Presence relative to competitors
Share of voice is a brand's presence in its market relative to competitors, and a share of voice above a brand's market share tends to predict growth. It measures how much of the total conversation, visibility, and attention in a category a brand commands, across channels like search, media, social, and advertising. Where market share measures how much a brand sells, share of voice measures how present it is, and the relationship between the two turns out to be one of the more useful predictive signals in marketing.Why it predicts growth
The reason share of voice matters is a well-established marketing principle about its relationship to market share:
- When a brand's share of voice exceeds its market share, it tends to gain market share over time. - When it falls below, the brand tends to lose share.
This makes share of voice a leading indicator: it moves before market share does, so a brand investing to raise its share of voice above its market share is investing in future growth, while one letting its share of voice slip below its market share is likely ceding ground it has not lost yet. This forward-looking quality is what makes share of voice valuable for the otherwise hard-to-measure brand.
Making brand measurable
Share of voice matters especially because it is one of the few ways to make brand presence measurable, which addresses brand marketing's chronic disadvantage against easily-attributed demand. Brand's effects are diffuse and lagged, flowing partly through the dark funnel, so brand investment struggles to justify itself against demand's clear metrics. Share of voice gives brand a leading, quantifiable indicator, a measure that predicts growth and can be tracked over time, which helps it compete for budget and lets a company see whether its brand presence is strengthening or weakening before that shows up in sales. It connects directly to share of voice ROI, which relates the investment in presence to the return. Measured across the channels where a category's conversation actually happens and tracked against market share, share of voice is one of the most useful metrics for a brand-conscious marketing team, because it turns the abstract question of brand strength into a concrete number with a known relationship to future growth, giving the long-term, compounding work of brand-building a leading indicator that the short-term, measurable work of demand generation has always had.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is share of voice?
Share of voice is a measure of a brand's presence in its market relative to competitors, across channels like search, media coverage, social, and advertising. It captures how much of the total conversation or visibility in a category a brand commands. A higher share of voice means the brand is more present and top-of-mind than its competitors.
Why does share of voice matter?
Because it is a leading indicator of brand strength and future growth. A well-established marketing principle holds that when a brand's share of voice exceeds its market share, it tends to gain share, and when it falls below, it tends to lose. This makes share of voice a forward-looking signal for the otherwise hard-to-measure brand.
How is share of voice measured?
By quantifying a brand's presence relative to competitors across relevant channels, share visibility, media mentions, social conversation, advertising presence, and expressing it as a percentage of the category total. The specific channels depend on where the category's conversation happens, but the principle is a brand's share of the total presence.
Put these metrics to work
ORM builds custom revenue forecast models that turn concepts like share of voice into prescriptive action for your team.
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