Daily Junction.mobi portalMarketing · January 3, 2025 · Harper Quinn · 6 min
Share of voice measures how much of the conversation in your market belongs to you rather than your competitors. This guide explains what it is, how to calculate it across advertising, search and social, and how to use it without chasing a vanity number.
Imagine every advert, search result, social post and news mention in your market dropped into one big pile. Share of voice asks a simple question of that pile: how much of it is yours? It is one of the few marketing metrics that refuses to let you grade your own homework in isolation, because it only makes sense in comparison with everyone else competing for the same attention. That comparative quality is exactly what makes it useful — and occasionally misleading if you read it the wrong way.
Share of voice (SOV) is the proportion of total marketing activity or audience attention in your category that belongs to your brand, expressed as a percentage. Where market share measures your slice of actual sales, share of voice measures your slice of the presence — the advertising, the search visibility, the conversation. It tells you how loud your brand is relative to its rivals.
The core formula is the same whatever you measure:
Share of voice = (your brand's activity ÷ total activity across all brands) × 100
If five firms in your sector spend a combined £1 million on advertising in a quarter and you spent £250,000, your advertising share of voice is 25%. The principle is intuitive; the work is in deciding what counts as "activity" and gathering honest figures for the whole market, not just yourself.
"Share of voice" is really a family of related measures. The word originally described advertising, but it now stretches across most channels, and each version answers a slightly different question.
| Type | What it measures | How it is usually estimated |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising SOV | Your share of total ad spend or impressions in the category | Spend data, ad-tracking estimates |
| Search SOV | Your visibility in search results for target terms | Share of clicks or impressions for a keyword set |
| Social SOV | Your share of mentions or conversation about the category | Social listening tools counting brand mentions |
| Media (PR) SOV | Your share of press and editorial coverage | Media monitoring of articles and outlets |
A small local business might never track advertising SOV across a whole sector, but it can absolutely track search and social share of voice for the handful of terms and topics that matter to it. The right version is the one that maps to where your customers actually pay attention.
Calculating your own activity is the easy half. The hard half is the denominator: the total across all brands. A few principles keep the number honest.
This is where share of voice and competitor analysis overlap closely: you cannot measure your slice of the market without first mapping who else is in it and how visible they are.
The reason marketers care about share of voice is not vanity — it is a long-observed relationship with growth. A pattern repeatedly noted in marketing research is that a brand's share of voice and its market share tend to move towards each other over time. Put plainly:
The gap between the two even has a nickname in the trade: "excess share of voice". A positive figure suggests you are punching above your weight and likely to grow; a negative one is an early warning. This is a tendency across many brands, not a guarantee for any single one, but it explains why cutting marketing the moment sales dip can be a false economy — you may be quietly shrinking your future share. It also reframes spending decisions: share of voice helps connect what you invest to what you can expect, which is the same discipline behind sensibly setting a marketing budget.
A metric this comparative is easy to misuse. Some habits that keep it grounded:
There is also a UK angle worth remembering: louder is not the same as freer to say anything. Whatever your share of voice, advertising claims must still be legal, decent, honest and truthful under the rules overseen by the Advertising Standards Authority. Volume never excuses a misleading claim.
Share of voice measures how much of your market's attention belongs to you rather than your competitors, across advertising, search, social or media. Calculate it by dividing your activity by the total across all brands, keep the market definition and the measure consistent, and watch the trend rather than the decimal. Its real value lies in the well-known link to growth: brands that out-shout their current size tend to grow, while quiet ones tend to fade. Use it as a directional signal alongside sales and brand health — a compass, not a destination — and it becomes one of the more strategically useful numbers in marketing.
![[View image]](/img/what-is-share-of-voice.jpg){kind=link}