The market is cutthroat with no lack of options when it comes to brands, products, or services. The key to being a successful business in such competition is to have a strong digital presence. Brands are making every possible effort to reach their target audience and drive them to engage with their content. 

But every digital marketing technique doesn’t always work. 

Like Pepsi’s advertising campaign with Kendall Jenner. The commercial showed Kendall, a supermodel, leaving her photoshoot and joining a peaceful anti-discrimination protest march. 

So far, so good. But then the ad shows Kendall offering a can of Pepsi to a policeman. Both characters embrace and the protest comes to an end. While the intention behind it was fine, the brand got bad publicity. People complained that the advertisement denigrates the importance of peaceful protests and shows that all it takes to resolve such serious and important issues in the world is a drink.

While such campaigns grab massive attention, audience and customer dissatisfaction are not always clearly noticeable. According to reports, 96% of unhappy customers won’t communicate their dissatisfaction to you directly but will tell friends about their disappointment. Many will post online but not tag you.

That’s why analyzing sentiment in marketing is important. It helps dig deep and collects data on your audience’s sentiment. It helps you send the right message without triggering the wrong sentiments in your audience. 

In this article, we will discuss the ins and outs of sentiment mining in digital marketing and how to use it properly. 

What is sentiment mining? 

Also known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis in marketing is the process of using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) approaches to examine online comments and written pieces and discover the emotional intent behind the words. 

To put it simply, sentiment analysis is the process of clearly understanding customers’ attitudes towards a particular topic, brand, product, or service – be it positive, negative, or neutral. 

Which sources should your sentiment analysis tap into?

Sentiment analysis is an amazing tool when it comes to quantifiably categorizing online statements’ negative or positive connotations. It gives companies a strong way of detecting the aggregate language data across all sorts of communications on online platforms.

But to use sentiment analysis in marketing properly, one needs to know the proper sources to trap into for collecting wide-ranging relevant data. Here are a few:

Audience inquiries

When an audience starts or participates in a conversation and asks about your product or services, the metrics on their overall sentiment, the length of the text and the words used can be compared to other different inquiries and mentions.

Customer service

Sentiment analysis of customer service interactions helps you track the way customers feel about your company or product over time. It can give you an insight into their brand loyalty and how satisfied they are with your customer service. It also helps you understand what your customers expect from you and how you can deliver those expectations.   

HR interactions

Happy employees are more likely to stay. You can apply sentiment analysis to HR interactions to collect how your employees feel about those interactions and how you can make them better. It can also help you improve your recruitment efforts and attract better talent.

News and public data

This source is particularly useful for large, public companies and brands getting better visibility. Sentiment analysis can detect whether your trending news is positive or negative over time and what your audience feels about trending topics. This can help you curate a campaign that appeals to their sentiments. 

How to use sentiment analysis data in marketing

We know that accurate sentiment analysis can change the face of your digital marketing strategy (for the better, of course). But for it to work, first, you need to identify the areas where opinion mining will benefit you the most.  

Here are a few ways you can optimize sentiment analysis in digital marketing:

Understand what they ‘care’ about

While trends may fade out with time, cause-driven marketing helps your business in the long haul. Data gathered from sentiment mining can help you understand what topics and issues your audience cares about. It’s a fantastic way to not only give something back to society but also establish your brand as aware and sensitive. 

Marketing has several benefits, such as increasing brand loyalty, boosting employee morale, positive reviews and press coverage, etc. This ultimately leads to increased sales and helps your company stand out among competitors. According to studies, 83% of gen Z and millennials say it’s important that company values match their own, and 62% of millennials have stated that they enjoy shopping from brands that reflect a positive ideology. 

But finding the right cause that aligns with your brand image and influences your audience’s opinion can be challenging. Sentiment analysis can help you with that. For example, if your opinion mining data shows that your targeted audience feels passionate about environmental sustainability, you can market your brand by joining a structured campaign like donating 1% of the profits to the planet. 

Based on the data, you can also identify local non-profits working towards a cause your audience is interested in. In this case, launching a co-branded marketing campaign with such non-profits for an event will increase your chances of fundraising and public support. 

Marketing demands significant investment and the campaign going wrong can cause you significant loss. Thus, basing your marketing strategy on sentiment analysis data will help you prevent any blunder by choosing the right causes to collaborate with. 

Better copywriting for campaigns

Good copywriting titillates your audience’s intellect and impacts their buying decisions. But today, every other brand is utilizing copywriting to boost their brand status. So to stand out in the crowd, your brand must have a unique voice that resonates with your target market. 

Sentiment analysis can help you identify topics that interest your core audience. But the feature that really takes the copywriting approach up a notch is its ability to detect your audience’s mood and feelings on topics. 

Artificial intelligence can detect which words are used most in negative or positive sentences. This way, the gathered data will help you to curate content addressing these feelings and avoiding any chances of hurting audience sentiment. 

Opinion mining generates data that otherwise would be considered intangible but can prove to be invaluable for your brand’s marketing.  To put it simply, it would allow you to personalize your content and CTA so that your audience finds them relatable and interacts more. According to HubSpot, personalized CTAs have 202% better chances of conversion. 

