As more and more of the conversation about brands and products shifts to social media and other online platforms, companies are turning to AI to help them tune out the noise and generate actionable consumer insight from all this available data.
Using AI-based technology known as social listening tools, companies can get a better sense of who is talking about their brand online, which platforms are driving the discussion, and even how their customers and target audience feel about their brand. Thanks to advancements in AI technology, social listening tools are becoming more emotionally intelligent, analyzing the language associated with a brand and brand-relevant topics to determine whether sentiment is positive or negative and whether specific emotions such as surprise, excitement, anger, or disgust are underlying online comments.
The results of this analysis is consumer insight grounded in both a data-based analytic approach and a deeper understanding of consumers’ emotions and opinions. Let’s take a closer look at how brands are leveraging these insights to build better marketing strategies.
What is consumer insight?
Consumer insight is not merely an analysis of consumer behavior. Rather, it involves interpretations of consumer research that identify both how a consumer feels and thinks about a brand, product, or service, and how marketing can better reach the consumer. You can think of consumer insight as bridging the gap between R&D and marketing, with the goal of improving the consumer experience based on what the consumer really wants.
How do social listening tools work?
Social listening tools are software used to analyze online conversations, including comments sections, reviews, and posts on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. These could be conversations about a brand, comments about topics in the news that are relevant to the brand, or comments about a competitor. Social listening tools use cutting-edge AI techniques, including text analysis, image analytics, and natural language processing, to sort through large amounts of data and generate consumer insight based on relevant consumer-created content.
When it comes to understanding how consumers feel about a brand or product, the primary social listening tool is sentiment analysis, which analyzes text to identify language that indicates approval and disapproval or indicates specific emotions.
Sentiment analysis can be a powerful tool for understanding the big picture of how your brand is being discussed online. For example, NetBase Quid AI uses sentiment analysis to gather data on consumer feelings and enables users to group that data based on different audience segments. NetBase Quid users can also group data according to consumers’ feelings towards brand-relevant current events and content, or towards competitors.
Translating consumer insight into effective marketing strategies
Merely gathering data is not enough. You need to be able to leverage that data to connect with your audience. NetBase Quid enables users to display large amounts of data using intuitive visualizations, distilling complex data to target relevant trends, market gaps, and audience segments.
For example, you can aggregate data to assess how feel-alike segments, groups that feel similarly towards your brand, respond to specific news and events. This kind of analysis allows you to better understand what content your customers care about, so you can create messaging that matters to them. You can also use audience segmenting to target messaging towards groups that tend to share your customers’ feelings and opinions about relevant events but aren’t yet aware of your brand.
In addition to identifying audience segments and topics to target, social listening tools provide consumer insight on the appropriate tone for your brand. For example, the online conversation around your brand may be compassionate, edgy, or humorous. Once you understand how your customers and target audience are talking about what they like or dislike, you can join in on the conversation and catalyze further engagement. This creates a positive feedback loop of generating more engagement, learning from that engagement, and using that knowledge to build more engaging marketing content in the future.
Insightful consumer research
The bottom line is that analytics and social listening tools are now more advanced than ever, and this can ultimately benefit both consumers and brands. Consumer insight is meant to bridge the gap between how a consumer and a company think about a brand. The goal is to help companies create more effective products and services and to create marketing campaigns that reach a wide audience based on genuine demand. Thanks to effective social listening tools, consumers are being heard, and companies are better able to speak to consumers’ wants and needs.
