When it comes to solidifying a company’s media presence, Share of Voice can be misleading.
High numbers of media citations can hide a lazy or poorly executed PR strategy. In the world of public relations, the quality of a single mention in a top tier media outlet often outweighs tens of passing mentions in any other outlet. Alternatively, a profile in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal is certainly worth a lot more than a passing comment anywhere else.
Share of Voice, however, will record all citations in the exact same way – as a single citation - masking the success (or not) and all the other nuance of that press mention. In this way, a lot of the work around promoting a company’s brand is wasted on chasing opportunities that do not live up to the promise of generating the highest return on investment.
This is why Material Impact has launched a proprietary algorithm that rates media hits, called Share of Voice+ (SoV+), and is part of the MiData PR and marketing analytics platform.
Material Impact's algorithm takes into account both the qualitative and quantitative aspects behind a single media citation, including whether the citation is a Tier 1 or Tier 2 opportunity (as defined by the client), geographic location, type of mention (profiles and by-lines score more highly than passing expert commentary, for example). We then use third party data which estimates the circulation and reads of a particular news page, along with other web metrics like domain authority.
These and other metrics, properly weighted, make up Material Impact's Share of Voice+ score (SoV+). The score encapsulates all the elements that should help financial services firms understand the effectiveness of their engagement with the media. The new metric assigns each media citation a score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest SoV+ score that a company’s citation in the media can get.
As a result of this algorithm, marketing and PR professionals are now able to score media mentions, putting a rating to the quality of their media campaigns and helping the C-suite better understand the efforts of their communications teams - and the link between budget and results. Going further, MiData customers can also link their Google Analytics, social media and other marketing metrics to better understand the Return on Investment (ROI) from their wider campaigns and how their PR fits into it.
Scoring media citations also allows financial services companies to benchmark their current performance against their engagements with the media in previous years, or future ones. This is a useful metric for those engaging in brand value benchmarking.
Material Impact’s SoV+ score was designed to help marketers and PR specialists who are interested in assessing the impact that their work has had over the media presence of their clients. Whether in-house teams or external consultants, these professionals now have a data-based approach to quantify the quality of the public relations efforts and marketing output.
If you are interested in learning more about how Material Impact can help your company make sense of its media presence, we would love to discuss how our SoV+ score can be of assistance. Quantity over quality is not a good trade-off when it’s your company name that is on the line.
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