So every industry leader must keep track of his companies’ reputation and monitor different media outlets to evaluate how consumers feel about their brand. Should business leaders see their positive sentiment beginning to drop, they must take quick steps to improve their reputation. Here’s our guide to using sentiment analysis for brand monitoring.
How to measure brand reputation
Select a method for brand monitoring
There are a number of different potential methods for monitoring the sentiment around your brand. You can pick just one approach to sentiment analysis for brand building, or use a combination of them.
Run a survey. A survey is a slightly old-school approach to monitoring your brand, but asking customers how they feel about your brand is a direct way to track their attitudes. There are at least three methods to run a survey with each of them giving the company different information. However, every survey depicts a specific group of people at a specific moment in time and may not cover the ever-changing needs and wants of customers, who at our current times may change their minds quickly. So, today’s survey results may shift within the following few weeks, but the company who ordered the survey may act according to data that is fast becoming less relevant.
Track organic traffic. In theory, organic traffic rates should reflect the success of your digital marketing and give you lots of business intelligence, but you can’t always know which part of your marketing strategy is driving it. A company should also understand the difference between organic and direct traffic, and act to improve both (organic comes from search engines and direct comes from straight entrances of people into the company’s website, through referrals for example).
Improve brand searches. Brand searches are quite important since they relate to customers who are already looking for information about your product or are willing to purchase it. That is why companies work hard to make it as easy as possible for customers to find their brand through searches.
Use sentiment analysis tools. Using these dedicated tools allows you to monitor customer attitudes in real time and respond appropriately. Sentiment analysis helps you accurately identify opinions and emotions, and follow engagement on many different digital platforms. Such platforms, other than the company’s own website, include review sites like TrustPilot and marketplaces like Google Play and Amazon as well as social media outlets. It is important to gather customer feedback of positive as well as negative comments, while clearing out the neutral sentiment, from as many platforms as possible. Such collection leads to the brand’s sentiment analytics, in order to evaluate the full brand perception picture and make better future strategies.
Set your KPIs
You need to select Key Performance Indicators for measuring your brand reputation. By tracking these KPIs, you can determine how your brand’s online presence and reputation is changing over time. Some of the main social monitoring KPIs to track include:
Total engagements with your brand per day/week/month
Total brand mentions
Positive and negative sentiments towards your brand. You can calculate your brand sentiment score by calculating positive mentions as a percentage of total mentions, or use a tool that does this automatically
Organic traffic through Google Analytics
Brand search (organic) volume
Direct search volume
Establish a benchmark
Once determining the KPIs you’ll follow, you need to fix a benchmark for each one of them so that you can measure your progress. Measuring KPIs can take place from quarter to quarter or year on year. And for a competitive edge, companies are also drawing comparisons between their brand scores and the ones of their competitors.
How to use sentiment analysis data for brand building
After setting up your effective sentiment analysis strategy, you still need to continue improving your customer experience, achieve steady growth, and strengthen your brand reputation.
Improve your marketing efforts
Customer feedback determines a company’s sentiment score. The sentiment analysis plays an important part in helping companies understand what their customers want, what they like about a company’s product, and what are areas they like less. Use sentiment analysis for your online strategy and to analyze customer reactions and customer feedback to a new or existing product or version, and then tweak it accordingly.
Sentiment analysis is also useful for tracking the impact of a marketing campaign, and then doubling down on its most effective elements and changing those that are weaker. Such an analysis can help you establish a better marketing campaign and assist in other areas such as your social media strategy and influencer marketing.
Understand the voice of the customer
Industry leaders always try to discover the voice of the customer by identifying the wording (positive words or negative mentions) that people use, the social media buzz, and the topics that are most talked about in relation to their niche or brand. Then use these topics and tone in your marketing strategy to forge stronger connections, or rephrase some of your marketing efforts into language that’s more easily understood and that taps into the general market attitude.
Identify your strengths and weaknesses
The feedback collection and sentiment analytics, as performed by AI, enables you to generate insights regarding your brand perception and also to play up your strengths and correct your weaknesses. Also, a company can compare its profile with that of its competitors to see where they are racing ahead. Performing a competitor’s analysis may lead a company to even consider adopting some of their tactics (with the company’s own adaptations, of course). This takes place in order to bolster the company’s own marketing strategy and product decisions.
Defuse a crisis before it develops
The sentiment analysis algorithm allows companies to monitor the different digital platforms and helps them manage crisis management, as it enables a company to spot negative mentions, and then respond swiftly and effectively before momentum builds up and you’re facing a catastrophe.
Discover new leads
Finally, audience sentiment analysis enables companies to discover new prospects who need your solution, product or services, but don’t yet know about your brand. Use social listening and customer experience analytics to identify and target them with a well-placed promotional offer, voucher, or marketing campaign.
Sentiment analysis drives stronger brand building
Understanding how people feel about your brand over the web and social media requires you to identify the best methods, apply KPIs and establish benchmark measurements to track your progress. Sentiment analysis features can help make this easier and faster, but it’s still up to you to apply crucial insights to strengthen your marketing campaign, understand what customers want and what their online conversation about you is, prevent negative reviews from snowballing into a crisis, and spot new leads to target in the right ways.
How Affogata can help
Affogata offers a thorough and easy-to-understand customer feedback analysis that shows how your clients feel about your brand. You can choose which keywords and specific word combinations to track in addition to your brand name and industry in order to learn what customers are saying about you.
Affogata, one of the leading analysis systems, operates a customer feedback platform that uses machine learning (ML) and Artificial intelligence (AI) which extracts public opinion in order to turn it from being unstructured data into becoming organized and actionable data. Through monitoring of every open web brand review and social media mention, the platform’s data analysis depicts if each conversation is positive, negative, or neutral. Such analysis enables users to set benchmarks that distill all discussions into a single brand reputation score. A company can view the most talked-about topics and key elements related to its brand, draw valuable conclusions and do a product analysis to evaluate if its efforts are succeeding.
In addition, companies using Affogata’s sentiment analysis work can also compare their performances next to previous ones as well as to measure their product and services results against those of their competitors.
Finally, companies work hard and invest large amounts of budgets to promote their brands. Affogata’s bottom-line marketing analysis and reports projects to companies how such efforts have contributed to their brand’s credibility.
Sentiment analysis glossary
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is the process of understanding audience sentiment, that is how people generally feel about your brand, specific products that you offer, or your social media presence.
What is brand sentiment?
Brand sentiment means the emotions that people carry towards your brand and how customers perceive it. With sentiment analytics, an AI classifies them into positive mentions, negative feedback, and neutral feelings.
What are sentiment analysis tools?
Tools that perform sentiment analysis use machine learning and AI data, which detects consumer emotions from social media posts, reviews, and other online content.
What is media monitoring?
Media monitoring is the process of tracking all the content that’s expressed about your brand, whether it’s on social media, blog posts, or review sites.
What is the voice of the customer?
The voice of the customer means gathering feedback from your target audience so that you can understand their needs, concerns, and expectations. It allows you also to learn how they comment and apply the tone and style they prefer.
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring relates to the times when your brand is mentioned on social media or elsewhere online, so as to stay aware of and actively follow exactly what people are saying about your brand.
What is social listening?
Social media strategy relies on, among other things, social listening, which is the process of social media monitoring what your customers say on digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Are they happy customers or are they critical of your product?
Such social media analytics allows companies to receive data-based insights and stay up to date with their customers’ thoughts and opinions about the brand. It also allows companies to gather competitor insights, make better business decisions, and improve their marketing campaigns.