By Tamara Irminger Underwood
Whether your organization is a start-up or an established brand, it’s likely you’ve heard of sentiment analysis to identify emotions and feelings in written comments. Sentiment monitoring typically runs on an AI-platform that is constantly assessing and organizing written feedback or communication and categorizing it into various emotional categories.
Let’s say a company launches a new ad campaign and wants to know how it’s being perceived. Before the marketing team can drill down to learn more specifics, they first need to gauge its overall impact. Are the written reactions mostly positive, negative or neutral? It would not be possible to manually scour and categorize all the media channels where people may be engaging, which is why sentiment monitoring is done using online sentiment analysis tools.
Sentiment monitoring has many benefits, but it also creates a lot of data noise. We’ve worked with a number of marketing teams from different size organizations to help them make better sense of their sentiment analysis feedback. We use data generated from the sentiment monitoring and design a qualitative market study to leverage the insights into actionable plans. Think of sentiment analysis as providing you with an aerial view, and qualitative market research providing you with a granular view.
The Benefits of Sentiment Monitoring Paired with Qualitative Studies
- Product Insights: Brands need to know what resonates with consumers, and what doesn’t. This can be anything from UX design to ad campaigns to features about a product or service. Sentiment analysis is a great starting point for gauging general emotional reactions but only qualitative studies will shed light on the ‘how’ or ‘why’ behind the emotion.
- Competitive Analysis: Surviving in today’s marketplace means not only fulfilling a need, but also understanding how the competition is also servicing its customers. Sentiment analysis and qualitative studies are great ways to discover the gaps in marketing strategies, control brand reputation, and home in on areas where sentiment analysis identifies negative or positive reactions. Once identified, companies can create strategies to enhance audience engagement, improve messaging for marketing and advertising campaigns, and contextualize key performance indicators (KPIs).
We’ve worked with numerous organizations, both large and small, to help them make better sense of their sentiment analysis data. It’s a great starting point for companies, but it doesn’t tell the whole story without being paired with qualitative research insights.
