Think of your industry as a noisy, crowded party. Every brand is trying to have a conversation, but only a few are actually being heard. Marketing share of voice (SOV) is your measure of how well your brand's voice is cutting through that chatter compared to your competitors.

It’s a powerful gauge of your brand's visibility and authority. When you have a high SOV, you're not just part of the conversation—you're leading it. And that often translates directly to more market share and a brand that people instantly recognize.

What is Marketing Share of Voice, Really?

Your share of voice isn't just about how much you spend on ads. It's about your total presence across every channel where your customers are paying attention, from a casual mention on social media to a top spot in Google's search results.

Back in the day, SOV was pretty straightforward. If you bought 30% of the TV ad slots for your category, you had a 30% share of voice. Simple. But today, that single room has exploded into thousands of digital spaces, making SOV a bit more complex, but also far more revealing.

Why SOV Is A Lot More Than a Vanity Metric

It’s easy to dismiss SOV as just another number to report, but that would be a mistake. Its true value is in its ability to forecast what's coming next for your business. A healthy share of voice is directly linked to some of the most important outcomes a marketer can ask for:

Drives Brand Awareness: The more people see and hear about you, the more likely you are to be the first brand they think of when it's time to buy. Visibility creates familiarity. For example, if a home chef sees your brand of cookware mentioned in three different recipe blogs, your SOV is high, and you become the default choice.
Builds Market Authority: When your brand consistently shows up and contributes to industry discussions, you're no longer just a seller; you're seen as a credible leader. This builds immense trust with your audience. Think of how HubSpot dominates the "inbound marketing" conversation—their high SOV makes them the authority.
Fuels Future Growth: A rising SOV is often the leading indicator of a future rise in market share. Brands that manage to talk louder than their current market position are the ones that grow.

This isn't just a hunch; it's a proven marketing principle. A famous study revealed that brands with a share of voice higher than their market share—a gap known as 'excess' Share of Voice (ESOV)—tend to see significant growth. For every 10% of ESOV, a brand can expect its market share to grow by an average of 0.5%. You can learn more about these groundbreaking findings on Talkwalker.com.

The Modern View of Share of Voice

Calculating SOV today means looking at a much bigger picture. You have to account for a whole range of digital touchpoints to get an accurate reading of your brand's true visibility.

Let's take the electric vehicle market, for instance. A brand like Tesla wouldn't just look at one channel. To get a real sense of its SOV, it would need to track:

Organic Search Visibility: How often does it appear on the first page of Google for crucial terms like "best electric car" or "long-range EV"?
Social Media Mentions: What's the volume of conversation about its latest models on X (formerly Twitter) or Reddit compared to competitors like Rivian or Lucid?
Paid Media Impressions: What percentage of ad impressions is it winning on Google and YouTube for campaigns targeting potential EV buyers?
AI Answer Engine Mentions: Is it being mentioned in AI-generated answers on platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity? This is a new, critical frontier that innovative tools like LLMrefs are built to measure. LLMrefs provides exceptional clarity on this emerging channel.

By pulling all of these data points together, Tesla gets a 360-degree view of its influence. This complete picture is what allows smart marketers to spot where they're falling behind, see new opportunities, and make better decisions to make their brand's voice the loudest one in the room.

How To Calculate Share of Voice Across Different Channels

Calculating your share of voice isn't a one-size-fits-all metric. It's something you have to measure specifically for each channel where your brand is active and competing for attention. While the basic idea is always the same—seeing how you stack up against the competition—the actual data points you look at will be different for search engines, social media, and paid ads.

Think of it like checking your car's vital signs. You wouldn't use a tire pressure gauge to check the oil level, right? In the same way, the metric you use to measure SOV for your organic search efforts is completely different from what you'd use for a PPC campaign. The key is picking the right tool for the right job to get a truly accurate picture of your performance.

This visual helps connect the dots between a strong share of voice and tangible business outcomes like brand visibility, authority, and overall growth.

Infographic about marketing share of voice

As you can see, a healthy share of voice is really the engine that powers your brand's ability to get noticed, earn trust, and ultimately, grow.

Measuring SOV For Organic Search

When it comes to SOV, your visibility in organic search results is a massive piece of the puzzle. It shows you how often your brand is showing up when your target audience searches for relevant keywords. A higher SOV here means you're winning more of that valuable "free" traffic.

