9 Expert Tips to Increase Share of Voice (and Beat Competitors)

Share of voice determines how prominent your online visibility is over a competitor. Learn to increase your share of voice to drive more awareness, traffic, and revenue.

Here, you’ll find:

1. What is share of voice?
2. 9 tactics to increase share of voice
3. Top share of voice tools
4. How to calculate share of voice
5. Why is share of voice important?

Your brand may boast the best products and services, the most admirable mission, or the top executive team. But if no one knows or talks about your brand, you’ll struggle to attract and convert customers.

In this article, we’ll cover how to increase your share of voice, how to calculate it, which measurement tools to use, and why this metric is so important for controlling the conversation and staying ahead of the competition.

What is share of voice?

Share of voice (SOV) is a measure of how your brand’s visibility compares to the competition. It’s a type of competitor analysis that tells you:

• Prospects’ awareness of your brand
• How often prospects mention your brand online
• Visibility of your brand is across various digital marketing channels
• How much of the conversation your brand owns compared to the competition

What channels does share of voice include?

This metric isn’t limited to a single channel. Share of voice can quantify your brand’s impact across several channels:

• Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO)
• Organic social media, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter / X, YouTube, and more
• Digital advertising, including pay-per-click (PPC) and paid social
• Public relations (PR) and earned media

In some cases, you may measure total share of voice across all channels. But marketers typically focus on one channel at a time. For example, you can measure social media share of voice to assess visibility across your brand’s social networks.

“We believe that share of voice is an important metric to measure for both organic and paid initiatives. In fact, we recommend using as many channels that are viable for your business in order to gain as much share of voice as possible. From there, we want to get strategic and granular to convert a high percentage of the SOV,” explains Rambod Yadegar, President of HawkSEM.

Share of voice vs. market share: What’s the difference?

These metrics are similar — both measure your brand against competitors. However, share of voice and market share have one key difference:

• Share of voice measures visibility or brand awareness compared to the competition.
• Market share measures sales or revenue compared to the competition.

9 tactics to increase share of voice

Is your brand awareness constantly trailing behind the competition? Here’s how to improve your share of voice across various channels.

1. Expand your reach on social media
2. Create content your customers want to share
3. Build a more engaged online community
4. Encourage user-generated content (UGC)
5. Partner with influencers in your industry
6. Seek out guest posting and guest speaking opportunities
7. Invest in your SEO and content marketing strategy
8. Audit your PPC budget and keyword portfolio
9. Reevaluate your target audience

1. Expand your reach on social media

If your social share of voice is low, take steps to expand your reach and engagement on key social channels.

• Does your brand have a minimal presence on major social media networks? Build out a more robust social media marketing strategy and start posting more organic content.
• Does your social media reach seem unusually low? Get familiar with each social network’s algorithm so you know what type of content works best on each.
• Is organic social media growth taking too long? Consider running brand awareness ads to get your business in front of more prospects and increase your following.

“In my experience and what my data shows, social media and SEO are by far the best channels for increasing share of voice. Online visibility and market share come down to a combination of SEO and social media efforts, and these two channels play an important role in increasing a brand’s share of voice, and most importantly, maintaining the edge against the competition,” explains Tom Golubovich, Head of Marketing at Ninja Transfers.

“The one tactic that always works is analyzing the market’s content performance and optimizing your content strategy to boost output, reach, and engagement across these platforms. For example, any time we decided to double or triple our content efforts to compete in the market, our brand visibility and SOV metrics went up significantly. However, it’s not just about producing more content, but also better content.”

2. Create content your customers want to share

Increasing share of voice is about more than just getting followers to comment on your social media posts. Ideally, you want them to share your content with their own followers. That way, you can gradually improve awareness of your brand, and expand your potential customer base.

The content topics your audience is most likely to share depend on their demographics, interests, and challenges. However, certain content types and formats are more likely to drive shares.

• The most shareable content includes infographics, videos, memes, and limited-time offers.
• The content with the most backlinks includes how-to guides, interviews, and original research.

3. Build a more engaged online community

Creating shareworthy organic social media content and running more paid social campaigns are just the first steps. To get customers to talk about your brand, you need an engaged community.

Posting content that sparks conversations is a good place to start. But when you want to increase share of voice significantly, you need customers to start conversations about your brand.

“Social media can be an excellent place to increase share of voice, particularly by implementing campaigns that command more engagement from your followers,” explains David Gaglione, Founding Partner of PS212.

“Say you launch a challenge where followers are asked to tag you in their Stories and Posts once they’ve completed the tasks involved in your promotion. That alone can generate dozens of mentions for your brand on just a single platform, increasing your reach and brand awareness without much market spend.”

4. Encourage user-generated content (UGC)

As you take steps to improve brand awareness, you’re likely to start collecting more brand mentions on social media. While comments and tags can increase share of voice, original content can have a bigger impact.

To prompt customers to share content featuring your brand, encourage them to create UGC.

Ask them to:

• Show what they made using your product
• Reveal their workflow for using your products
• Create an unboxing reel featuring your product
• Highlight the store where they purchased your product
• Share how they benefited from your company’s services

You always have the option to run completely organic UGC campaigns. But if you offer prizes or freebies, you may get more engagement — and ultimately more share of voice.

