With today’s shifting focus to the digital world, businesses need to have a strong brand presence online. But with so much competition on the internet, how can a brand stand out and capture the minds and hearts of potential customers?
💡 Read Sentiment Analysis 101: Everything You Need to Know
One way brands could get a better understanding of how customers are perceiving them is by adopting digital tools to monitor customer sentiments over time. Even better if they allow for real-time tracking.
In this article, we’ll explore five examples that demonstrate how your business can effectively leverage customer sentiment to its advantage. Ready? Let’s dive in!
What Is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a natural language processing (NLP) technique. It automates the process of uncovering the sentiment or emotion in a piece of text. This is typically applied to multiple forms of media, including:
- Tweets, Instagram comments, Facebook posts, TikTok comments
- Customer reviews
- News articles
- Survey responses
It would be extremely time-consuming for a human to trawl through thousands of data points to categorize customer sentiment. Instead, NLP technology allows marketers to quickly extract insights about how individuals feel about a business. Sentiments are typically categorized into positive, neutral, and negative.
The Benefits Of Sentiment Analysis For Brand Building
Are you wondering whether you should adopt a sentiment analysis as part of your branding strategy? Here are the main benefits of adopting a sentiment analysis:
- Real-time insights: By providing insights into how customers feel about a product or service, sentiment analysis allows brands to respond promptly to positive and negative opinions. With sentiment analysis, customers will feel more like a priority.
- Tailored marketing and content: Sentiment analysis helps brands understand what types of content and messaging best appeal to their customer base. With this, they can create compelling campaigns that resonate with their customers and audience.
- Competitor analysis: Brands can use sentiment analysis to compare their sentiment data with their competitors. By directly comparing their brand with competitors, businesses can work to stand out against the crowd,
- Data-driven decision-making: Sentiment analysis provides quantifiable data about customer perceptions. By using this data, businesses can make purposeful decisions that will shape their brand strategy.
- Reputation management: Monitoring sentiments across various channels, including social media, allows brands to manage their online reputation effectively. Addressing negative sentiments quickly allows brands to maintain a positive image.
- Campaign effectiveness: Brands can measure sentiment shifts during and after marketing campaigns to assess their impact. A boost in positive sentiment indicates successful campaigns, while negative shifts show brands that they need to make quick adjustments.
5 Use Cases Of Real-time Sentiment Analysis To Build A Brand
Businesses use sentiment analysis to improve multiple aspects of their marketing endeavors, including brand-building. Marketers can use their customer base’s sentiments to identify the positives of their current marketing campaigns and any pitfalls they need to address.
But let’s see how real-time sentiment analysis can actively contribute to building a solid and successful brand.
Social Media Engagement
Most modern businesses actively engage with customers on social media, especially on sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Billions of consumers log in to social media on a daily basis. A deep analysis of these platforms allows marketers to understand how their customers feel about a brand.
Many people share their thoughts and feelings online. Including about products and brands, there’s plenty of data hiding behind the screen.
Analyzing the sentiments expressed by customers through comments and shares is a method that allows marketing professionals to gauge customer emotions. By collecting thousands of comments, they can adjust specific aspects of their branding strategy to suit sentiments.
For instance, if customers react well to photos on Instagram but poorly to long-form videos, marketers may choose to amp up their photo posting schedule and take away longer video posts.
Sentiment analysis on social media also allows brands to pinpoint customer complaints. With CCaaSS solutions, brands can swiftly identify and address customer feedback, whether positive or negative, and respond promptly, boosting their brand image.
Analyzing Customer Feedback Instantly
Sentiment analysis allows businesses to process a large volume of customer feedback instantly.
Examining the sentiment expressed in customer feedback allows companies to gain an overview of whether customers are satisfied with their brand. A higher percentage of positive comments suggests that customers are highly satisfied. Negative sentiments, on the contrary, often highlight shortcomings or customer issues within a business.
Brands use sentiment analysis to identify these areas of concern, allowing them to proactively address customer issues and continuously enhance their customer experience.
For instance, if a brand sees multiple negative comments regarding its customer service waiting times, it could use a call center solution to respond to customers by phone almost instantly.
