The Ultimate Brand Sentiment Guide for 2024

How often have you seen someone sharing a post about a brand online? Consumers take to social media and other platforms to voice their opinions about companies, good and bad, and these comments substantially impact a brand’s performance.

These mentions and the emotions behind them are known as brand sentiment.

Though what these consumers post about your brand is out of your control, you can measure and improve your brand sentiment. How? Through brand sentiment analysis.

Keep reading to learn:

• What brand sentiment is
• Why conducting a brand sentiment analysis is important
• How to measure brand sentiment
• How to improve brand sentiment

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What is brand sentiment?

Brand sentiment refers to the mentions of your brand online and the feelings behind them. If a brand receives positive word-of-mouth publicity, they have a positive brand sentiment. But if they get caught in a public relations nightmare, their brand sentiment will skew negative.

You can track these shifts in consumers’ attitudes toward your brand by conducting a brand sentiment analysis. A brand sentiment analysis gathers all mentions of your brand to determine whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.

Why is conducting a brand sentiment analysis important?

Conducting a brand sentiment analysis is the best way to keep a pulse on how customers feel about your brand. By continually analyzing your brand sentiment, you ensure your brand remains in a positive public light. You also equip yourself to mitigate any negative publicity you might receive.

More reasons your company should conduct a brand sentiment analysis include:

Improved customer satisfaction

While 35% of users post negative comments about companies on social media, these complaints don’t have to spell a catastrophe for your brand.

When you keep track of your brand sentiment, you’ll spot these complaints quickly, even if the user doesn’t tag you directly. The quicker and more thoughtfully you respond to negative comments, the better your chances of alleviating the situation.

You’ll also improve your chances of retaining those customers by showing that you care about their experiences with your company.

Additionally, other audience members will see your thoughtful response and understand how much you care about your customers’ experience and seek to improve it.

Importance of word-of-mouth

People are more likely to trust what a friend or family member says about a brand than what the brand says about themselves. If your brand sentiment is positive, that can work wonders for your marketing strategy.

If it’s negative, you’ll need to remedy that to get your marketing campaigns back on track.

Conducting a brand sentiment analysis helps you keep track of your word-of-mouth mentions so you can respond accordingly. You might repost positive recommendations and adjust your strategies in response to negative word-of-mouth.

Understanding the industry

A brand sentiment analysis is one of the best ways to conduct market research into your industry. By analyzing what consumers say about your competitors, you can spot opportunities or threats and gain better insight into industry trends.

For example, if you work in the tech industry and notice more negative mentions of machine learning, that might indicate an industry development that could affect your brand.

Understanding your target audience

All marketing strategies should center on your target audience, and what better way to understand them than by analyzing how they talk about you and your competition online?

While surveys and other market research tools provide a foundational understanding of your target customer, analyzing what your audience says online helps you dive deeper. What does your target audience love most about your brand? What makes them unhappy?

Your findings will help you better target your marketing strategies to your ideal customer.

Bonus Read: Understanding Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research

Improved marketing strategies

Similarly, you can use brand sentiment analysis to gauge your marketing performance. Have you launched a new product? Analyze how people talk about it. Initiated a new ad campaign? See if it’s generating positive buzz.

You can also use your findings to gain new ideas for future marketing strategies and tactics. Are customers talking positively about something related to your competitors, and can you leverage these insights to create something better?

How to measure your brand sentiment

Now you know why brand sentiment is essential, but how do you measure it?

You can measure your brand sentiment by collecting all brand mentions and determining whether each is positive, negative, or neutral. From here, you can calculate an overall brand sentiment score to gauge how many positive and negative mentions you’ve received, or you can analyze and respond to individual comments.

You’ll need to include tagged and untagged mentions of your brand, and in many cases, you’ll want to look at the mention’s context. The context sometimes changes a sentence’s meaning, so don’t overlook this step!

Brand sentiment analysis tools

Most mid-sized or large brands receive so many mentions that make manually measuring their brand sentiment challenging. Fortunately, there are many brand sentiment analysis tools to automate the process. Some excellent choices include:

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a brand monitoring tool that lets you select any keywords you wish to monitor, then compiles mentions of that keyword from social media and elsewhere on the web. It also features automated sentiment analysis software so you can quickly see whether those mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch also compiles mentions from social media, including posts and direct messages (DMs). It tells you the sentiment of each post, along with an overview of your total mentions and their sentiment. To help you stay alert, it notifies you of potential threats to your brand.

Social Searcher

On Social Searcher, it is free to search for chosen keywords and see sentiment analysis for them, along with other post statistics. If you upgrade to the premium version, you’ll also receive a stored log of your past mentions.

Bonus Read: Brand Management

How to improve your brand sentiment

You’ve seen your brand sentiment score and you aren’t happy with the results. So, what do you do if you need to improve it? Follow these four tips to increase your brand sentiment:

1. Monitor consistently

The digital space changes rapidly, so you should monitor your brand sentiment consistently to stay ahead of potential problems and mitigate them as needed.

Include this task as a regular part of your marketing activities, and use an automated tool to simplify the process!

2. Respond quickly

When you see negative brand mentions appear online, respond to them quickly. Ensure you personalize your response and do your best to answer the poster’s question or address their concern.

3. Adapt your strategies

If you notice a spike in negative brand mentions, find the source of the problem and remedy it before it becomes too troublesome.

While a spike in negative mentions can be concerning, they don’t have to spell disaster. Use your brand sentiment analysis to learn what went wrong so you can improve going forward.

You can also use the reverse — if you find a campaign or strategy correlated with a positive boost in brand mentions, lean into it!

4. Test new ideas

Brand sentiment analysis can also unveil potential new ideas for your marketing campaigns. Stay on the lookout for these, and don’t hesitate to test them. To do so effectively, run an A/B or multivariate test on your new campaign idea — where it’s a new messaging tactic, post format, or strategy.

You can also scope out brand voice examples for some inspiration!

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