Accurate and timely sentiment analysis is key to building your brand. Sentiment analysis enables you to identify your strengths and weaknesses through the eyes of your customers.
Using this data to analyse your brand’s performance will help you get a more accurate and subjective view of the success of your brand strategies and direct you moving forward.
In this blog, we look at how sentiment analysis can be used to build your brand and inform your marketing and product development strategies.
What is sentiment analysis?
Also known as “opinion mining”, sentiment analysis isolates a certain topic and then perceives and evaluates how someone feels about it and to what extent. Word choice, syntax and tone of voice all come into play when evaluating someone’s sentiment. Sentiment is categorised as either positive, negative or neutral.
Where to source data for sentiment analysis
Any subjective content about your brand constitutes data for sentiment analysis. That could be survey responses, social media interactions, customer service emails, online reviews, blogs, news sites and forums.
The majority of useful and relevant data is qualitative and in the form of written text. This kind of data is notoriously difficult to analyse.
Fortunately, the Symanto Insights Platform has been developed to crawl, organise and analyse vast amounts of unstructured data within minutes.
The Symanto Insights Platform is already connected to approximately 75 online portals and review sites, making it quick and easy to use.
How to use sentiment analysis for brand building
1. Find out what your customers want
Discovering what your customers want is the holy grail of building your brand. You’d never imagine it was so easy to find.
Your customers are telling you what they want both directly and indirectly. Use sentiment analysis technology on reviews and customer comments to isolate the topics that are mentioned relating to your brand, and how people feel towards that topic.
The Symanto Insights Platform isolates topics and subtopics so that you can discern where your main strengths and challenges lie.
Use the term cloud to discover the main topics related to your brand that are being discussed and their associated sentiment. This will immediately give you an overview of the strengths of your brand as well as the issues that need addressing from the perspective of your customers.
2.Conduct competitor analysis
You can also use the Symanto Insights Platform to conduct sentiment analysis on your competitors. This will help you find out why your customers choose you over other brands in your market.
Use this information in your marketing strategies to capitalise on your key selling point.
It’s also extremely useful to have a clear understanding of the issues affecting your competitors across the board. If an issue is unique to your brand, you know that you have to address it immediately to avoid losing customers to your competitors. If, however, the issue affects your competitors to a similar extent, you may be able to surmise that it’s an industry-wide phenomenon.
3. Capitalise on your strengths
Use sentiment analysis to discover your true key selling points. You might be surprised to find that the main message you push out in your marketing campaigns isn’t the one that customers identify when using your products or services.
For example, if you market your brand as the most affordable option on the market, you might be surprised to learn that customers connect more with your responsive and friendly service.
4. Develop your product/business accordingly
Now that you know what your customers want (and what they don’t) it’s time to make the necessary adjustments to your business strategy.
Issues with order fulfilment times? Investigate any funnels in your pipeline or consider switching courier service.
Is there negative sentiment around customer service? Invest in training and support for your customer care team.
Sentiment analysis will also help you quickly identify product flaws or opportunities for improvement. Are your customers disappointed by, for example, limited speed settings or lack of colour options? Let your customers direct your product development strategy for you.
5. Keep your pulse on the situation
When it comes to brand building, sentiment analysis needs to be ongoing and constant. One PR disaster could set you back lightyears.
Sentiment analysis can be used for PR monitoring. Use sentiment analysis software to detect comments, tweets and reviews with strongly negative sentiment and act on these instances urgently to address them before they worsen.
6. Analyse campaign success
Once you have implemented changes and redirected your marketing messaging, you can use sentiment analysis to monitor their impact.
Did the messaging increase conversation and improve sentiment around your brand? How are customers responding to the improvements you’ve made?
This information will enable you to refine your ongoing strategy.
Measuring more than just sentiment
The Symanto Insights Platform does a lot more than measure whether someone feels positive, negative or neutral towards your brand.
Find out what proportion of your customers are promoting your brand through their posts, and discover whether customers have an emotional affiliation with your brand.
There’s a difference between customers that speak positively about your brand, and those who want all of their family and friends to try it.
Promoters or detractors use words with a much stronger sentiment. The Symanto Insights Platform also measures comments for “Emotional Connection”. Promoters with an emotional connection to your brand or product are over twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. They’re the people building your brand through word of mouth and social proof.
The Symanto Insights Platform can also detect the personality traits and communication style preferences of your customer base, enabling you to hone your messaging and attract more of the same kind of consumers.
Get started with Symanto
As you can see, sentiment analysis is an intrinsic part of the brand-building process. In the age of social proof, at a time when so many of your customers are actively writing and talking about your brand, it’s essential to listen, respond and keep track of what’s being said.
The Symanto Insights Platform excels at analysing textual data accurately and at scale. Get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration to get started.
