Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool for marketers, consumers, and anyone who wants to know what people are really thinking. Whether you’re looking to improve customer satisfaction or market your product better, sentiment analysis can help you do just that! Let’s explore the benefits of sentiment analysis and how it works so you can start using it today.
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining, emotion AI, or emotion recognition) is the process of identifying emotions, attitudes, opinions, and feelings in order to gain insight into people’s overall opinions. For marketing purposes, this can help you gauge how your product is performing on a larger scale. It can also help you optimize your product or campaign to better appeal to the public.
Sentiment analysis for online reviews
Before sentiment analysis, it was incredibly difficult to make sense of all the feedback customers gave online about products they purchased. Many companies ditched customer service altogether because it was impossible to parse through all the feedback. With sentiment analysis, it’s possible to get a detailed “read” on every review you receive so you can quickly identify good and bad feedback. This allows you to respond quickly to resolve issues with your customers, saving you money in the long run!
Types of sentiment analytics with pros and cons
Synthetic Sentiment
Uses AI to deduce emotions from customer service conversations. It isn’t 100% accurate because there are so many different ways to say the same things. It’s best if you’re looking for general feedback about your company but can be tricky in particular cases. You don’t want to mix up sarcasm with genuine reactions, or your customers will be offended.
Crowdsourced Sentiment
A human reviews customer service conversations and identifies emotions, which are then used to determine general sentiment. This is accurate, but slower compared to synthetic sentiment because it requires more time to review each conversation. If you have a lot of customer service feedback, it can also be costly.
Social Listening
A company monitors conversations across the Internet and social media to see if there’s any discussion about its product or company itself. While it only tells you that people are talking, it doesn’t tell you what they’re saying. Use this type of sentiment analysis to gain broad insights into themes and trends.
Audience Sentiment
A company monitors its audience’s reactions to an event or product. This way, you can see what people think of your brand during key moments like a marketing campaign launch or new release. While it isn’t a direct look at a company’s analytics, it can tell you if a lot of people are discussing your company or product in a negative way, especially around important dates like Christmas or Black Friday.
Now you know what data you should gather and what types of analysis you can conduct. But what to do with all this information and how to use it for the company’s benefit.
Benefits of sentiment analysis
There are many benefits that sentiment analysis can provide. Sentiment analysis can be useful in understanding what language are specific groups using to talk about you, your brand, and your products.
Another benefit of sentiment analysis is that it can show how positive or negative messages affect consumers’ perception of the brand. With this type of information, marketers can use it to identify areas that need improvement or work on creating messages that resonate with consumers more.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do
People tend to gravitate towards familiar things. That’s why it’s important to use a similar language to which your customers use. Utterances gathered thanks to the sentiment analysis can help you find a common language with your public. You can identify which phrases and words are commonly used and adjust your releases to be clearer to read and more relatable.
Importance of storytelling while building your brand
Storytelling is an essential tool in the modern world. Whether you’re using social media, marketing collateral, or editorial content on your company website, storytelling can make a huge impact on your audience.
Consumers gravitate towards entertaining and engaging stories because they allow them to connect with your brand on an emotional level. So, why should you use storytelling in your business?
Following one’s heart
Firstly, your customers live in a world of distractions and entertainment. It’s hard to captivate their attention for a long while and the competition is enormous. Stories add emotion to the marketing material, therefore people process this information better when it’s delivered in such a format. In addition, stories can help you make more personal connections with your customers.
Engaging stories to tell
Of course, storytelling isn’t easy. And if you’re sending out pieces of content on a regular basis, how do you make sure they all tell an engaging and consistent story? Here are 3 types of stories you can use in your marketing:
- The Hero’s Journey – A story where a character goes on a journey and must overcome obstacles to attain their goal.
- Rags to Riches – A story that starts with the main character in rags and gradually gets better until it reaches its peak.
- Comedy – A story where there are humorous incidents or outcomes.
The best way to find the right story type is to think about your audience. What are their interests and motivations? Which stories do they like hearing in their everyday lives?
Dear @upgrade_music
You told us no one liked our fries.
So new ones are coming soon.
Yours sincerely,
KFC pic.twitter.com/DxPRh50apV
— KFC UK (@KFC_UKI) November 2, 2018
Sentiment Analysis for Brand Storytelling Improvement
And this is the moment when sentiment analysis comes in. You no longer have to guess what the customers think, you just have to listen to them. Using sentiment analysis will help you improve your storytelling by giving you useful information about your audience’s tastes and interests. By using stories that connect with people emotionally, you’re guaranteed to make your brand more memorable.
You’ll also have live reaction feedback on the narratives you are creating, which is extremely useful for quickly finding out if you’re doing something wrong or right. You can create marketing tactics tailor-made for your customers and apply changes right away.
Find Yourself a Hero
Gathering sentiments can not only help us create a captivating brand story but also can be a tool for finding engaging customer stories worth highlighting. Those are the keys to building your brand. Such testimonials are more trustworthy and authentic. We all know that consumers are more likely to engage with people similar to themselves. That’s why they tend to put more faith in the stories of others like them.
Free Promotion
What’s more, sentiment analysis can also help you identify “communicators” in your audience that are great assets for sharing positive messages about your brand. Those would be the people who talk about your brand a lot and in a positive way. When you identify them you can promote your content to this person’s audience by making them your ambassador or simply notice them and favour their support.
As you can see, sentiment analysis has tremendous potential for storytelling. It just needs to be applied in the right manner. So, if you’re facing a PR crisis or just want to tell your brand story better, use services like brand24, to guide you through the sea of reviews and opinions.