As a content marketer, our specific goals may vary, but our main focus typically is growing our audience, generating more awareness and ultimately increasing sales. While all of this may happen, if you’re not considering the reasons why your customers are engaging with certain content assets, then you’re missing out on the opportunity to further improve content across your ecosystem.

The best way to know if your content resonates is to analyze the sentiment of your content. Sentiment analysis - or the act of measuring how users feel about your content - helps you understand the qualitative side of your audience beyond just the CTR. It’s estimated that 90% of created content is unstructured, which means it’s unmeasured. Sentiment analysis provides you the insight to improve content structure and deliver more meaning for your audience. Read on to discover how measuring sentiment can help you generate content that your customers will not only engage with, but that they can emotionally resonate with. 

How Measuring Sentiment Works

Sentiment analysis is how your organization, and you as a content marketer, gauge whether consumers are responding positively, negatively, or neutrally to your content. Depending on how you want to collect information, you can measure emotions such as happiness, sadness, or anger or even use it to gauge someone’s overall level of intent: urgent, not necessary or just browsing. 

For example, you may have an article that is driving a lot of traffic to your site, something you would normally view as a positive thing. However, it may come to your attention down the line, that the article is actually driving negative sentiment and reactions.  This is the most dangerous content you possess. By measuring sentiment, you can find out how much dangerous content you have, and either fix or remove that content.

The Knotch team has learnt that content that drives negative sentiment is typically content that is unclear or contradictory.  Content that confuses is rewarded with lower sentiment.    Clear content that is clear in its intent, and repeats the key points and takeaways is rewarded with higher sentiment.  The visual elements should reinforce the key messages too, and not be generic or place fillers.

The impact your content has on your audience matters. Being able to monitor for these signals will allow you to better create a content strategy that resonates with your audience. It will even allow you to experiment and even understand what content drives negative reactions in your environment. This invaluable information will always lead to optimization and future conversions. 

Real-Time Sentiment Analysis Samples

Around the holidays in 2019, Peloton released a commercial for an at-home bike that viewers responded negatively to. They felt it was off-putting, and did not receive it well. At the time, it was the only thing customers were discussing on Twitter, and it had a material impact on the company. Its stock fell by nearly 10% and it had to release a statement discussing how the commercial was “misinterpreted.” It was proof that not all press is good press. 

On the other hand, Budweiser has been succeeding in positive sentiment analysis for many years in a row now. Just look at their Superbowl commercials of the last five years. They elicit strong emotional responses, and customers discuss them (positively) for days after they air. And in an act of goodwill, they opted not to run an ad during the 2021 Superbowl in order to spread vaccine awareness instead. Budweiser and its parent company Anheuser-Busch understand the impact their messaging can have on their consumers. 

Measure Your Audience’s Sentiment

Here are several ways where measuring sentiment can help you create better connections with your customers, ultimately serving both you and them. 

1. Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Despite what kind of brand you have, there is no better place to connect with your customers than on social media. It’s where consumers go to share emotions and opinions - whether good or bad - and it’s a way for you to start collecting what people are talking about around your brand. This means having content managers on the ground, corresponding with your audience to find out not only click-through-rates and how many posts they like, but also whether what they’re saying skews positively or negatively, and all the ways you can engage in those conversations. 

2. SEO Research

In 2017, keyword searches outpaced social media searches for the first time in three years, which means users are relying on their own searches to find products relevant to them rather than just what is served to them. And you can use that to your advantage. By using sentiment analysis to sort through opinions and comments on reviews of your products you can focus your keyword, SEO, and metatag usage and help your audience find you easier. 

3. Customer Satisfaction

Sentiment analysis can also be a way to improve customer satisfaction. Consider it an alternative to your NPS score. Except, it’s something you can measure more than once on a daily basis throughout your content. Increasingly, social media is where consumers head when they’re dissatisfied with a product or an experience, since they don’t want to spend the energy on holding customer service lines. If you have support monitoring mentions and reactions to certain products, you can see what customers like and what they dislike. The more present you are online, the better you can gauge that dissatisfaction and resolve the issue. 

4. Plan For the Future

Sentiment can help you plan for the future: measuring sentiment can give you a more holistic idea of what content works, and what doesn’t, across all your platforms including social media, websites, blogs, review sites, forums, and more. This helps you put a pulse on consistent brand awareness that you can use as you plan your upcoming content strategies. It can also help you prepare better strategies for customer loyalty and retention. Finally, measuring sentiment can help you plan for how you talk about your brand, because you’ll have a better idea of how your customers are talking about your brand. The current, real-world impacts of your content will help drive the way that your brand is interpreted in the future. 

5. Invest in Martech

It would be really nice if you had infinite creators measuring the metrics and the effects of your content. But that’s not a realistic or wise use of resources. Instead, invest in marketing technology that can automatically measure sentiment for you from social media, reviews, and more. Knotch measures sentiment at a large scale through data collection in real time via the Knotch Scorecard, which can be embedded on any webpage. That information is then analyzed on your dashboard, giving you reads on sentiment as soon as they occur. 

If you’re not using it already, it’s crucial that sentiment analysis is part of your overall measurement framework for your content strategy moving forward. It can help you get a stronger read on what your customers are responding to and why, and give you the opportunity to give them more of what they already like and respond to. Equip yourself with the tools to drive a successful sentiment analysis with the martech designed exactly for that. 

To learn more about Knotch, click here.