5. Partner with influencers in your industry

Customers can be excellent advocates for your brand. After all, almost 50% of consumers trust recommendations from strangers online as much as those from family and friends.

But if your customers have relatively small audiences, their mentions may not help as much as you’d like. To reach a much wider audience, consider influencer partnerships.

When you work with influencers, you tap into an engaged community and a network that trusts each other’s recommendations. If you choose an influencer who’s a good match for your brand, you can also get high-quality SEO and social media content that mentions your brand.

6. Seek out guest posting and guest speaking opportunities

Increasing media share of voice doesn’t have to require press releases or a PR team. Instead, consider alternative ways to get your brand in front of your target audience while earning media mentions.

• Podcasts: Make a list of podcasts that cover topics in your niche. Filter out those that don’t accept guests. Then review the pitch process for the rest and start reaching out to pitch your executive team.
• Guest posts: Written thought leadership can be just as effective. Follow the same steps as above, but for blogs in your industry. Then start placing high-quality guest posts on sites with high domain authority.
• Subject matter expert quotes: You don’t always need to write a full post or record a full episode to get great brand mentions. Contribute your team’s subject matter expertise to get mentions and backlinks.

7. Invest in your SEO and content marketing strategy

Is your SEO share of voice always slightly below the competition? Follow these steps to improve your metrics:

• Rethink your budget. Are you spending enough to create the high-quality content you need to rank at the top of the SERPs?
• Revisit keyword research. Are you going after the most relevant keywords for your business? Does your content align with search intent?
• Reconsider distribution. Producing great content is just one step of the process. Are you sharing SEO content across channels and building links?

“Having a comprehensive understanding of our competitors was crucial,” explains Tanantino. “We differentiated Grooveshark by focusing on innovative product features like the ‘listen anywhere’ functionality and social sharing features, which not just augmented the user experience but also helped us stand out in a crowded market.”

“Monitoring was done through standard SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc. However, the real juice was in the data’s interpretation. Understanding which artists or songs resonated with our audience and then creating more of that type of content became our north star.”

What does a successful SEO campaign and B2B content marketing funnel look like? HawkSEM partnered with Prismatic to boost keyword rankings by 67%. Our efforts also increased the top three keyword rankings by 225%.

8. Audit your PPC budget and keyword portfolio

Is your impression share remarkably low for Google or Microsoft ads? To find out why, check the ad network’s impression share lost metrics.

Both networks reveal whether budget or ad rank is causing you to miss out on ad impressions. Use this data to determine how to optimize your PPC campaigns.

If budget is the main issue, consider increasing your total budget or allocating more for crucial keyword groups. Revisit your bids for important keywords, and increase them to be more competitive and land more impressions.

If ad rank is the main issue, review your keyword research and ad copy to ensure it aligns with your target audience. Optimize your landing page so it fits your PPC campaign better.

9. Reevaluate your target audience

Whether you’re successfully increasing share of voice or struggling to get traction, it’s worth reconsidering your target audience. Are your campaigns reaching the right people? Are you leaving major markets untapped?

“Tracking is an essential part of any marketing campaign. Along with measuring share of voice, we use ConversionIQ (CIQ) to granularly track every single step of the buyer journey. That way we can understand what aspects of a campaign are working and where we should cut back,” shares Sam Yadegar, CEO of HawkSEM.

“Further, tracking with CIQ provides more insight about the target audience, which allows us to take that data and leverage it on another marketing channel. Then we can further scale PPC campaigns and content marketing funnels while maintaining profitability.”

Top share of voice tools

No platform can monitor share of voice metrics across all channels. Instead, use a tool designed for the channels that matter most to your brand.

Social listening tools

Leverage social listening tools to track social share of voice.

Agorapulse

(Image: Agorapulse)

As a social media listening platform, Agorapulse can track mentions, hashtags, and keywords for your brand and the competition. Its tagging system can track sentiment, offering another layer of insights. Because it’s also a social media management tool, Agorapulse helps teams plan, analyze, and optimize social media content to improve their share of voice.

Keyhole

(Image: Keyhole)

Keyhole tracks direct and indirect mentions so brands can easily assess impact across social media. The platform’s AI-powered sentiment analysis offers more nuanced feedback, breaking down positive, neutral, and negative mentions. Keyhole’s trending topics feature can help brands find and join popular conversations to boost their share of voice.

SEO tools

Use these tools to measure and improve SEO share of voice.

Ahrefs

(Image: Ahrefs Rank Tracker)

As a complete SEO platform, Ahrefs charts keyword rankings and organic search traffic. Ahrefs’ rank tracker tool monitors share of voice using a custom set of competitors, offering a more complete picture of how your brand performs on the SERPs.

“We rely on SEO metrics to see how our marketing strategies enhance our share of voice. We use a rank tracker that compares the keywords our company is associated with. Then we compare that with competitors using the competitor tab on Ahrefs,” explains Bernard Castro, Founder of Bybrand.

