Customer sentiment is both a powerful and elusive metric for businesses. It accounts for all of the positive, neutral, and negative feelings and attitudes toward your brand. But with more channels for customer feedback emerging, accurately capturing all of that information as it happens is quite challenging.

Video has recently become the most popular channel for consumers to conduct research and share product opinions. With the surge in user-generated content, it’s more important than ever to understand customer sentiment.

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What is the importance of customer sentiment? 

Customer sentiment refers to the range of emotions buyers go through when engaging with your brand. Those feelings will dictate whether or not a buyer becomes a raving loyal customer or decides to leave a negative review on your social profiles.

Staying attuned to the attitude of your customers will enable your business to align with what they want and need from your product or services. If you actively track both positive and negative sentiment, you'll be able to gain actionable insights as to how you can deliver on those specific wants and needs. 

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Why does sentiment analysis matter? 

You need to keep a close eye on what people are saying about your business online. 91% of 18 to 34-year-olds trust reviews online just as much as personal recommendations. But those online recommendations are scattered across every corner of the internet. 

By analyzing what buyers are saying and where they're saying it, you'll have a better understanding of where your online reputation generally stands. Engaging with that feedback — especially learning how to respond to a negative review — will improve your online standing with current and potential customers alike. 

Leveraging the data from an AI-powered sentiment analysis tool also means you'll be able to make more informed business decisions. Who better to gauge the success of your products and services than the people who use them? Using a solution like Vyrill will allow you to track months of social content related to your brand and discover trending topics within those comments.

That feedback gives you the fundamental details you need to improve. Conducting regular sentiment analysis will help you uncover new products and features that your shoppers want to see. The more you incorporate customer suggestions into new products, the happier those buyers will be — that means fewer product returns and an improvement in your bottom line. 

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How to do sentiment analysis on video

While it's important to keep tabs on channels like social media and surveys, there's one emerging feedback source you shouldn't ignore: video.

With the rise of influencers and user-generated content, more businesses are leveraging video content to drive awareness and sales. Consumers rely on video reviews to make purchasing decisions. Brand trust increases when shoppers can relate to the speaker and see the product in action. That means it's time to start including video content in your routine sentiment analysis cycles to completely capture negative and positive feedback trends.

There are two schools of thought as to how you can analyze video content.

1) The manual method

Have a team member manually scour the internet for videos that mention your company. Manually search and scroll through social media watching every video that shows up in search. Use spreadsheets and dashboards to track your observations from each video. Take note of metrics such as the sentiment, demographics, engagement, creator type, region, and keywords of each video.

2) AI-powered ‘In-video’ search

Vyrill offers the ability to comb through trillions of videos to identify, analyze, and synthesize relevant data with in-video search. This essentially allows us to search the actual content of videos on YouTube, TikTok, and more. Vyrill finds mentions of your brand even when it’s not listed in the title or description of a video. The information is compiled into a single dashboard, rated and ranked, and analyzed across multiple dimensions so brands can understand their video data from every angle. 

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How to improve customer sentiment

Even if your business has a positive online reputation, there's always room for improvement. Here are a couple of tips to boost your overall customer sentiment.

1) Listen and respond

Your customers want to feel seen and heard. Show them you take their comments seriously. If a buyer critiques your product in a video, leave a comment thanking them for the feedback and explaining how their feedback helps you improve.

2) Create a customer journey map

Shoppers want to be able to solve their problems quickly and efficiently. Ensure they can do that with your product by creating a customer journey. Outline what happens at every touchpoint. Then ideate ways you can improve the experience at every stage.

Keep these strategies in mind when listening to customer feedback in videos and every other channel. Showing your audience you’re listening and understanding their experiences with your products and services will undoubtedly increase brand loyalty. 

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How can you use sentiment analysis for competitive analysis?

The role of customer sentiment analysis is to inform you of how consumers feel about your brand and marketing efforts. But you can take that data one step further. If you have a good handle on your demographic, along with how they feel about your current slate of products, you can compare that to general attitudes about your competition.

Just as you can perform sentiment analysis on videos that mention your product manually, you can do the same for your competitors. Simply search for mentions of your competitors across all relevant channels and see how their user-generated content (UGC) tracks against yours. 

Take note of which of their products elicit the most engagement, along with where they get the most positive or negative reviews. That'll give you insight into their marketing efforts and product innovations. In turn, you'll be able to use that data to inform your own business decisions.

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Using AI to understand customer sentiment

Customer sentiment is a crucial metric for businesses to understand and monitor. With the rise of video as a medium for customer feedback, it is imperative to thoroughly analyze UGC to gain a complete picture of customer emotions.

Sentiment analysis allows businesses to track online reputation, make informed decisions, and continuously improve products and services. Vyrill’s AI-powered sentiment analysis tool helps businesses comb through vast amounts of data efficiently and spot negative videos before they go viral. Listening and responding to customer feedback is what ultimately improves customer satisfaction.

You deserve to know what your customers are saying about you online — and Vyrill can help. Contact us today for a demo.

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About the Author

Katy boasts two decades in B2B technology & services, spearheading growth and brand evolution. A former Adobe marketing maven for 9 years, she’s since built growth teams for 5 tech startups that have all been acquired. With a stellar record in operational excellence and creating demand, she excels at leading successful cross-functional initiatives that enable companies to scale up.