While audience sentiment is a more abstract and subtle layer of understanding, therein lies its power – crafting themes which leverage emotion. 

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis allows you to gain deeper insights into how your audience feels about your brand, products, services, and content. This knowledge helps you understand customer opinions, preferences, and pain points.  You can better tailor your content strategy to match their emotional state.  Positive sentiment, for example, is optimally placed in the context of messaging that reinforces loyalty and sustainable co-identification with the brand.  Addressing negative sentiment can help you improve areas of concern, enabling you to better manage your brand’s online reputation. You can address negative sentiment promptly and engage with customers to resolve issues before they escalate.  Negative sentiment towards an external situation can be used as a rallying point for customers to reinforce community identity. 

Sentiment analysis relies on uncovering emerging trends and shifts in opinions, and with that, you can more effectively adapt your strategies and offerings to stay aligned with customer expectations.  Understanding sentiment not only applies to your brand but also to your competitors.  Analyzing the sentiment around your competitors can help you identify their strengths (for you to enhance and replicate) and weaknesses (for you to expose and leverage).  Negative sentiment points to specific product or service issues that need attention, enabling you to solve a problem in the market and to make advance improvements to enhance customer satisfaction.

What makes monitoring sentiment difficult is that there is no way to perfectly quantify feelings and opinions.  Data analytics relies on key words and phrases, and associating these with desired responses in engagement and purchasing.  Recognizing patterns of behavior and applying these with your messaging demonstrates that you’re listening to your customers and valuing their opinions.  This can foster customer loyalty and long-term relationships.  People are more likely to interact with content that reflects their feelings.

What can you do with sentiment monitoring? 

• Better Decision-Making: provide data-driven guidance for marketing strategies, product development and customer support.
• Crisis Management: understanding sentiment allows you to gauge the extent of the issue and take appropriate actions to mitigate its impact.
• Personalization: more personalized and relevant interactions, improving customer satisfaction and increasing click-through rates and ultimately, increased sales.
• Opportunity Identification: positive sentiment can highlight areas where your brand is excelling. You can leverage these strengths to further engage your audience and differentiate your brand.
• Refined Marketing Messages: craft marketing messages that resonate emotionally with your audience, leading to stronger connections and higher conversions.

How can you carry out sentiment monitoring?

Incorporating sentiment analysis into your business strategy empowers you to make informed decisions, tailor your interactions with customers, and foster a positive brand perception. By addressing both positive and negative sentiment, you can build a more resilient and customer-focused brand that thrives in the digital landscape.

This analysis is no longer exclusively the domain of “rocket scientists” and back-room quants.  There are several automated tools and platforms available that can help you gauge the sentiment of your audience.  Advanced tools use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze and categorize the sentiment expressed in social media posts, comments, and mentions.  Here are some popular options:

• Brandwatch – social listening and analytics services, including sentiment analysis, to help you track how your brand is perceived on social media.
• Sprout Social – social media management tools, enabling categorizing of social media mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, helping you understand how your audience feels about your brand.
• Talkwalker – a social listening and analytics platform to help monitor your brand’s reputation across social media channels.
• Hootsuite Insights – also enables understanding of the tone of conversations surrounding your brand or platform, giving assessment of content as positive, negative, or neutral.
• Meltwater – a media intelligence platform.
• IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding – natural language processing tool.
• Socialbakers –social media marketing and analytics tools.
• Lexalytics – text analytics platform.
• MonkeyLearn – text analysis platform utilizing machine learning models.

Wrapping it up

Before choosing a tool, consider factors such as the social media platforms it supports, the depth of analysis it provides, its ease of integration with your existing tools, and its pricing structure. While these tools can automate sentiment analysis, when it comes to your own learning and understanding of your audience, nothing beats manually reviewing and interpreting results, developing hypotheses of audience motivation, and frequently testing these hypotheses through frequent and personal engagement.