Overall, sentiment analysis allows for a continuous flow of customer feedback. This allows brands to improve their marketing strategies based on raw data.
Crisis Management
Crisis management is pivotal to brand building. A positive reputation builds trust, loyalty, and goodwill among customers. Effective crisis management works to protect this reputation by addressing negative incidents promptly and transparently.
Real-time analysis of sentiments is crucial when dealing with an online crisis. By monitoring sentiment, brands can identify negative opinions or emotions directed toward them.
Detecting negative sentiments early enables brands to respond before the crisis escalates. Addressing issues promptly shows that the brand genuinely cares about its customers’ concerns.
Sentiment-Driven Content Creation
Sentiment analysis can go a long way in allowing marketers to create content tailored to their audience, allowing them to build a rapport and an emotional connection.
If a business sees a positive sentiment trend related to one of its products, it can tailor content to focus on said product.
Content that aligns with the emotional tone of your audience’s sentiments can establish a stronger emotional connection. A brand can notice that humorous posts create a positive sentiment with its audience. That can commit to including more memes and jokes in its broader content marketing strategy.
There are numerous instances in the real world where content creation is influenced by sentiment. Let’s take a look at an example: Duolingo.
Duolingo is a learning app offering a free and entertaining way to learn languages. With an audience made up of young adults and students, Duolingo caters to users who want to learn another language for traveling or for academic purposes.
As a large and recognizable brand, Duolingo uses sentiment analysis to engage better with its millions of users. When carrying out their analysis, Duolingo noticed that its audience enjoys funny content. From this, lots of playful and entertaining clips featuring Duo – the brand’s iconic green owl – were developed on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
On TikTok, Duolingo has over 7.3 million followers, regularly posting content that hops on trends and uses humor to convey its brand message. Duolingo’s most-watched TikTok has over 32 million views. Clearly, real-time sentiment analysis for brand building is an effective marketing strategy for Duolingo – and it can work just as well for your brand.
Personalized Customer Experiences
Personalization is crucial when trying to build a new brand, which makes it an essential aspect of your real-time sentiment analysis strategy.
If, for example, sentiment analysis shows that your customers enjoy being addressed by their first name, you can use this when promoting special offers or when welcoming them back to your business website.
Or, let’s assume that you aim to give a local audience a truly personalized experience by recommending relevant products and services that they can access easily in their area. You could try to conduct real-time sentiment analysis by using a local domain. For example, if your audience is based in Hong Kong, you could buy domain HK and focus your efforts on monitoring sentiment related to that specific domain.
Also, collaborating with VoIP services providers can enhance your personalized customer experiences. VoIP technology allows you to engage with customers in real-time through voice and video calls, providing instant support and addressing their concerns effectively. Choosing the right VoIP provider is extremely important for ensuring seamless communication with your customers, especially if you operate in multiple regions.
In parallel, integrating sentiment analysis with customer support channels can help brands quickly identify unhappy customers. Doing this allows your team to monitor negative sentiments from your customers and reach out proactively to provide solutions.
When choosing the right sentiment analysis software, picking a suitable hosting option for your customer service page is essential. Most businesses choose between hosted vs cloud communications – make sure you do your research before deciding which one is best for you. By combining online customer service and sentiment analysis, your support teams can work to prioritize interactions with unhappy customers.
Adopt Sentiment Analysis And Start Building Your Brand Today
Word travels fast online, but real-time sentiment analysis enables you to never skip a beat. By learning from your customers in real time, you can craft more engaging content that resonates with your target demographic, boost engagement and personalization, and be better prepared to tackle any potential issues.
This article has given you the insights you need to incorporate sentiment analysis into your strategies for building your brand. By utilizing sentiment analysis you can develop a comprehension of how your customers perceive and react to your brand.
If you’d like to find out more about how Determ can help you analyze sentiment in real time, reach out to our experts and book a demo.
Alwayne Powell is an experienced performance marketing leader with an extensive background in the digital space, working client and agency side to provide paid search, SEO and CRO solutions in the B2B and B2C sectors. They are the current Senior Digital Marketing Manager at leading communication platform provider, 8×8. Alwayne has written for other domains such as Agility PR Solutions and Noupe. You can find them on LinkedIn.
