The Benefits of Sentiment Analysis

5 min read

We’ve talked extensively about sentiment analysis on this blog. By now, you know what sentiment analysis is, how to do it yourself, and you can take a look at a list of the best sentiment analysis tools. But you might still wonder why should you incorporate sentiment analysis into your marketing activities?

Emotions are important, not only in your personal life, but in business as well. How your audience feels about your products or your brand in general provides you with context necessary to evaluate your marketing and communications strategy. 

Sentiment analysis will help you understand the insights your customers leave for you online. People will tell you what they want from your product – which features they miss, what they like and dislike. Part of your job is spot all those remarks, draw conclusions, adjust your marketing strategy, and, ultimately, your product.  

Benefits of customer sentiment analysis

Examining the marketing metrics one by one is not the most optimal way to measure your marketing performance. A more holistic approach, which requires combining different marketing metrics, will yield more detailed and insightful results. 

Sentiment analysis is one of the metrics that provides the context necessary to assess your marketing performance. 

Looking for an example? Here you go!

a graph showing the sentiment analysis for a given period

Having a lot of likes and comments under your social media posts might seem like a success. After all, people are interacting with your content, so the social media plan worked!

But do you know what travels fast on the Internet? Bad news!

A high volume of mentions is only a positive sign when it’s accompanied by positive sentiment. 

Examining the sentiment around your brand will help you in many different areas of your marketing presence. 

Of course, a detailed social media analysis contains not only hard numbers and sentiment analysis, but also estimated social media reach of your most active audience. The more data you could analyse, the more accurate and actionable your analysis will be. 

Sentiment analysis is relatively new metric in marketing analysis, but it’s already proven to be one of the most important context metrics there is!

So, without further ado, here are the benefits of sentiment analysis!

1. You can develop a more insightful, data-based marketing strategy

Nothing beats data-based strategy.

Sentiment analysis is one of the metrics that will advance your marketing strategy as it has impact on many different aspects of your brand’s online presence. 

Analysing the sentiment around your brand helps you understand motivations behind your customers’ purchasing decisions and the intent behind their searches. 

Is your packaging a strong point? Does the ingredients make your product unique? Or maybe a feature you wouldn’t have expected conquered your customers hearts?

a social media mention with negative sentiment

Your customers are definitely already talking they likes and dislikes. Sentiment analysis will give you data based on which you can bring your marketing strategy to the next level. 

Moreover, sentiment analysis provides strategic information when it comes to competitors analysis. There should be components of your marketing strategy that distinguish you from your competitors. That’s one of the benefits of sentiment analysis – it allows you to discover the unique parts of your offering and leverage them. 

Still not convinced about the benefits of sentiment analysis? 

You can see the effects of your marketing campaigns on your brand sentiment. Sentiment analysis will help you spot the audience groups that respond most positively to your content. That will help to deliver more personalised messages to the audience most interested in your product. 

2. Understand your customers

It’s hard to succeed in business without fully understanding your audience. The more precise your message is, the better the response rate. 

Sentiment analysis can be your secret weapon, not only in targeting the right demographics, but also monitoring the overall tone of the conversation. 

an example of a social media mention with positive sentiment

Adding sentiment analysis to your marketing portfolio will help you get the most out of the content you post. 

3. Measure your marketing campaign

I’ve mentioned it before, but I would like to stress this point one more time. 

The quantitative data you follow to assess the success of your marketing campaign, for example, the number of likes, shares, comments, or social media reach, should be the backbone of your marketing analysis. 

But to properly assess the results of your marketing campaign you need the qualitative data as well. 

Sentiment analysis will provide the context to the numbers. Is your audience responding well to your messaging?

In marketing, it’s not all about numbers. Sentiment is equally important. 

4. Take a look at brand perception

That application of sentiment analysis is very useful for PR agencies. 

Sentiment analysis will help you ensure that the messages you share are relevant and target the right audience. 

a man and a woman shaking hands

A consistent perception of your brand is one of the biggest assets you have. By monitoring sentiment around your industry, you can spot how people feel about certain topics and adjust your content accordingly. 

5. Find industry leaders and influencers

By monitoring certain keywords or phrases you’re able to find the industry leaders and influencers you could work with to boost your business to another level. 

Many marketers claim that influencer marketing is long dead. But that’s not entirely true. 

If you want to run a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to choose the right influencer. Apart from examining the number of likes and shares, take a closer look at the sentiment around given author. 

Of course, you can go for a more controversial influencer, that might align better with the overall tone of your brand. But it has to be a conscious decision, not a random or uninformed one. 

6. Give extra boost to your customer service

Once the crisis hits, you have to act fast, before it escalates. Sentiment analysis and Internet monitoring will help you contain crisis around your brand, or even turn the tables around and use the crisis to your advantage. 

The key is to act fast. Spotting negative comments early will help you nip the critical situations in the bud. 

The faster you react, the better chance you have of resolving the problem. Happy customers will spread the positive word about your brand. 

Business benefits of sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is not another buzzword in the marketing world. It’s a legitimate component of your marketing campaign. 

However, you have to remember that sentiment analysis is still a relatively fresh addition to the marketing analysis family. Sentiment analysis still struggles with sarcasm and irony, but the NLP processes are getting better in detecting different tones of Internet statements. 

But even now, the benefits of sentiment analysis are undeniable. Sentiment analysis will boost your marketing performance in the long run. 

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