Consumers today have innumerable channels to express themselves. Social media has empowered them with powerful platforms, where they can extol brands that serve them well and thrash the ones that fail to meet expectations.
This is not necessarily bad for brands. An analysis of consumers’ opinion of brands and their standing in the marketplace — in other words, sentiment analysis, a much bandied about term making the rounds in the digital marketing space — can help brands in better implementing their marketing campaigns to address issues.
Sentiment analysis is the process of determining the emotional tone behind a series of words, to gain an understanding of the emotions, opinions and attitudes expressed online by consumers of goods and services or brands.
Quality matters
Playing with numbers such as shares, like, tweets, re-tweets is a good way to start, but is it good enough? Numbers can’t determine whether or not consumers are on the same page as the brands would want them to be. With sentiment analysis, marketers can have a holistic view of customer engagement by measuring qualitative aspects such as opinions, feelings and satisfaction ratings among others.
Benefits
Sentiment analysis is extremely useful in digital marketing as it allows companies to gain an understanding of the wider public opinion behind campaigns. It can uncover attitudes that consumers hold with respect to brands. A powerful marketing tool, sentiment analysis provides deep insight into consumer perception and, additionally helps in driving strategies for brand improvement.
The applications of such analysis are broad and powerful. Consumers rely on peers when making their purchasing decisions. They take decisions based on comments and opinions expressed on social media channels. Even one negative comment can spell doom for brands. That’s why and how sentiment analysis comes into the picture. Brands can track all that’s being felt and said about them and thereby take steps to redeem themselves.
A word of caution
Inbuilt algorithms recognize and track a gamut of words, and categorize them as ‘negatives’ and ‘positives’. However, teaching machines to analyze the complexities of human language is not possible. For example, a sarcastic statement containing a positive word may be taken at face value and be categorized as ‘positive’.
The way ahead
Sentiment analysis is surely not a perfect science. It needs to move beyond the one-dimensional positive-negative scale.
Today, companies can choose from a variety of tools for sentiment or opinion mining. With the right software and an expert, companies can gather, analyze and manage conversations about their brands. Remember, both quality and quantity are important for brands looking to maximize their business.
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