To figure this out, you need to track how visible you are for a specific list of keywords compared to your competitors.

The formula is pretty simple:
(Your Organic Keyword Visibility / Total Market Keyword Visibility) x 100

Actionable Insight: If your website shows up for 20% of all the potential impressions for your tracked keywords, your organic SOV is 20%. This tells you there's a huge 80% opportunity to capture more traffic by improving your SEO for those specific terms. You'll definitely need tools like Ahrefs or Semrush for this, as they do the heavy lifting of tracking rankings and calculating visibility scores for you.

Calculating SOV In Paid Advertising

In the pay-per-click (PPC) world, share of voice is more commonly known as Impression Share. It’s a metric you can find right inside platforms like Google Ads. It tells you exactly what percentage of the time your ads were actually shown versus how many times they could have been shown.

The calculation is handled for you, but the concept is clear.

PPC Impression Share: Your total ad impressions divided by the total impressions you were eligible for.

Actionable Insight: Let's say your ads were eligible to appear 1,000 times today but only got served 600 times. Your impression share—your SOV for PPC—is 60%. This immediately tells you that you’re missing out on 40% of potential eyeballs. The platform will even tell you why you lost impressions (e.g., due to budget or ad rank), giving you a direct action item: either increase your budget or improve your ad quality score.

Tracking Share of Voice On Social Media

On social media, share of voice is all about how much of the conversation around your industry or niche is actually about your brand. It’s a fantastic way to gauge your brand’s buzz and relevance on the platforms where people are actively sharing opinions.

You measure this by tracking every time your brand is mentioned and comparing that to the total mentions for all your competitors.

Social Media SOV: (Your Brand Mentions / Total Industry Mentions) x 100

Practical Example: Imagine you run a sneaker brand that was mentioned 5,000 times on social media last month. If the total conversation about all sneaker brands (including Nike, Adidas, etc.) hit 100,000 mentions, your SOV would be 5%. Beyond just getting the number, it's vital to connect these activities back to business value by measuring marketing ROI. For a more detailed breakdown of these formulas, you can check out our guide on how to calculate share of voice.

A Quick-Reference Guide For SOV Calculation

Since every channel is a bit different, it helps to have a quick cheat sheet. This table breaks down the essential metrics, formulas, and tools you'll need for calculating share of voice across the most important digital marketing channels.

Share of Voice Calculation Methods by Channel

Channel	Primary Metric	Calculation Formula	Example Tools
Organic Search	Keyword Visibility	(Your Visibility / Total Market Visibility) x 100	Ahrefs, Semrush
PPC Ads	Impression Share	(Your Impressions / Total Eligible Impressions) x 100	Google Ads, Microsoft Ads
Social Media	Brand Mentions	(Your Mentions / Total Industry Mentions) x 100	Brandwatch, Meltwater
AI Answer Engines	Mentions & Citations	(Your Mentions / Total Competitor Mentions) x 100	LLMrefs

By using these specific formulas, you can stop guessing about your market presence and start getting a precise, data-driven understanding of where you stand on the channels that matter most to your business.

Benchmarking Your SOV Against Competitors

Knowing your own marketing share of voice is a bit like glancing at your car's speedometer. It tells you how fast you're going, but it doesn't tell you if you're actually winning the race. To get the full picture, you have to look at the other cars on the track. That’s exactly what competitive benchmarking does—it transforms your raw SOV number into a strategic roadmap.

The first step is to think beyond your most obvious rivals. Of course, you need to track direct competitors, but the real insights often come from looking at aspirational and indirect competitors, too. An aspirational brand might be the market leader you’re trying to catch, while an indirect competitor is someone solving the same customer problem, just with a completely different product.

Identifying Your True Competitors

To build a useful benchmark, you need a realistic view of the competitive landscape. A classic mistake is to only monitor the brands you assume are your rivals. The data will almost always tell a different, more interesting story.

