Consumer sentiment can explain why sales may be significant, poor or other sudden changes in business activity. It often applies to the larger economic picture but can be focused on specific sectors, such as retail or your specific brand.
In financial news, consumer sentiment is determined by statistical measurement and is often used to predict economic activity. It can also relate to an individual’s attitude about their financial prospects, which can determine their purchasing habits.
Consumer sentiment is not only related to the economy in general but specific products and brands. On social media, eCommerce platforms, and websites, consumers express their feelings about products. Increasingly, companies seek to gather these insights into one place, analyze them, and integrate them.
AI and machine learning can automate analyzing these data points through opinion mining that can read the feedback for tone and attitude.
The Steps of Measuring Consumer Sentiment
Measuring and applying consumer sentiment usually includes the following steps:
There are many places data can be mined–social media, eCommerce platforms, and company websites. AI tools gather these mentions of your brand. Also, web scraping tools will retrieve content that will help you gain insight into consumer sentiment.
Not all data will be essential. Sorting data can be laborious, but AI tools can extract extraneous words, punctuation, and topics that may not be relevant. When the text is cleaned up, it is easier to evaluate.
Once the data has been sorted, analyzing results will give a detailed picture of how customers feel about your brand. Tools can evaluate the tone of the feedback to provide an overall view of customer sentiment.
Apply analysis of data to update your business operations, product development, and marketing. Detailed information from customer feedback can help you time and present promotions and personalize your approach to customers.
It is important to stay informed about consumer sentiment, whether it is regarding the economy in general or directed towards specific sectors in particular. The following companies are valuable for revealing information about consumer sentiment.
Marketwatch is a familiar site for anyone who follows business and financial news. This site is published by the Dow Jones &Co and provides information about the business, personal finance, and consumer sentiment. Business owners can benefit from getting ahead of consumer trends by pursuing economic and business developments published on Marketwatch.
If there are headwinds in consumer sentiment, business owners can adjust their forecasts and strategies to accommodate general trends. Also, Marketwatch news on consumer sentiment can help business owners gauge when to time promotions that could encourage consumers to buy even when times are tight.
Revuze is a site that provides expert advice on marketing, product development, and marketing through an interdisciplinary approach using big data, machine learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and sentiment analysis.
Revuze offers several products that can help gauge consumer sentiment. Revuze Explorer provides a thorough inventory of your brand with performance indicators and sentiment analysis, featuring 40 to 80 features customers care about the most. Revuze eCommerce Alerts is an add-on to Revuze Explorer that sends emails, reviews, and Q&A based on your brand criteria.
Measuring consumer sentiment is an ongoing process that can be time-consuming if done through traditional methods. Revuze provides AI tools with “local models” that produce insights on consumer sentiment. The key is personalization and focuses on specific features of customers’ value.
Medallia takes participants through every phase of improving understanding of consumer sentiment. It assists in collecting data from the sites, social media, emails, and messages, creates AI tools through machine learning for sorting through and analyzing the data, and making conclusions and predictions from consumer sentiment. Medallia also provides insight on how customers interact with your product from which webpages they visit, links they click, and when they abandon their shopping carts.
Qualtrics facilitates consumer sentiment data collection and analysis. It can be hard to keep track of customer comments and reviews from all over the web, but Qualtrics provides consumer data promptly along with recommendations on what actions to take based on feedback. Qualtrics has developed tools that track customer actions through every touchpoint, from visits to the site to the point of sale. It will also help track and prioritize customer preferences. There are also tools to find out keys to customer engagement.
Keeping Track of Customer Sentiment
It is important to know how your customers feel about your products and your brand. Using tools and websites to help you collect data on social media, analyze the results, and refine your strategy is a smart approach to updating your strategy to improve customer satisfaction.