Better visuals

To create content that helps your business stand out in the crowd, visuals are essential. Proper visuals and infographics reflect your brand and draw in the target audience.

Imagery helps make text-centric content more eye-catching, digestible, and memorable and can communicate a compelling message that speaks volumes without taking up much time.

Nowadays, millions of images are being uploaded on different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. These visuals play a crucial part in expressing the emotions of users on multiple online social networking sites. To understand what interests them, image sentiment analysis has become important in the area of online multimedia big data research. But how do you detect whether your brand’s visual imagery works for your audience? 

But visual storytelling is not just about pictures. The goal is to plan your visual media in a way that’s relatable across all your platforms, and understanding what visuals are likely to trigger positive emotions is the key to that. Sentiment mining in digital marketing helps you pinpoint those relatable factors and improve your brand’s visual storytelling. The AI-powered analytics shows you the way to getting better engagement not only on content but also on your ad campaigns. 

With opinion mining, you can track direct replies to those who subscribe to your content, examine replies to the comments, and compare the retention rate of each visual. You can use the results to understand what parts hit a chord with your audience and what did not work for them. 

Better crisis management 

In the era of social media, every post and campaign is under constant scrutiny. No matter how well you target a trending topic, the slightest miscommunication or poor representation can make your digital marketing go wrong real fast. 

That’s something you can prevent by including sentiment analysis in digital marketing. AI-powered opinion mining can help you can find out if people aren’t picking up the content you are delivering. To understand it better, let’s examine the chaotic McDonald’s Brazil campaign. 

During the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, McDonald’s Brazil ran a solidarity campaign with customers isolated in quarantine by separating its iconic arches. But the Twitter users didn’t appreciate the campaign as it seemed like a set of half-hearted efforts of the brand to support people.

A sentiment analysis tool would have flagged the campaign as negative, and McDonald’s could prevent the negative coverage before it spun into a full-fledged brand reputation crisis.

This shows us the importance of constantly monitoring the sentiment of your campaigns. Sentiment analysis makes it easier. It immediately identifies spikes of negative mentions that might be a sign of a brewing controversy. Whether it’s linked to your marketing, competitors’ campaigns, news, or anything in between, you will see it coming.

Prevention is always better than cure. With sentiment mining in digital marketing, you can track your brand mentions on social networking sites and media outlets and find the root cause – be it an influencer tweet, a customer review, or something else. Mending the damage will be far easier if you know early on that there is an issue.

Segmenting audience better 

Not every individual in your core audience sees or feels the same way about a topic, issue, or your product and services. Thus your digital marketing strategy needs to be customized based on segments to cater to each of them. But how do you categorize your audience in this vast sea of social media interactions? The answer is – with the help of AI in sentiment analysis. 

Sentiment analysis goes through millions of online conversations, images, and written pieces and pinpoints different sentiments clearly and comprehensively. This helps you differentiate the segments in your audience and shows you what to target while running a campaign that resonates with each segment. 

Understanding different markets 

For a scaling company, understanding the intricacies of different markets is crucial. One marketing strategy may have done really well in India but may fall flat in Singapore or Japan. Still, social media does not always have national boundaries, and sentiment analysis leverages that very universality. With proper sentiment analysis tools, you can assess what different populations from different countries relate to or feel passionate about. 

Let’s say you are planning to scale your brand to European countries like Germany. Now before you run advertising or social media campaigns, you need to understand the sentiment of the people of that country. A uniform strategy does not work in every market, and that’s where sentiment analysis can help you. By applying those analytics, you will be able to gauge exactly what content will be well accepted in a particular market. 

Identify influencers

No matter what we say, social media influencers are now a big part of the online buzz, and they are here to stay. Identifying influencers who can be the face of your brand on social media can be easily done with sentiment analysis. 

With the help of opinion mining, you can locate the most appropriate influencers for your product by just identifying and applying keywords that are relevant and important to your business. For example, if you are a pet-food brand, you could search social media for keywords like “dog food,” “organic dog food,” etc. 

Once you’ve located the influencers with a fair number of followers that use your keywords frequently (in a positive light, of course), you can further use sentiment analysis to make sure their interactions with followers are also positive. And voila — you’ve found your candidates!

Conclusion 

Did you know, according to reports, 68% of customers leave a brand because they believe it doesn’t care about them? Digging deeper into your brand sentiment is not only good for your digital marketing but also beneficial for your customer support strategy. Sentiment analysis can open your eyes to how your customer really feels about certain issues as well as your brand.

But tracking the sentiments and opinions of your audience is a complicated task that needs precision. That’s why choosing the right tools for accurate sentiment mining in digital marketing is the key to running a successful campaign. 

Radarr provides you with the finest features when it comes to social media marketing. The platform’s cutting-edge AI technology enables you to utilise the necessary social media intelligence services and more. This social media solution tracks and monitors every emerging trend and offers sentiment API capable of measuring human emotions behind online conversations. With its efficient services, Radarr will help you align your brand image with your audience’s expectations and prevent any downfall of the misdirected campaign. 

For effective, relatable, and interactive brand marketing, book a demo today.