A Five-Step Guide to Building a Modern Brand Sentiment Tracker with Sensu Insight

In today’s fast-paced business environment, understanding how your brand is perceived is crucial for making informed decisions. Whether you’re tracking public sentiment around a new product or evaluating how effective your PR campaigns have been, having a robust brand sentiment tracker in place is key to any successful strategy. At Sensu Insight, we provide a comprehensive approach to brand and sector tracking, combining stakeholder surveys, AI-driven interviews, and online content analysis to give you a 360-degree view of your brand’s reputation.

1. Define Your Brand’s Objectives

Before diving into tracking brand sentiment, it’s important to establish clear objectives. Are you interested in understanding general brand perception or specific aspects such as customer satisfaction, product quality, or service delivery? Sensu Insight works with you to align your brand’s tracking objectives with your business goals. For example, you might want to measure the effectiveness of a new product launch or the impact of a recent PR campaign. We ensure that your sentiment tracker aligns with your key performance goals, making the insights actionable.

2. Choose Your Data Sources

An effective sentiment tracker gathers data from multiple sources to ensure a well-rounded understanding of your brand’s perception. Sensu Insight uses a mix of stakeholder surveys, AI interviews, and online content analysis across a range of platforms, including social media, news outlets, forums, and review sites. This combination of qualitative (e.g., survey interviews) and quantitative data (e.g., brand mentions and sentiment analysis) provides a rich and nuanced view of how your brand is being perceived across various audiences.

3. Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The success of a brand sentiment tracker lies in the KPIs you choose to measure. For brands, key KPIs typically include:

• Brand Mentions and Reach: Tracking how often your brand is mentioned and the platforms driving the most discussions.
• Share of Voice: Analysing how your brand compares to competitors in terms of visibility and attention.
• Brand Association with Key Messages: Understanding what people associate your brand with and whether this aligns with your key communications.
• Sentiment, Emotion, and Engagement: Measuring whether your brand’s mentions are positive, neutral, or negative, and understanding the emotional tone of conversations surrounding your brand.
• Competitor Comparison: Analysing your brand’s performance in comparison to key competitors, identifying areas where you’re leading or lagging behind.

4. Choose the Right Tools for Analysis

At Sensu Insight, we use a combination of industry-leading tools to support our tracking efforts. We’re independent and impartial (rather being tied to a specific platform or method), meaning we’re free to pick the best tools for the job.

We’ve also developed a few of our own tools and techniques – such as our innovative attribution tool – which we bring to the party.

We also use AI interviews, a cutting-edge technology that helps us gather in-depth qualitative feedback from your target audience.

By blending traditional survey methods with innovative AI-driven solutions, we can gain deeper insights into your brand’s reputation and stakeholder perceptions.

5. Continuous Tracking and Reporting

Once your brand sentiment tracker is set up, ongoing tracking is essential for identifying shifts over time. Sensu Insight provides both regular reporting (e.g., quarterly or monthly) and live dashboards that allow you to monitor metrics in real-time. These dashboards show the most important KPIs, such as mentions, reach, sentiment, and brand association, offering immediate insights into the effectiveness of your communications campaigns. By continuously monitoring these metrics, you can quickly adjust your strategy to stay ahead of the competition and respond to emerging trends in sentiment.

Conclusion

Building a modern brand sentiment tracker involves combining the best of traditional research methods with cutting-edge technology. At Sensu Insight, we offer a blend of stakeholder surveys, AI interviews, and online content analysis to provide you with the most comprehensive view of your brand’s reputation. Whether you’re tracking the impact of a campaign, evaluating the health of your brand, or understanding audience sentiment, we can help you gather the insights you need to make better, data-driven decisions.

Ready to get started with brand sentiment tracking?

Contact us today to learn how we can help you build a customised brand sentiment tracker tailored to your needs.