazon has search suppressed your product page and how you can fix the problem, fast.

Strategies to Improve Your Share of Voice on Amazon

There are two main strategies to effectively improve your Share of Voice on Amazon.

1) Optimize Your Product Detail Pages

All of your Amazon listings should be optimized to perform at the highest level possible. This will help you achieve a better ranking, more sales, and of course, improve your SOV.

Take the time to carefully optimize your product title, images, bullet points, and product description. To step up your game, you can also use A+ Content or even Premium A+ Content which replaces your product description with images and visual explanations. It's really important to use all relevant keywords that potential customers might search for in your listing.

Finally, make sure that your content is informative, describes your product comprehensively, and shows off its many benefits for customers.

Learn more: Amazon Listing Guide: Best Practices for Best Sellers

2) Utilizing Ads on Amazon

Optimizing your product listing is a good first step to increase your ranking and your SOV. However, it's no secret that you must use advertising in order to be successful on Amazon.

Running ads on Amazon has many advantages, including the ability to:

• Identify your most relevant keywords
• Identify your biggest competitors and “attack” their placements
• Create “protect campaigns” to save your brand keywords
• Use different ad types for your different campaign goals
• Use both short and long-tail keywords

Looking at your SOV can also help you optimize your ad campaigns and measure their effectiveness. For example, when you launch a share of voice advertising campaign, you can see if your percentage increases afterward. This indicates that your campaign is successful and your visibility is increasing. Based on this, you can also optimize other campaigns and continuously increase your visibility in the market.

What Share of Voice Tools Can Do For You

Manually calculating your share of voice can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious. You must take into consideration many different products, keywords, and marketplaces.

For this reason and more, BidX allows you to easily calculate your share of voice right from within its tool. You control the settings and the questions, including:

• Should the organic or the paid results be considered?
• Which keywords should be tracked?
• Which tracking type should be used - products or brands?
• How should the calculation be done? (You can distinguish between the linear and the weighted calculation mentioned above.)

If you want to know how you can use BidX's share of voice tools, you can send a request to hello@bidx.io. We look forward to hearing from you!