Keeping a Finger on the Pulse: How Brand Sentiment Tracking Can Generate Valuable Insights

As human beings, we feel first, then decide. And this is especially true when we, as consumers, make decisions about which brands to purchase and feel loyal to.

The feelings your brand inspires in consumers – positive, neutral or negative – have a direct impact on your bottom line. That’s why brand sentiment tracking is essential to understand the emotional context behind how consumers perceive and feel about your brand.

By developing robust, continuous brand sentiment tracking, you can keep your finger on the pulse of your customers and uncover insights that can drive action and fuel your business objectives.

Brand Sentiment Tracking Requires a Holistic Approach

Customer sentiment is not one-dimensional – consumers can even have mixed feelings, where they may feel positively about one part of your brand while also feeling negatively about another – and it’s dynamically changing with each interaction and touchpoint. To accurately and effectively capture how your customers feel about you, your brand sentiment tracking must be equally multi-dimensional and dynamic. 

Pulling both quantitative and qualitative data from third-party reviews, consumer feedback, social media, word-of-mouth, customer service interactions and any other sources from which you’re collecting data can inform your brand analysis. Only relying on one source or one type of data will give a skewed and incomplete analysis; a holistic approach will provide the best data and, thus, the most valuable insights.  

When those data are input into a sentiment analysis tool, they are automatically scanned, with the help of AI and machine learning, and categorized as either positive, neutral or negative in tone. By synthesizing the data based on customer sentiment, brands can better understand where they stand and where to focus their efforts in winning over their customers. 

Turning Sentiment Analysis into Actionable Insights

It’s not enough just to analyze customer sentiment data, though. The most important aspect of brand sentiment tracking is reading between the numbers and extracting insights that point forward and drive action. 

Sentiment analysis data can be a great indicator of customer loyalty and a great predictor of their future behavior. By developing a better understanding of how consumers view your brand, you can predict their responses to any potential future moves you may – like rolling out a new product or service line, moving into a new category or rebranding – and make smarter, more informed decisions. 

Extracting insights from your sentiment analysis data can also paint a more nuanced and informative landscape of the market and your competitors. These insights can help you uncover strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities for where and how to move next to win big.

Manage Your Brand Reputation by Tracking Customer Sentiment in Real-Time

Brand sentiment tracking – whether as part of a broader brand tracking program or as a standalone practice – can also help you be more effective in reacting to any unforeseen circumstances where negative customer sentiment can threaten your brand reputation and positioning and hurt your bottom line. 

By continuously tracking customer sentiment metrics from multiple sources, brand leaders are in a better position to diagnose a problem that’s arising – for example, that customers’ experiences with customer service have not been easy or helpful – and clarify the right course of action to solve the problem. Without those concrete data ready and available at all times, you might only have a hunch that something is wrong but not have any clear path forward.  

Real-time brand sentiment tracking can also catch problems before they become entrenched and difficult to course correct. If customers are still engaging with your brand and sharing feedback about their experiences, there’s still a chance to intervene and rewrite a negative experience with a positive one and maintain your brand reputation. If you only track customer sentiment periodically, then you may miss the window to act.  

Tracking customer sentiment in real-time also provides a rich baseline of data from which it will be easier to compare metrics over time and pinpoint when sentiment has shifted (either positively or negatively).

Keep the Quality of Your Insights in Mind

Insights need to be energizing, understandable and tied to KPI growth to motivate action. If your brand sentiment tracking doesn’t produce high-quality insights, then you’re leaving value on the table and there’s little purpose in tracking the metrics at all.  

When looking for the right tool or infrastructure for your brand sentiment tracking, look for these five components to ensure you’ll get insights that drive action and grow your bottom line: 

1. You should have always-on and real-time sentiment analysis. 

2. There should be a sentiment score available that aggregates the metrics together into an easy-to-understand number to answer the question, “How are we doing?” 

3. It should pull multiple kinds of data (qualitative and quantitative) from multiple sources simultaneously and display them together. 

4. There should be an automated analytics function to uncover trends that can lead to discovering insights. 

5. Whatever tool(s) you deploy should be able to integrate into your organization’s existing tech stack and be accessible within your organization so that the appropriate teams can find and use the insights generated. 

Deploy Systems of Learning and Action to Accelerate Growth

Material thrives at the intersection of strategy, service, technology and data science to accurately measure, carefully analyze and creatively package impactful insights. We have over 50 years of experience partnering with the world’s leading businesses, bringing them closer to their customers and fueling human-centric growth. 

Want to learn more about how Material’s brand measurement services can make a meaningful impact for your organization? Start the conversation today. 

FAQ

What are the best metrics for tracking brand sentiment? 

Some good metrics to include in your brand sentiment tracking are: velocity & tone of comments, social media reactions, volume and tone of shares/mentions, Share of Voice (SOV), click-through rate (CTR), purchase behavior, Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) and engagement trends over time. 

What are the challenges in tracking brand sentiment? 

Not having the infrastructure in place to facilitate good data collection and analysis from your customer sentiment tracking can make it difficult to uncover valuable insights. It can also be challenging to get the most from your brand sentiment tracking by going alone and only relying on your own internal resources, if you don’t have the appropriate tools, expertise and capacity to execute effectively.