Emotions play a critical role in the buying process. Whether you sell luxury items or packaged goods, you’re more likely to convert prospects after creating a sense of urgency. Making them feel like they need your goods or services is key.
💡 Read Sentiment Analysis 101: Everything You Need to Know
However, despite the importance of emotional value in marketing, many business owners overlook it when promoting their brands. They prioritize key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly affect daily sales. While these KPIs are equally important, they don’t necessarily reflect engagement metrics like brand loyalty, trust, and satisfaction. To truly grow your business, you need a solid customer base of repeat buyers.
If you find it challenging to understand the emotional motivators behind modern consumers, consider performing sentiment analysis on reviews. By assessing customer feedback based on quantified metrics, you can uncover the subjective buying factors that drive their decisions. It’s time to stop taking reviews at face value and delve deeper into deciphering their emotions. This will allow you to gain a better understanding of your target market’s demands, needs, and buying triggers.
The Importance of Customer Feedback Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a data-driven process wherein you evaluate the underlying emotional tones behind pieces of text. It has several applications across different industries. In business, performing it on feedback and reviews gives you insights into how consumers feel about your offers.
You can evaluate feedback based on more precise categories by breaking down your buyers’ emotional responses. Go beyond positive and negative sentiment analysis on reviews. Quantifying strong emotions like delight, frustration, satisfaction, and dismay will help you:
Analyze Consumer Needs
Careful sentiment analysis highlights which prominent emotions act as buying triggers for your target market. You should know what customers feel when engaging with your brand. A deeper understanding of their emotional spectrum will help you steer purchasing decisions in a favorable direction.
But contrary to popular belief, not all business owners should aim for joy. The emotions your brand evokes depend on your products and services. For instance, fast food restaurants capitalize on hunger, insurers provide financial assurance, and gyms inspire aspiring fitness buffs.
Take this review about Planet Fitness. This gym-goer feels inconvenienced because of the poor facilities—the gym should address these issues to evoke comfort.
Make Informed Business Decisions
Quantifying subjective elements that affect feedback, e.g., emotions and intent, helps you predict trends. Of course, market activities are never guaranteed, but you can use customer insights to make informed business decisions geared toward product and service improvements.
Analyzing sentiments also mitigates business risks. Break down negative reviews and uncover potential challenges before scaling operations—you’ll reduce the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes.
Perform Efficient Competitor Analysis
Incorporating buyer sentiments and attitudes into your competitive analysis helps you spot market gaps more efficiently. Compare how consumers feel about your brand versus your competitors. You can collect hundreds of data from popular review sites like Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Yelp, and Wirecutter.
Make sure you analyze positive and negative sentiments alike. Adopt effective strategies that evoke emotional buying triggers and improve ones that turn away prospects.
6 Effective Tips for Analyzing Customer Feedback
Collating customers’ feedback is one thing, but deconstructing their intent, attitudes, and emotions is another. You might find the process overwhelming at first. If analyzing just one review already takes an hour, then going through all the comments on your social media pages will waste weeks.
Sentiment analysis shouldn’t interfere with your business operations. Here are some tips to execute it quickly without compromising accurate, reliable results.
1. Leverage Advanced NLP Tools
Streamline social listening with AI-driven media monitoring platforms like Determ. Advanced AI models can efficiently scrape various social media websites for any mention of your brand. You could even set them to provide real-time updates.
Meanwhile, natural language processing (NLP) technologies classify pieces of text in human language. They’ll analyze the comments collected online and provide an accurate analysis based on preset factors, which you can adjust.
2. Craft Customized Sentiment Models
Mark Pierce, the CEO of Cloud Peak Law Group, encourages every business to create a custom sentiment model. He says, “Craft customized models based on your target market to ensure relevant sentiment analysis results. Generic sentiment models might yield inaccuracies. The emotions that your business must evoke will depend on the products and services you offer. They vary across industries.”
3. Measure Sentiment Quantitatively
Employ quantified scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to quantify sentiments to track changes and benchmarking against competitors. After all, sentiment analysis involves subjective emotions—you must quantify them.
Take this review about Pizza Hut as an example. Although discomfort is subjective, the restaurant could create action points to improve its customer service and complaints handling.
4. Utilize Aspect-Based Analysis
Jim Pendergast, the senior vice president at altLINE Sobanco, advises creating precise categories for more accurate findings. He says, “Never lump random feedback into one group. Divide them based on relevance, e.g., support, pricing, functionality, or customer services, to determine the emotions your business must and must not evoke. Strive to highlight which areas your business lacks the most.”
5. Track Cross-Platform Feedback
Map feedback across different social media platforms and customer service sites, like Google Business, Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Yelp. Traditionally, brands hire social media listeners to handle these comments. But if you don’t have the resources to scout, onboard, and pay for another professional, consider investing in an AI media monitoring tool.
Nancy Mitchell, an RN at Assisted Living, says she saves thousands using AI apps for social media listening. “Onboarding and hiring a full-time employee costs too much—it’s impractical to waste money on sentiment analysis and online engagement. Instead, we utilize advanced AI models. They complete the job much faster than human employees for a fraction of their salaries.”
6. Incorporate Customer Sentiments Into A/B Testing
A/B testing is an expensive yet critical marketing task. Simultaneously running multiple campaigns and comparing their results spikes your ad spend while barely moving your ROAS.
Fernando Lopez, the marketing director at Circuit, advises marketers to perform smarter, more efficient tests by adopting sentiment analysis. “Don’t just churn out random ad sets. Ensure that every campaign you launch utilizes elements customized for emotional resonance.”
Drive Business Growth by Employing Sentiment Analysis on Reviews
Use sentiment analysis to understand the intent behind customer reviews. Learn how you can improve your branding, ads, and offers based on your market’s demands. Ensure that they trigger the correct feelings. Again, you’re more likely to convert prospects and earn their loyalty if you provide a positive overall buying experience.
For more helpful results, collect reviews from a broad range of consumers who are interested in your brand or the products/services you offer. Don’t limit yourself to loyal patrons. Your customer base will barely expand if you only engage with people who match your ideal buyer persona.
That said, analyzing customer reviews shouldn’t compromise your daily workflow. Consider automating the process with an AI-powered media monitoring tool like Determ—it tracks, measures, and creates reports based on your media presence. Book a demo and see if it suits your business.