Why Share of Voice is Mission Critical to Your Competitive Intelligence Program

There’s a long list of metrics you can track to gauge the success of your Competitive Intel program. Let’s talk about a powerful one that doesn't always get the love it deserves.

But first, let me give you some context.

When I started my Competitive Intel program at Later, I wanted to consider the entire customer journey to give us a data-backed approach to painting our competitive landscape.

Paying close attention to who we were competing with at the acquisition phase of our customer journey ended up paying major dividends, and led me to a metric I’d heard of but had never taken advantage of.

Since then, it’s become an invaluable measure in gauging how we’re positioned in the market.

I’m talking about Share of Voice.

What is Share of Voice?

Share of voice is a calculation that tells you how much of the market your company “owns” compared to the competition.

Now, “own” in the context of Share of Voice can mean several things…

Traditionally, Share of Voice described the “share” of a brand's advertising in media channels, such as print, radio, or television, compared to its competitors.

But it’s since evolved to now include other brand awareness metrics, such as ad reach, social media mentions, and website traffic.

There’s a handful of reasons why measuring Share of Voice is important to any business. Here’s a few of them:

• It gives you a snapshot of industry trends. This helps you keep current on what’s hot or not in your industry so you can make sure that you’re always giving your audience the most relevant content.

• It gives you a glimpse into what your competitors are talking about and where they’re talking about it.

• It helps you understand which topics/problems/products your prospects are most interested in, offering a glimpse into marketing effectiveness.

• It tells you where you might have a product/solution gap relative to your competitors.

• It helps you identify why customers choose your solution over your competitors.

• It drives revenue. A higher Share of Voice is generally correlated with increased revenue opportunities because you’re working to understand your company’s market presence and how to increase it, which impacts the bottom line.

Share of Voice ≠ Market Share

Share of Voice isn't the same thing as market share, but it does correlate with market share and revenue.

Share of Voice helps us understand the authority the Later brand carries in the market. The higher our Share of Voice, the more authority our brand carries.

Market share, on the other hand, is the percentage of the market we own based on revenue vs. addressable market.

We chose Share of Voice over Market Share because… well, it’s easier to track. Most competitors in our space are privately held, so revenue and customer numbers aren't exactly easy to come by.

And also, there are tools available to us that help us track Share of Voice and paint a picture of our visibility and brand authority within the market that goes beyond revenue.

How to start tracking your Share of Voice

We use SEO Share of Voice as our measure of visibility and ownership in the market because it provides us with a clear picture of how well our website and content perform. This measure is based on the keywords we’ve determined are most important to our growth.

There's a bunch of ways to measure SEO Share of Voice, but we found the most accurate (and easiest) way to do it is using Semrush.

Our Share of Voice project is built on a master keyword list developed by our SEO team. If you want to get one started, you’ll need to become best friends with these people—they’ll become invaluable partners in your Share of Voice journey.

The list started as a few hundred keywords and continues to grow over time. It’s based on keywords identified as the most important for us to rank for over the next 6 to 12 months.

Using Semrush, I upload the keyword list into a “project,” which helps me separate the data into its own area of the software and make reporting easier. The software uses a measure called “position tracking” to determine how well each of those keywords performs over time.

Semrush compares the performance of our master keyword list against any competitors also ranking for those keywords.

The formula it uses is actually pretty simple:

Not all competitors will rank for each keyword we're trying to rank for—but the more overlap, the higher the competition for SOV.

This is where things get fun because in some cases, you may think you're competing with a company, but the SEO data could suggest otherwise.

Or it might show you that you compete with someone at the customer acquisition phase… but at the product level, not so much.

For example, we have a very different feature set than a large competitor in our space. Heck, we don’t even go after the same segment of customers, but we compete with them at the SEO level.

That tells me we need to be aware of them, but there are probably other competitors who are more aligned to our product that I should invest more time on with my Product team.

Share of Voice could also help us if we decide to move up-market—to get started, we’d just figure out what keywords our up-market competitors are prioritizing. This would offer us a glimpse into their priorities and help us identify opportunities to win some of that traffic ourselves.

Note: You can do this without a master keyword list like the one we use, but I recommend the route we’ve taken to hone in on the keywords most important to your SEO team. Otherwise, Semrush (or any other tool like it) will base your SOV on every single keyword you’re ranking for, which could generate a less accurate measure

Share of Voice is a way to get everyone excited about your Competitive Intel program

I report on Share of Voice every month, and it’s become something our marketing team celebrates as we track our progress vs. our competitors.

There’s always a bunch of virtual high-fives thrown around in Zoom every time we overtake a competitor.

It’s a great measure of incremental growth, and a way to showcase how investment in marketing resources is elevating our position in the market.

At a competitive level, Share of Voice has evolved into a secret weapon.

It gives me a clear view into what our competitors are thinking about, problems they’re trying to solve, or products they’re thinking about developing.

These are insights I can act on immediately to inform marketing initiatives, products we could drive more attention to, and even solutions we could improve to stay ahead of the competition.

P.S. If you liked this, consider listening to the Healthy Competition podcast or joining the community!