Share of Voice
It’s One Year Plan (1YP) season, the time of the year when brands are building out their marketing plans for the following calendar year.
Assess Marketing Pressure
Whether you’re already deep into it or whether you’re just getting ready for planning how you will market your brand, product or business in 2013, consider this:
From an overall marketing communications perspective, what is your share of voice versus your competition? What are they spending and how far is it getting them? What are you spending and how far is it getting you?
A very smart VP, Marketing at one of our clients calls this marketing pressure.
Impressions (media, social, digital, earned, sponsorship, experiential) are an intermediary measurement, but a reasonable one when considering share of voice. Get a view on total marketing spend and total impressions clocked for both you and for your competitors and look at a cost per impression as a benchmark metric. If you ladder this cost per impression against market share, yours and your competitors’ market share, do you gain any insights?
Bring the same notion of share of voice down to your sponsorship activity. Look at what your competitors are spending in rights fees and what they are spending in activation. Again, impressions is an intermediary metric and tracking impressions as a sole ROI metric is a fool’s game, but as a benchmarking tool – look at your cost per impression versus your competitors’ cost per impression. What insights do you gain?
Widen Your Definition of Competitor
Now, widen your view of what you consider to be your competitors in share of voice within your sponsorship space.
What is your share of voice within the specific sponsorships you’re investing in and activating? Let’s assume you’re not investing in sponsorships that deliver logo soup, where you’re one of many sponsors vying for the attention of the sponsored property’s audience.
You’re competing with the co-sponsors within the sponsorship properties that live within your sponsorship portfolio. Are you breaking through, or are you going unnoticed. Through the activation of each of your sponsorships, are you carving out ownable space that other property sponsors don’t and can’t have pleasance in?
Marketing is an investment. Share of voice – marketing pressure – is an important element of how you measure the efficiency of marketing investment.
