Customer acquisition is costly. In fact, it is estimated to cost up to five times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. But there is a way that businesses get new customers without spending a penny: word of mouth recommendations.
Loyal customers who wax lyrical about your brand are priceless commodities. When it comes to analysing customer feedback, people tend to focus on brand sentiment. But there’s a huge difference between someone who feels positively about your brand, and a loyal customer who feels so passionately that they believe all of their friends should buy your products too. The return on investment on these customers is incomparable.
Brand recommendation is an often overlooked indicator of the success of your brand, your products, and your brand and marketing strategies, perhaps in part because up until recently it has been difficult to capture and measure. But now, customer feedback is readily available on review sites and social media channels, all you need to do is find the right tool to help you convert that information into a measurable metric.
The Rise and Rise of Social Proof
Whether or not people would recommend your product is increasingly important. Thanks to the ubiquitous use of review sites and social media, there is an abundance of information about your brand and your products online, and people are searching it out. Did you know:
of consumers aged 18-34 say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
of all consumers say their purchase decisions were influenced by online reviews
People want to find out the information for themselves before ever talking to a sales representative. The customers who are promoting your brand through their customer feedback are more important than ever, so it’s vital to capture and analyse exactly what they are saying beyond positive and negative sentiment.
Not All Positive Customer Feedback is Equally Valuable
Sentiment is a useful metric. Of course, you want people to be saying positive things about your brand, but there’s a marked difference between customer feedback with positive sentiment and feedback from customers who would recommend your brand.
Let’s look at the difference between these two comments with a positive sentiment:
They have met my expectations, comfy, controllable, and great sound.”
Wow! An amazing product! This headphone set is excellent. Extremely comfy to wear, extraordinarily effective noise-cancelling and high-quality sound reproduction. I didn’t think headphones could be as good as this: a must-buy for music lovers.”
Which of these comments is most persuasive? Which sells the product best? Evidently, not all positive feedback is equally valuable, so measuring what percentage of your customers are promoting your brand is highly useful information.
How to Calculate Brand Recommendation From Customer Feedback
Calculating brand recommendation from written customer feedback online is a challenge given the volume of qualitative data that would need to be analysed. Fortunately, advancements in AI technology mean that this is not only possible but easy with the Symanto Insights Platform.
The Symanto Insights Platform classifies each post into three categories: Promote, Detract and Indifferent.
- Promoters are recommending the brand to others,
- Detractors are dissuading others from purchasing from the brand,
- And those who are indifferent have no strong feelings either way.
The Symanto Insights Platform analyses each post for sentiment and communication style to deduce which category the comment belongs to.
Promoting or detracting posts use stronger words to express their opinion, they tend to be “action-seeking”, and want to influence others’ actions. Promoters use phrases such as “I’d buy this again” or “a must-see” while detractors “waste of money” or “don’t bother”.
The Symanto Insights Platform also measures comments against another metric: “Emotional Connection”. Emotional promoters of a brand or product are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. The higher this number, the better for your company.
These values are condensed into one number: The Symanto Recommendation Score (SRS). The SRS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractor comments from the percentage of promoter comments. This value allows you to easily compare selected brands or products by how many people would recommend them.
Get Started With The Symanto Insights Platform
Positive brand sentiment is just the beginning. Your marketing and brand strategies should work to increase the number of customers actively promoting your brand through online feedback. If you don’t have a firm grasp of this metric, you only know part of the story.
The Symanto Insights Platform unlocks previously inaccessible information from online conversations about your brand, information that’s valuable, and can help you shape your business to help you grow a loyal customer base that promotes your brand online.
To get started, get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration of the Symanto Insights Platform.