“The main challenge has been finding more effective methods of creating engaging content using the results from our keyword research. We are considering using generative AI to create a knowledge base, but we are still looking at how to overcome Gen AI’s limitations.”

Semrush

(Image: Semrush)

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool for keyword research, backlink monitoring, and competitor analysis. Semrush’s position tracker can chart your brand and its competitors, monitoring both visibility and share of voice. Since it tracks each brand’s position on the SERP on a daily basis, this tool is ideal for monitoring progress and spotting trends.

PPC dashboards

Set up PPC dashboards to monitor impression share for active campaigns.

Google Ads

(Image: Google Ads)

Google Ads automatically tracks search and display impression share for any PPC campaign you run on the ad network. It can also reveal when your ads lost impression share due to ad rank or campaign budget, which can help you make data-driven improvements.

Microsoft Ads

(Image: Microsoft Ads)

Microsoft Ads tracks impression share for ads on Bing. The ad network’s share of voice report charts total impression share, top impression share, and relative click-through rate (CTR). It also calculates lost impression share to reveal how often the competition outbids or outranks your ads.

PR software

Use PR software to track brand mentions and earned media.

Prowly

(Image: Prowly)

As a PR and media monitoring tool, Prowly measures both press and social media mentions. Its filtering options let you zero in on specific topics, and its sentiment features help you understand how the press, your customers, and the general public is talking about your brand.

Brandwatch

(Image: Brandwatch)

Brandwatch is a media monitoring tool that tracks mentions across 100 million surfaces, including both online and print channels. It provides real-time data on mentions and share of voice, making it ideal for marketing teams that need to analyze campaigns and respond to trends quickly.

How to calculate share of voice

To calculate this metric, use this simple share of voice formula:
Share of Voice = Your Brand Metrics / Total Market Metrics

As you can see, this formula requires two data points: your brand metrics and total market metrics. The best way to track these metrics depends on the channel. Here’s a breakdown of each channel that drives share of voice.

SEO share of voice

When you measure SEO share of voice, you have to factor in metrics like:

• Keyword portfolio, since this measurement is based on the specific keywords your brand is pursuing
• Organic clicks, since website traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs) drives this measurement
• Search volume, since keywords that drive more organic traffic make a bigger impact on your overall share of voice

To calculate SEO share of voice, divide your brand’s organic search traffic by the total search volume. You can measure this metric for individual keywords, for your entire portfolio, or for keyword categories.

“In my experience with Grooveshark, we found that SEO was a powerful channel for increasing our share of voice. By focusing on optimizing our site content for popular artist names and tracks, we managed to consistently rank in the top 10 search results on Google,” shares Sam Tanantino, Fractional CMO at Harmonic Outreach.

“This generated high organic traffic and significantly boosted our visibility. For example, we created unique musician pages that were SEO optimized and tracked closely to see what kind of visitors they attracted.”

Social media share of voice

Social media share of voice focuses on brand mentions. In other words, you need to know the total number of mentions of your brand versus the competition across social media platforms.

Although this metric may seem simple, this kind of social media competitor analysis can be complicated to measure. You’ll need to track all kinds of social media mentions, including full brand names, nicknames, and hashtags.

You may opt to measure the share of voice for a single social media platform or for several at once. Use your social media strategy to determine the platforms that matter to your team.

PR share of voice

Also known as media share of voice, this metric refers to the mentions your brand gains from earned media and PR campaigns.

PR share of voice can include mentions in:

• Podcasts
• News articles
• Blog posts
• YouTube videos

To measure PR share of voice, track your brand mentions across the web. Then compare your brand’s number to the competition.

PPC share of voice

Compared to other marketing channels, PPC share of voice is much easier to calculate. Compare the number of times your ads successfully displayed to how many times they could have served — but were outranked by the competition.

When you run Google Ads, the advertising platform calculates this metric automatically. Below, we’ll cover how to find your impression share for search and display ads using Google Ads reporting tools.

Why is share of voice important?

Tracking share of voice is crucial for businesses in virtually every industry. Here’s why share of voice is important for B2C and B2B companies alike.

Go beyond basic campaign analysis

From content strategy to SEO to PPC, you can easily measure the results of any marketing campaign or channel. Share of voice goes beyond monitoring campaigns to provide a big-picture view of your brand’s performance.

Measure full-funnel impact

Many marketing campaigns focus on outcomes like conversions and revenue. As crucial as these results are, they don’t reflect brand visibility. By measuring your brand’s share of voice, you can more accurately assess full-funnel impact.
Gain competitive analysis insights

When reviewing your marketing efforts, it’s easy to use benchmarks to quantify campaign success. Yet this approach fails to account for the competition.

Share of voice is a type of competitive analysis. As a result, it provides a more nuanced view of your advertising or marketing strategy.

For example, you may find that you’re outperforming your brand’s previous campaign. Yet you may also learn that you’re underperforming compared to the competition. These insights can help with reassessing your marketing efforts.

The takeaway

With a well-crafted digital marketing plan, you can increase your share of voice strategically, across all marketing channels that matter to your brand and industry.

To explore how our experienced team can help, reach out to HawkSEM. Book a free digital marketing consultation to learn more about our services and marketing tools.