How to Measure Share of [Local] Voice

David Hunter October 28, 2020

Refine your digital marketing strategy by calculating your share of [local] voice.

Share of voice (SOV) is the latest in digital marketing metrics that brands and digital marketers are tracking to determine the popularity and authority of their companies and organizations.

But just as local SEO tends to be different from general SEO trends and strategies, share of local voice is unique to companies and brands looking to engage with consumers on a local level.

What is Share of Voice?

The world of digital marketing moves practically at lightspeed, making it hard to keep up with the latest metric trends. If you missed the emergence of SOV or are just hearing about it for the first time, here’s a rundown:

Share of voice (SOV) is a digital marketing metric used to determine how much market space a brand takes up.

It serves as a gauge of how much brand visibility a company or organization has, and how much conversation is being stirred by the brand in its given industry. The more SOV a brand has, the more digital market share it possesses. Furthermore, the more market share it has, the greater the popularity and authority the brand has.

Share of voice — though an official digital marketing metric — can be difficult to calculate. (Though not as difficult as word of mouth, which for many retailers, is the most impactful way to reach customers.)

How to Calculate Your Brand’s SOV

Knowing how to calculate an SOV — on a national and local scale — will help brands and organizations determine their ranking and reshape their digital marketing strategies to reach new customers and communities.

To calculate a brand’s SOV, you can use organic keywords, impressions, reach, mentions and hashtags.

The best place to measure SOV is on social media. These platforms are the “true” voice of customers and (for most brands) is the closest thing to word of mouth sharing that can be tracked and analyzed. Calculating your SOV in this way can also give you insight into your customer base that may otherwise be missed.

Calculate a SOV:

1. Take a brand hashtag or keyword and determine how many times the word or hashtag of your choice is being used online.
2. Analyze how often the same hashtag or keyword is being used with competing brands in your market.
3. Calculate your SOV using this formula: [Number of mentions of your brand Total amount of brand mentions (the combination of your and your competitors’)] 100 = SOV

Search Engine Journal recommends using free social media monitoring tools to gain insights used to calculate using SOV, though they note these free tools often have their flaws and lack detail, so be mindful of when measuring your chosen metrics.

What is Share of Local Voice?

Now that the basics have been established and you (hopefully) have a reasonable understanding of how to calculate your SOV, we can get into share of local voice.

Share of local voice is the percentage of data points where a business ranks in the top three positions of a given ranking cycle.

Share of local voice is calculated differently than traditional SOV as the markets are often much smaller, making it more difficult to acquire metrics that would help determine share of local voice.

So instead — in most cases anyways — we return to basic SERP and keyword rankings.

Of course, you can do this manually (by searching for different keywords and phrases related to your brand and seeing how often it appears in the top SERP positions compared to competitors), but a simpler way to report on share of local voice is with the local ranking tool Local Falcon.

Instead of repeatedly searching for brands and keywords on Google to record and compare result rankings (which, overtime, will skew results), using a tool like Local Falcon will help you determine where in SERPs your brand is landing in a given geographical location.

Putting Share of [Local] Voice in Action

Digital marketing and brand specialists are adding SOV to their list of digital marketing analytics to track all over the country, but few are focused on share of local voice.

Share of local voice is typically unique to companies and organizations that perform on a community level as opposed to national or international, but learning to analyze and harness it correctly can open doors in larger markets over time.

Think about it: If you record a brand’s share of local voice in their base city, you can then begin to strategize on how to expand to other regions.

And remember, SOV is emerging as an important digital marketing metric that can be easily tracked when using the handy equation.

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