Brand Sentiment Analysis

“It is important to measure your brand health regularly”

As a marketer/marketing student, you must have often come across this statement. As the world becomes increasingly digital, the ways to do the former, change drastically.

Today’s customers engage with brands digitally through various social media as well as through e-commerce websites and blogs. To understand their feedback better, it is important to make sense of their tone and words. To do this manually (pause: Ha-Ha-Ha), is definitely impossible.

This is where Brand Sentiment Analysis comes in!

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is the process of retrieving information about a consumer’s perception of a product, service, or brand.

It is similar to what we have learned about any computer or machine:

Input --> Processing --> Output

The input is the varied customer engagement in the form of mentions, reviews, comments, etc. This input is bucketed according to predetermined rules into different sentiments which give our processed data.

Why is it so important for brands?

Brand sentiment analysis is important to understand the consumer view regarding the brand, the product & the services. It would be really cumbersome and inefficient to find out manually, where along the graph (positive – high praise to negative – total disapproval), does the company lie.

Thankfully, due to technological advancement, there are enough tools to help you with this exercise. All you have to do is feed the data to the tool and the tool automatically tells you whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral (or in fact anywhere in between).

Brand sentiment analysis advocacy points are endless:

🔹Helps measure brand health

Brand health is a collection of metrics which represent brand awareness, brand reputation, and brand’s share of voice. It includes customer satisfaction and the opinions potential customers have on the company.

It is important to measure brand health regularly and the data for the same comes through digital means in today’s world.

🔹Scalability & Automation

In today’s day, content around brands is generated at multiple sources and in a huge amount: in the form of reviews, comments, likes, mentions, etc. It is impossible to gauge sentiment from these manually. Sentiment analysis helps automate this process and makes it scalable.

🔹Avoid crises

Rapid times like these require constant monitoring of social media content by consumers such that a discontent/complaint doesn’t turn into a crisis.

Let’s take the example of United Airlines. A passenger incident led to a spurt in negative social media mentions after the company was accused of racial profiling. The topic spread like wildfire to China, where it became the number one trending topic on Weibo, a microblogging site with almost 500 million users.

And all of this happened within mere hours of the incident. In incidents like these, sentiment analysis can help you single out negative issues immediately so that they can be dealt with, before escalating into a bigger problem.

🔹Aids customer service

Sentiment analysis helps provide better customer service by identifying complaints separate from praises for example. It thus helps speedier redressal of queries and a satisfied customer in return!

Such a feature is especially useful for consumer-facing businesses like hotels.

🔹Monitor campaign progress

It will be easier to track marketing efforts on social media using this tool. Take Zomato for example, the MC BC ad released by Zomato received a backlash on Twitter which was immediately handled by the Zomato co-founder, mentioning it would be removed.

Thus, a quick response like this is essential to retain your customer base. This is possible using sentiment analysis which tells you immediately whether your campaign is a hit or a flop.

🔹New product insights

Companies like Instagram continually keep testing new product features like Instagram Reels and test them out with their consumers before launching it fully. Thus analyzing the consumer feedback with respect to the new product feature becomes much easier with sentiment analysis rather than manually reading each feedback.

How to do it effectively?

There are a number of tools already out there to serve all your needs. Judge your requirement and choose your tool accordingly. Some of the best tools are:

Hootsuite Insights, Talkwalker’s Quick Search, RapidMiner, Social Searcher, Lexalytics, Brandwatch, Social Mention, and Sentiment Analyzer.

What next?

Ensure your messaging is on track

It can be a real challenge to find the correct tone on social media. Brands like Netflix have nailed it with their humorous tone which helps in generating buzz and positive mentions.

Monitor competition

Similar to how important it is for you to know how your consumers feel about you, it is crucial to know their views about your competition too. Many a times when someone is searching for recommendations, multiple companies are tagged together.

Sentiment analysis may help understand why someone chose your competitor over you.

Amp up your customer service

As mentioned earlier, sentiment analysis helps improve customer service through quick and easy redressal of issues. Thus, use the tool to do the same and amp up your response to both positive and negative consumer engagement.

Improve your products

Being open to feedback is the best a human and a brand both can do. Thus, keep all the senses open for feedback. Glean advice from complaints and compliments alike.

Keep in check your brand health

Having understood the benefits of sentiment analysis, it is important to utilize them fully. Use it to track progress, especially when there are big changes happening. For instance, pricing changes, product launches, or anything else that may affect brand perception. Monitoring the health regularly helps spot a potential crisis before it can occur.

That’s all you need to do folks!

Author: Nidhi Gadia