Understanding how your audience feels about your product or service is paramount to any marketing strategy.

To build a comprehensive brand marketing strategy, you should know what people struggle with and what they enjoy about your products. You should also know how their attitude to your brand changes in response to product launches, marketing campaigns, and outside events.

Fortunately, the world of technology is evolving all the time, and now sentiment analysis tools can provide that data.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a method of text analysis that uses machine-learning and natural language processing to determine whether the sentiment behind a piece of writing is positive, negative, or neutral.

Why is it important to perform sentiment analysis for your target audience?

Sentiment analysis uncovers information that can't be discovered in any other way. Big Data reveals your overall brand reputation and does the same for your competitors. Just having that data will improve your brand marketing strategy, but there are also less apparent ways you can use the information revealed by sentiment analysis.

How can you use the information gathered by sentiment analysis tools?

1. Flag customers for active communication

Analyzing sentiment around your competitors' brands shows you the customers who are unhappy with your competitor's products or services. If they are criticizing an issue that your product doesn't have, you can easily swoop in with an attractive product offer.

If the sentiment analysis shows customers who are unhappy with your own brand, you can reach out to them and attempt to solve their issues.

Sentiment analysis tools can also reveal customers who are actively satisfied with your brand—i.e., they post positive things about your brand online. You might want to reach out and ask them to leave testimonials on your site or become an affiliate or brand advocate.

2. Uncover hidden conversations about your business

Sentiment analysis shows you the pain points and happiness points of your company. If your brand is popular, you'll uncover entire discussions online that you can join to showcase your expertise or present your solutions.

You can approach the conversations about your business in two ways. The first is to act as a company representative: speak as an expert, promote your brand, answer questions and complaints.

You can also encourage your brand advocates to join in those discussions as inspired customers and thus promote your brand in a more subtle and possibly more persuasive way.

3. Keep a closer eye on your competition

Performing sentiment analysis for your competition is no less important than doing so for your own brand. You'll find out what their customers are happy and unhappy about, and will be able to steal their good practices and avoid their mistakes.

For example, you can analyze how your competitor's most recent marketing campaign turned out. You can't usually get access to exact financial results, but you can find out whether the competitor's target audience liked or disliked the campaign, what they said about it, and how much traction it received.

In addition, you can see which demographic was most satisfied with the campaign and which was least satisfied. If your competitor is an international brand, you can see how countries differed in their responses.

4. Understand your own messaging better

Sometimes, marketing campaigns, slogans, and ideas don't work out as planned. Sometimes, you end up promoting a message you didn't intend to promote.

Sentiment analysis reveals the reaction to your every word early on. If you say or do something insensitive, only sentiment analysis tools have a chance of catching the problem before it blows up.

Since the rise of social media, brands' social media posts, marketing campaigns, and business decisions have frequently caused social backlash that could have been prevented with a sentiment analysis tool.

Even if you aren't planning on anything controversial, it makes sense to know how people feel about the message you send out into the world.

5. Create a more holistic approach to your online presence

Social media marketing and other digital marketing strategies often go unassessed. We don't know exactly what's working and what isn't. We don't know the extent of the social media buzz and its effect on brand awareness and brand reputation.

Sentiment analysis is a part of the solution in that it makes us more aware of our online presence. It turns vague feelings the target audience has about our brand into numbers, and it helps us create better marketing strategies.

Top 5 Sentiment Analysis Tools

Now that we've hopefully agreed that sentiment analysis can be useful for your brand, let's move on to the tools that perform it for you.

1. Awario

Awario (an app developed by my company) is a social listening (also called social media monitoring) tool, and sentiment analysis is one of its prominent features.

The tool crawls all major social media networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and other parts of the Web for mentions of any keyword. Usually, the keyword will be your brand or your competitor's brand, but it can also be your product, industry, CEO, or whatever else you choose.