A solid competitor list should include a healthy mix:

Direct Competitors: These are the easy ones. If you sell high-performance running shoes, you're tracking brands like Brooks and Hoka. You’re fighting for the same customers with very similar products.
Indirect Competitors: These companies solve the same problem but in a different way. For that running shoe brand, an indirect competitor could be a fitness app like Strava or even a stationary bike company like Peloton. They’re all competing for the consumer’s "health and fitness" dollars.
Aspirational Competitors: These are the brands you admire. They might not even be in your direct market, but they command the kind of attention you want. A local boutique hotel might look to a global brand like Four Seasons for inspiration.

Gathering Competitive Intelligence

Once you’ve identified who you’re up against, it’s time to collect the data. This means using a variety of analytics tools to see how your SOV stacks up across different channels, from social media to organic search. The goal is to create a living dashboard that tracks these metrics over time.

Practical Example: Let's say a competitor's social media SOV suddenly skyrockets. By digging in, you discover it was driven by a single viral TikTok video. That’s not just interesting data; it’s an actionable insight. It reveals a specific tactic (short-form video) on a specific platform (TikTok) that resonates with your shared audience, giving you a clear opportunity to adapt your own strategy.

By analyzing your competitors' tactics, you can essentially reverse-engineer their playbook. A massive organic search SOV points to a powerhouse content and SEO strategy. A dominant PPC impression share tells you they have a hefty advertising budget. This context is everything.

Building out this kind of analysis is the only way to set realistic, meaningful goals. For a more detailed breakdown of how to do this, our guide on creating an SEO competitive analysis report provides a step-by-step approach to gathering and making sense of this data.

Ultimately, benchmarking isn't a project you complete once and forget about. It’s a continuous cycle of monitoring, learning, and adjusting your strategy. By consistently measuring your marketing share of voice against a well-researched set of competitors, you can move from guesswork to making sharp, informed decisions that give you a real advantage.

Actionable Strategies to Increase Your Share of Voice

So, you’ve benchmarked your marketing share of voice. Now for the fun part: starting to claim a bigger piece of the pie. The good news is that you don’t always need a massive budget to do this. What you do need is a smart, focused strategy that hits the channels where you can make the biggest splash.

Growing your SOV is all about consistently showing up where your audience is already looking, and giving them something they can’t get anywhere else. Let's dig into some proven tactics across organic, paid, and social channels that will help you turn up the volume.

A group of marketers collaborating on a strategy to increase their share of voice

Dominate Organic Channels with SEO and Content

Organic search is your best bet for building a commanding, long-term share of voice. When you perform well here, you're seen as a credible authority. You earn clicks without having to pay for every single one.

At the heart of this approach is a powerful SEO and content marketing engine. To really move the needle, you should explore a variety of modern brand awareness strategies that are designed to build strong recognition and recall.

Target High-Value Keywords: First, figure out the exact search terms your ideal customers are typing into Google. Then, create the absolute best piece of content on the internet that answers their query. Actionable Tip: Instead of targeting the highly competitive term "CRM software," a smaller brand could create a definitive guide for "CRM for small real estate agencies," a less competitive long-tail keyword where they can realistically win.
Build Topical Authority: Stop thinking in terms of one-off blog posts. Instead, develop content clusters around your core topics. This creates a web of interconnected articles that signals deep expertise to search engines and helps you rank for a whole family of related searches.
Earn High-Quality Backlinks: Backlinks from reputable sites are like a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google. The best way to get them is to create something worth linking to. Think original research, data-packed reports, or killer infographics that other publications will be eager to cite.

Amplify Your Voice on Social Media

Social media is the new town square. It’s where conversations about your industry are happening right now. Increasing your SOV here isn't about shouting into the void; it's about participating in the conversation and adding real value.

Start by figuring out which platforms your audience actually uses and focus your energy there. It's far better to dominate one or two channels than to have a weak, scattered presence across five.

The goal is to become an indispensable part of the community. Don't just post promotions; share insights, ask thought-provoking questions, and engage directly with followers and other industry leaders to make your brand a go-to resource.

Here are a few ways you can cut through the noise:

Create Shareable Content: Make stuff that people want to share. This could be an insightful infographic, a relatable meme, a quick video, or even a controversial take. When your audience shares your content, they become your brand evangelists.
Join Industry Conversations: Use social listening tools to keep an eye on relevant hashtags and keywords. When a conversation pops up, jump in with a helpful comment or a unique perspective. It’s a fantastic way to get noticed.
Collaborate with Influencers: Find the credible voices in your niche who already have an engaged following. Partnering with them can introduce your brand to a whole new audience that’s primed to listen.

