Your customers have opinions about your brand, and you deserve to know what they are. That’s the power of brand sentiment tracking — using social listening technology to get inside the minds of your consumers to see how they feel about your brand.
We define brand sentiment as the emotional response customers have toward a brand. These responses are shaped by their experiences, interactions, and perceptions. We measure brand sentiment as a collective mood, where social media chatter, online reviews, and personal interactions converge to create an overarching vibe.
Knowing your brand sentiment measurement helps you see how your marketing efforts are paying off, or whether you might be falling out of favor with your customers. Here’s how you can use brand sentiment to your advantage.
Contents:
What Is Brand Sentiment Tracking?
Brand Sentiment Tracking vs Competitor Analysis
How Do You Measure Brand Sentiment?
Improving Brand Sentiment
How to Monitor Brand Sentiment
Integrating Brand Sentiment Tracking with Meltwater
What Is Brand Sentiment Tracking?
Brand sentiment tracking taps into the collective pulse of consumer opinions. It’s a systematic way of measuring and monitoring brand sentiment that goes beyond reading customer feedback.
To do brand sentiment tracking, you’ll need to enlist the help of data tools like Meltwater that can be everywhere you are online. Meltwater makes sense of what people are saying about your brand and how they’re saying it.
The result: Meltwater is like a digital mood ring that tells you exactly how your customers feel about your brand.
Brand Sentiment Tracking vs Competitor Analysis
Brand sentiment tracking pairs well with competitor analysis. The two serve different yet related purposes:
- Brand sentiment tracking monitors how customers feel about a brand.
- Competitor analysis identifies strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities regarding your competitors.
Sentiment focuses on consumers, while competitor analysis focuses on the market at large. You can combine your findings from each to improve your brand strategy.
Brand sentiment is a part of competitor analysis. You can use brand sentiment monitoring tools to see how others feel about your competitors, which may help you identify ways to strengthen your own market position.
How Do You Measure Brand Sentiment?
Brand sentiment tracking can take several forms, especially when tracking opinions across multiple channels and audiences. Let’s review a few tools to track sentiment.
Consumer intelligence tools
Consumer intelligence platforms like Meltwater gather, analyze, and use data about consumers’ preferences and behaviors. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of your audience, including their values and what encourages them to act.
These tools combine insights from multiple data sources, such as social media, purchase history, website interactions, customer reviews, and surveys, to create a comprehensive profile of consumer sentiment.
In addition, consumer intelligence tools help with measuring brand awareness so you can see your reach and impact. These insights can help you better predict customer sentiment and behavior regarding your brand.
TIP: Learn more about AI-powered consumer intelligence tools in our buyer's guide!
Online surveys
Online surveys collect feedback directly from your customers. This allows you to get feedback from verified customers (e.g., send a survey after they make a purchase) and learn more about their experiences.
You can make surveys as short or as in-depth as you like. You can also automate this method to provide a continuous feedback system and always know where your brand stands.
Social listening tools
People don’t shy away from airing their true feelings on social media. Comments, posts, and engagement can give brands a raw look at what resonates with customers (and what doesn’t).
Social listening tools give you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on social channels. These tools monitor keywords, such as your brand name, products, or even competitors, then turns mentions into an easy-to-digest rundown of those conversations. It’s a way for you to be everywhere all at once.
TIP: For a deep-dive on the power of social listening solutions, download our free guide!
Focus groups
Focus groups are a qualitative research method where a small group of participants go through moderated discussions. Brand leaders can use their responses along with things like body language and other nonverbal cues to gauge brand sentiment. They also have the benefit of asking follow-up questions to gain clarity.
Online review sites
Online review sites like Google, Yelp!, and Bing give people a platform to review businesses and share their experiences. These reviews can indicate whether a person is satisfied or dissatisfied with a business or brand.
However, online reviews aren’t enough to gauge overall sentiment. That’s because only 38% of happy customers will leave a review, while just 10% of customers will leave a negative review. This means you’re missing out on a huge slice of your customer base who will never tell you how they feel about you, at least not through a review.
Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that gauges customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking a simple question:
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?”
NPS divides customers into three categories:
- Promoters (Score 9-10): These are your most loyal and enthusiastic customers. They are likely to recommend your brand to others.
- Passives (Score 7-8): These customers are satisfied but not enthusiastic. They may not actively promote your brand and could be swayed by competitors.
- Detractors (Score 0-6): These customers are unhappy and may discourage others from engaging with your brand. They represent a risk to your reputation.
This tool quantifies how customers feel about your brand. Looking at Promoters, Passives, and Detractors will give you a better sense of your overall brand sentiment.
Improving Brand Sentiment
Learning how to measure brand sentiment is just the beginning. Once you know how customers think and feel about you, you may want to improve their perceptions.
Let’s look at some ways you can improve brand sentiment and monitor your progress.
Respond to negative feedback
Negative online reviews happen to every business or brand. However, you don’t have to take negative feedback as your final answer. The way you respond can make all the difference, not just in how that customer feels but also in how other customers reading the review will feel.
Nearly half of consumers say they’re more likely to give a business a chance if they respond appropriately to a negative review. Take it as an opportunity to show off your customer service and commitment to great experiences.
Leverage positive customer reviews
If you have customers singing your praises, take time to show off their feedback to your audience in other places. Positive customer reviews are essentially free marketing. You can use their feedback to share on your social channels, videos, and even your website to boost your brand image.
Engage your audience on social media
Social media gives you a direct connection to your audience. In fact, 56% of consumers want to hear from their favorite brands on social media. Respond directly to comments on your posts, send DMs when appropriate, and run interactive campaigns to encourage two-way engagement.
Get ahead of PR crises
Negative publicity can happen to any brand. If you’re not carefully watching for it, it can quickly spiral and cause significant brand damage. Getting ahead of negative coverage gives you the opportunity to dispel misinformation, prevent brand erosion, and share your side of the story before too many people hear about it.
Run sentiment-driven marketing campaigns
When you want to boost sales, gain social followers, or increase email signups, you run campaigns to achieve those goals. You can do the same to boost sentiment. Focus on sentiment-driven campaigns, starting with learning what your audience cares about. Tailor your campaigns to reflect those needs and make emotional connections with your audience.
How to Monitor Brand Sentiment
Brand monitoring tools make it easier to track sentiment gains or losses. These tools pull together several ways to measure brand sentiment into a single source of truth. You can gain a bird’s eye view of how people feel about you in real time and track your progress along the way.
Brand monitoring is a slice of the bigger brand management puzzle. In addition to monitoring sentiment, you can also get insights into your share of voice, competitor analysis, and trending topics so you can manage your brand from all sides.
The key is to be proactive. Build brand monitoring into your everyday processes so you can react quickly and be consistent with how you shape others’ perceptions.
Integrating Brand Sentiment Tracking with Meltwater
Understanding your brand’s health starts with getting a comprehensive picture of your brand as it stands. Meltwater gives you the most comprehensive data from online and offline sources so you can see what people are saying and how they’re talking about you.
Meltwater combines social listening with consumer intelligence so you can see the total impact your brand is making. Compare your standings to your competitors, get an up-to-the-minute view of sentiment and share of voice, and connect every campaign to real business outcomes.
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