How to Use Sentiment Analysis in Brand Marketing

Analyzing consumer feedback on your past campaigns is a great way to develop the strategy for your next one. Taking the time to gather all of the insights available to you about how your audience responds to your organization is the easiest way to build a more effective marketing strategy moving forward. Here, we’re talking about sentiment analysis. 

Without sentiment analysis, you may never get the full picture of how consumers view your brand and products. To capture this information and review audience feedback, there are many sentiment analysis tools out there to choose from-- but it’s important not to rely on automated sentiment. Because sentiment is nuanced, human, and subjective, no technology can be 100% accurate when scoring it. Thorough sentiment analysis requires manually scoring content to ensure complete accuracy.

Let’s take a look at how to best engage in manual sentiment analysis to optimize your brand marketing efforts.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is identifying opinions about a brand or product that are written or communicated in a public way. Sometimes called opinion mining, sentiment analysis is a way for brands to categorize their consumer engagement in terms of positive, negative, or neutral engagement.

Brands often use sentiment analysis to review ad campaigns or influencer campaigns since they’re rich with data and engagement from viewers. When you understand your audience on a deeper level, you’ll be better prepared to support them in the future and offer productive solutions to any problem they bring to your attention. 

Image: Unsplash

How do you conduct sentiment analysis for brand marketing?

1. Consolidate all of your consumer feedback to make it easier to manually analyze. For organizations of all sizes, this process has the potential to overwhelm quickly. Especially when analyzing engagement on branded content like your company blog, as well as your social media engagements. 
   
   
2. Analyze your data. With some content, this process will be easier than it is for others. For example, if a comment on one of your blog posts is “This brand stinks” it is easy to use sentiment analysis to flag this as a negative engagement. However, with social media, the process can be a bit murkier. For example, usually, a high amount of likes and comments on a social media platform is typically a sign of positive engagement. However, if you look closer and the bulk of comments is negative then although there is a high level of engagement, sentiment analysis would flag this as negative engagement.
   
   
3. Keep a close eye on how your consumers feel about your brand over time. Sentiment analysis isn’t a one-and-done process but requires developing a thorough sentiment analysis strategy to ensure no engagement falls through the cracks.

For influencer marketing, brand safety can be a huge factor during the discovery phase. Learn more about Influencer Vetting and how we do it here → 

Examples of Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis comes in many shapes and sizes. The degree to which your organization practices sentiment analysis will depend on your long-term engagement goals and there are a few different ways that you can focus your analysis to fit the needs of your brand. The primary types of sentimental analysis are:

• Polarity focused— involves flagging engagement hyper-specifically in terms of “very positive” “positive” “neutral” “negative” and “very negative” to gain insights 

• Emotion focused— more involved than flagging for polarity, emotion focused sentiment analysis includes flagging engagement in terms of how the consumer feels such as “happy” “frustrated” “sad” “angry” or “satisfied”

• Intention focused— more of a temperature check than anything else, using sentiment analysis to reveal the intention of your audience is as simple as flagging engagement as “interested in your brand” vs “not interested in your brand”

• Aspect-based— best applied to product reviews and releases, aspect-based sentiment analysis is used to target the success of specific features of your products in “positive” “negative” or “neutral” terms

Using Sentiment Analysis in Brand Marketing

Once you decide to engage in sentiment analysis look at sentiment as a whole and engage with it through specific channels— paid vs organic, social platforms, and how it varies across different Influencers. Within these channels, find pockets of opportunity to optimize future campaigns.

To get the most out of your sentiment analysis, keep these best practices in mind:

• When manually sorting data, sort at scale. You’ll be going through thousands of tweets, likes, comments, customer support conversations, and surveys— that is too much data to look at individually and can quickly become time-consuming if not approached in an organized way.
• Do sentiment analysis in real-time to accurately identify critical issues as they happen, so you aren’t stuck playing constant catch up. 
• Flag engagement with consistent criteria. Choose which type of sentiment analysis you will apply to which types of content— for example, use emotion-focused analysis for customer support conversations and aspect-based analysis for product reviews— and then stick to those parameters to ensure you are consistent in your terms of analysis.
• Focus on customer service. A top benefit of practicing sentiment analysis is being able to keep a thorough eye on your customer support efforts to see how they directly lead to consumer’s thoughts about your brand and products. By integrating your sentiment analysis efforts with your customer support teams, you’ll be able to approach customer support in a more holistic way.
• Use your sentiment analysis results to evolve your marketing strategy. The more data and insight you have into how your customers think, feel, and act means the more tailored your brand marketing efforts can be. Marketing is a living organism, to be effective your marketing efforts need to progress as you gain new insights.
• Navigate media perceptions of your organization. Sentiment analysis isn’t just about monitoring your customer engagement, but should also be used to keep an eye on how your brand is perceived by the media— such as journalists, market analysts, and media researchers— in order to get ahead of any “bad press” that could pop up about your brand.
• For influencer marketing, use sentiment analysis as a tool of your vetting process in order to develop a deeper understanding of how and why certain Influencers thrive as representatives of your industry, as well as a way to flag Influencers who may be clouded in negative perception based on their past partnerships or actions.

Using sentiment analysis to deepen your understanding of how consumers think of and engage with your brand is a necessary step to optimizing your next brand marketing campaign. To expand your marketing approaches even further, learn about our Platform-Agnostic Influencer Marketing Platform Approach right here.