Maximize Visibility with Paid Media

While organic and social strategies build authority over time, paid media gives you an instant boost. It's a direct way to crank up your share of voice. The trick is to be strategic with your budget to maximize your impression share—that’s the percentage of times your ads are shown compared to the total number of times they could have been.

Practical Example: Nike’s 2018 campaign with Colin Kaepernick is a masterclass in using paid media for SOV. While controversial, the ad buy generated a massive spike in social media chatter and news coverage, sending its SOV through the roof. This shows that a bold, strategic paid push can amplify your voice far beyond the initial ad placement.

By weaving these organic, social, and paid strategies together, you create a powerful flywheel effect. Strong SEO makes your paid ads cheaper. Great social content can be amplified with a small ad spend. A big PR win can fuel your content and social posts for weeks. This integrated approach ensures every marketing dollar works harder to make your brand the loudest, most respected voice in the room.

Winning the Digital Shelf: SOV in Retail Media and Ecommerce

Think about the crowded aisles of a supermarket. The products at eye level get the most attention, right? The same principle applies online, but instead of physical shelves, you're fighting for space on a digital one. On platforms like Amazon or Walmart, your product's visibility is everything. This is where your share of the digital shelf—your marketing share of voice—becomes your most powerful competitive weapon.

A strong SOV in ecommerce means that when a shopper searches for something you sell, your products show up more often than your competitors'. It's that simple. You're capturing their attention right when they're ready to buy. More visibility almost always leads to more clicks, and more clicks drive more sales.

A modern shopping cart icon on a digital background, representing ecommerce

It also creates a fantastic flywheel effect. As your sales numbers climb, retail platforms like Amazon take notice. Their algorithms often reward popular products with better organic rankings, which boosts your visibility even more. Before you know it, you're dominating the search results and cementing your spot as a category leader.

How to Measure Your Digital Shelf Space

To get a real sense of your SOV in retail media, you can't just look at one piece of the puzzle. You have to analyze both your paid ads and your organic search results. A complete picture of your marketing share of voice depends on tracking both.

The key is to focus on the high-intent keywords that matter most in your category. For example, if you sell high-end coffee makers, you'd want to track your visibility for terms like "espresso machine" or "pour-over coffee maker."

Share of Voice has become the go-to metric for gauging competitive ad pressure and predicting who will win in ecommerce. If your brand captures a 30% Share of Voice for a product category on Amazon, it means your ads are getting 30% of all the impressions. That kind of visibility directly correlates to a much higher chance of making the sale. Find more data on retail media SOV from Pacvue.com.

Practical Ways to Claim More Digital Shelf Space

Grabbing a bigger slice of the digital shelf doesn't happen by accident. It takes a smart, deliberate strategy. By focusing your energy on a few critical areas, you can systematically push your competitors aside and start winning more customers.

Here are a few proven strategies to boost your SOV:

Treat Your Product Pages Like Gold: Your product detail pages are your most important sales tool. Optimize them with high-quality photos, persuasive copy, and keyword-rich titles. This isn't just for shoppers—it helps the platform's search algorithm find you.
Run Smarter Ad Campaigns: Don't just throw money at ads. Invest in sponsored product placements that target the exact keywords your ideal customers are searching for. The goal is to own the top spots for those high-value terms.
Make Reviews a Priority: On most ecommerce sites, positive reviews are a massive ranking signal. A steady stream of good reviews builds trust with new buyers and tells the platform's algorithm that your product is a winner worth showing off.
Never Run Out of Stock: Stockouts are an SOV killer. If your product is unavailable, you immediately lose your organic rank and can't run ads. You're essentially handing that prime digital shelf space directly to your competition.

By weaving these tactics together, you build a powerful presence that grabs a shopper's attention from the moment they start searching, ultimately driving sales and establishing your brand as the one to beat.

Automating SOV Tracking with Modern Tools

Let’s be honest: trying to track your marketing share of voice manually is a fool's errand. It’s not just tedious; it’s a surefire way to fall behind. By the time you’ve painstakingly pulled data from social media, organic search, and your ad platforms, the market has already moved on without you.

