Using Sentiment Analysis for Digital Marketing

The customer, as they say, is king — and there’s a reason why this cliché has stood the test of time. Your customers’ thoughts, preferences, and habits are the key to meeting their wants and needs effectively, and if you really want to improve your customer acquisition efforts, your best bet would be to look into sentiment analysis.

As we covered in a previous post here on the Mindy Support blog, sentiment analysis, in its simplest sense, is the detailed examination and interpretation of how customers feel about a certain company and its products and services. By turning all this data on customer opinions into more tangible factors, sentiment analysis can very well be your most powerful tool in digital marketing.

But first, what is digital marketing?

Contrary to popular belief, digital marketing goes beyond just using the right social media platforms and posting regular updates. It also involves designing a company website, optimizing it for search engines, building mobile apps, and even maintaining an e-mail subscribers list.

Since this approach requires marketers to navigate an intricate system of channels, digital marketing can come in various combinations and approaches, depending on what your business needs. Digital marketing leader Ayima highlights how the best strategies are borne out of a data-focused approach to both technology and people. To succeed in digital marketing and boost conversion, it’s important to create a strategy surrounding a core message that resonates with the audience — and this starts with knowing your consumer well through sentiment analysis.

Monitoring your brand’s status

According to a recent survey by BrightLocal, customers ages 18 to 34 trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations. Given this reality, it becomes imperative for businesses to keep a close eye on their brand’s status in the eyes of previous buyers. Fortunately, the sentiment analysis tools available these days can make this process a whole lot easier.

By processing large volumes of text-based feedback like reviews and social media posts, brands will be able to understand how their customers perceive them. Are you seen in a positive light or not? What feelings did your recent campaigns, events, and posts evoke? All these questions, and more, can be answered by sentiment analysis.

Tracking customer trends and boosting customer service

Customer behavior trends change every so often. To stay relevant, businesses must then find a way to keep up with the public’s fickleness. Through sentiment analysis tools that scour the internet, businesses would be able to figure out the issues that are gaining traction. From here, you can then use these valuable findings in curating new campaigns and posts that are sure to pique the interest of your target audience.

Certain sentiment tools such as Cogito, which reviews customer service calls by detecting human signals can also be utilized to improve the interactions with clients and determine significant patterns. This can help boost customer satisfaction in the process.

Measuring social media impact deeper

The success of social media campaigns is usually gauged through standard engagement metrics such as the traffic they drove to an organization’s website, the likes and comments they garnered, and the number of times they were shared. While these metrics are useful in their own right, they tell brands nothing about the overall perception of the said campaigns.

For instance, it could be very easy for the number of “likes” to overshadow the number of people that were angered by a certain post. But without analyzing beyond the number of likes, you might think that a post was successful. Through sentiment analysis tools, you would be able to distinguish positive brand mentions from negative ones. In addition to this, you would also have a deeper understanding of the overall feelings a certain social media campaign generated.

As sentiment analysis continues to advance alongside other machine learning and AI-based services, the benefits it provides to digital marketing will only grow even more impactful. Nonetheless, it continues to be of utmost importance for organizations to look into the different ways this up-and-coming innovation can be leveraged. Equally vital would be the organization’s very own willingness to go beyond just waiting for the next sentiment analysis tool but to, instead, take the time and effort to train their own and wholeheartedly invest in a reliable data annotation service like Mindy Support, which provides a variety of BPO offerings.

Written by: Diane Fisher