Colgate: Winning Share of Voice in the Oral Care Category

May 3, 2023

Please Note: All insights are extracted from publicly available data including search ranking, volumes, pricing, content and reviews.

Why is Colgate Winning on Share of Voice in the Oral Care Category?

Colgate ranks #1 on Share of Voice in the Oral Care category, beating out leading brands such as Crest and Listerine. This is surprising given Crest’s perceived market share and longevity as one of P&G’s most iconic brands.

WHAT IS SHARE OF VOICE?

Share of Voice (“SOV”) dictates your overall ranking on specific keywords relevant to your category. This measurement represents your brand’s share on the digital aisle across all the different ways consumers are looking for your products. It is a leading indicator of market share.

HOW TO MEASURE SHARE OF VOICE?

SOV takes into account both the number of times a brand’s products show up on search results, as well as the relative importance of each keyword associated with those products. A brand with a higher SOV has more visibility within its industry than one with a lower SOV.

Brands with higher SOV have greater visibility and thus more opportunities to drive traffic and sales through organic search results. Measuring share of voice also allows brands to identify areas where they are outperforming competitors as well as areas that need improvement. This information can inform decisions about marketing campaigns, product positioning, and product detail pages (“PDP”) optimization strategies that can help increase share of voice.

It’s important to track share of voice across all channels to ensure that your brand has maximum visibility when customers are searching for products similar to yours.

HOW DID COLGATE WIN ON SHARE OF VOICE?

Improving your Share of Voice ranking is primarily driven by PDP optimization and your retail media strategy.

Optimizing product pages means providing detailed descriptions, including images, videos and other visuals, so that customers know exactly what they are buying before they make their purchase decision.

Colgate successfully dominated key search terms in their own branded search, a key competitors (i.e. Scope) branded terms, and a number of important keywords, specifically owning many variations of the travel sub-category. They were the key leader with 74%+ Share of Voice in these areas, with the next leading brand only as high as 14%+.

ORGANIC SHARE OF VOICE RANKINGS IN AMAZON ON ORAL CARE

For example, on the keyword “toothpaste gum detoxify” you can see the consistent mention of “cleaning the whole mouth, including your gums” in one of their PDP’s

Colgate Total Teeth Whitening Toothpaste PDP

Colgate further augmented this with a thoughtful retail media strategy, which is rooted in share of voice and spending dollars strategically based on where there was the highest incremental sales impact. Ideally, this should be done through software automatically, which adjusts bids in real time to allocate spend where you have highest incremental impact, while also taking into account stock levels to ensure you aren’t driving SKUs out of stock ultimately depressing your long term SOV.

They also ensure they appear above the fold, pushing their Best Seller status to the forefront on the same search term.

Colgate’s investments overall have them Leading in the Medium Price category and Challenging in the Low Price category.

Colgate’s sponsored search investments align closely with their organic search performance, showing how these two sides are closely linked, and signaling investment into the kids category.

WHAT ARE THE OTHER FACTORS TO WIN IN RETAIL ECOMMERCE?

It can be difficult to really understand the success of your retail ecommerce business, given all the factors and metrics that go into it. In addition to Share of Voice, there are eight key metrics to consider when evaluating your performance in the world of retail ecommerce.

Read all about them here: 8 Factors to Win in Retail ecommerce