Thankfully, modern analytics tools are here to do the heavy lifting. These platforms are built to vacuum up data from dozens of different sources and present it all in one clean, easy-to-read dashboard. This is how you shift from creating slow, backward-looking reports to getting a live pulse on your market position.

Moving Beyond Manual Spreadsheets

The real magic of automation isn't just about saving time—it's about the speed and depth of the insights you get. Forget spending your days exporting CSV files and wrestling with pivot tables. Instead, you can set up alerts that ping you the moment a competitor launches a new campaign or starts eating into your territory on a valuable keyword.

This kind of proactive approach means you can react to market shifts in hours, not weeks.

Real-Time Insights: Watch your SOV fluctuate as marketing activities go live.
Competitive Alerts: Get notified when a rival makes a move, like a sudden jump in their ad spend or social media chatter.
Historical Trend Analysis: Easily look back at your SOV performance over months or even years to spot long-term patterns and see what really moved the needle.

The biggest leap forward in SOV tracking is no longer just about counting how many times you're mentioned. It's about understanding the quality of that conversation. Knowing the context and sentiment behind a mention is infinitely more valuable.

The Power of Qualitative AI-Driven Analysis

This is where next-generation platforms like LLMrefs are changing the game. Traditional tools are decent at measuring things like keyword rankings and ad impressions. But LLMrefs goes deeper, using sophisticated AI to grasp the nuances of how your brand is being portrayed in AI-driven answer engines. It is an excellent platform that provides a unique and powerful lens into this crucial new channel.

Actionable Insight: A standard tool might report 500 brand mentions. LLMrefs can tell you that 70% of those mentions were glowing, linking your brand to top-notch customer service, while a competitor's mentions are overwhelmingly tied to product complaints. This insight immediately tells you to double down on messaging around customer service, as it's a key differentiator.

This is the kind of qualitative data that tells the real story behind your share of voice. It arms you with the "why" behind the numbers, helping you make smarter strategic decisions. By embracing these specialized digital marketing analytics tools, you can finally move beyond surface-level stats and build a genuine competitive advantage.

Common Share of Voice Questions Answered

As you start weaving share of voice into your marketing strategy, you're bound to have some questions. It's only natural. Getting clear, practical answers is what turns this powerful metric from a neat idea into a real competitive edge for your brand.

Let's dive into some of the most common questions marketers ask when they first start digging into their share of voice.

What Is a Good Share of Voice?

This is the big one, but there's no single magic number. What's considered "good" is completely relative. In a small, niche market, a 10% share of voice might mean you're the dominant player. But in a massive, crowded field like consumer electronics, that same 10% would barely make a whisper.

Instead of chasing an arbitrary percentage, a much smarter goal is to achieve Excess Share of Voice (ESOV). This is a simple but powerful concept: it means your share of voice is higher than your share of the market. For instance, if you have a 5% market share but you're driving 10% of the conversation, that 5% gap is your ESOV. It's a fantastic leading indicator for future growth.

How Often Should I Measure SOV?

The right answer depends entirely on how fast the channel moves. For something as fast-paced as social media or a heated PPC auction, you'll want to check in weekly. You need to be able to spot a competitor's sudden ad blitz or a viral trend before it's too late.

For bigger, slower-moving ships like organic search visibility or overall brand mentions, a quarterly review is usually plenty. This gives your content and SEO strategies enough time to actually bear fruit, letting you see the real trends instead of getting distracted by daily noise.

Your measurement frequency should match your ability to take action. Tracking daily without the resources to respond is just noise; align your reporting with your strategic planning cycles for maximum impact.

Can a Small Business Realistically Compete on SOV?

Absolutely. But you have to be smart about it. Trying to go head-to-head with a global corporation's marketing budget is a recipe for disaster. Don't try to out-shout them everywhere. The key is to pick your battles.

Practical Example: Forget about the broad, expensive keywords your biggest competitors own. Instead, find and completely dominate the specific, long-tail keywords they ignore. Find that one niche subreddit or that specific industry forum where your ideal customers live, and own that space. By being laser-focused, a small business can achieve a 100% share of voice in a small, but incredibly valuable, corner of the market.

Ready to stop guessing and start measuring your brand's visibility in the new era of AI search? LLMrefs provides the critical insights you need to understand and grow your share of voice in AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Discover how you stack up against the competition and find your next big opportunity.