Do you know what your customers really think of your brand? What about peers? Competitors? The public at large? Brand sentiment analysis tools can give you insight into all of the above and more, ensuring you have a complete and accurate picture of your brand reputation at all times.
Why does this matter? For starters, a poor brand reputation can make it impossible to gain new customers or hire top talent. And when you don’t know you have a poor brand reputation, small issues can spiral into bigger problems.
On the flip side, when you use brand sentiment analysis tools to stay on top of your reputation, you can use insights to continually improve your customer experience and leverage positive brand mentions to grow your business.
In this article, we’ll explore 8 of the top brand sentiment analysis tools to consider—features, pricing, use cases, and more.
What Is a Brand Sentiment Analysis Tool?
Brand sentiment analysis tools are software applications that use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the emotional tone and overall audience sentiment associated with a brand. They aim to extract insights from textual data such as social media posts, online reviews, news articles, and more to gauge overall public brand perception.
These tools typically employ a combination of algorithms that mine, process, and analyze large volumes of text data, then categorize it according to positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Key features of brand sentiment analysis tools include:
- Sentiment Classification — Identifying the sentiment polarity (positive, negative, or neutral) in individual pieces of text
- Topic Extraction — Identifying key topics or themes associated with the brand
- Opinion Mining — Extracting opinions and subjective information from text
- Brand Monitoring — Tracking and analyzing brand mentions and sentiment across various online platforms
- Trend Analysis — Identifying patterns and trends in sentiment over time
- Competitive Analysis — Comparing sentiment and brand perception against competitors
- Visualizations and Reports — Presenting sentiment analysis results in easy-to-understand visual formats and comprehensive reports.
Today, companies need brand sentiment analysis tools to keep their finger on the pulse of their online brand reputation and the way their brand is perceived by the public. Those that don’t are at risk of being in the dark about how their audiences really feel about them.
In fact, a recent report on brand sentiment found a huge discrepancy between the percentage of brands who thought their consumers were satisfied (53%) and the percentage of consumers who said they actually were satisfied (15%)—an alarming gap of 38 percentage points.
There’s no doubt about it—adopting a brand sentiment analysis tool is a smart investment in your company’s understanding of your audience and ability to align your offerings and strategy with their needs.
In the next section, we’ll evaluate 10 of the top brand sentiment analysis tools on the market, their features and pricing, and their top use cases to help you evaluate potential options.
8 Brand Sentiment Analysis Tools to Check Out
Talkwalker
Talkwalker offers a comprehensive consumer intelligence platform and a range of individual tools to keep brands more informed about their brand reputation. Their proprietary Blue Silk™ AI enables seamless sentiment analysis across 10+ social networks, blogs, news sites, online forums, and more.
Features include:
- Sentiment analysis in 127+ languages and coverage of 187 languages
- Quick brand overviews that measure important KPIs
- Automated alerts to help brands immediately combat issues that arise
- Customized dashboards for powerful real-time monitoring
- Content ideation to create viral content that resonates with your audience
- Virality maps to show how trends spread
- Competitive intelligence reports for benchmarking against competitors
- Conversation clustering to organize large datasets
Talkwalker offers a variety of pricing options for enterprise companies and small businesses.
Critical Mention is a tool for managing earned media and tracking your brand mentions across key channels including TV, radio, social media, print, and online news. For brands looking to monitor brand sentiment across both digital and analog channels, Critical Mention is an option to consider.
Some benefits of Critical Mention:
- Ability to build brand awareness by sharing earned media content
- Holistically understanding the context of your earned media
- Amplify positive coverage and quickly address potential PR issues
You can contact Critical Mention for customized pricing information.
Lexalytics
Lexalytics delivers text analytics APIs that can help you translate complex text documents into valuable insight for your business. Available on-premise or on the cloud, Lexalytics can be highly integrated with your existing tools to store, manage, and analyze unstructured text documents in an organized, meaningful way. It’s a great tool for data-savvy companies and/or companies in industries that experience data-centric problems (ex: tech, sciences, healthcare, etc.)
Important features include:
- Sentiment Analytics — Determining positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of text
- Categorization — Sort and organize documents into customizable groups
- Entity Extraction — Pull data on people, places, companies, products, and more
- Intention Detection — Identify the intention behind customer-generated text
Lexalytics also offers industry-specific packs for increased brand sentiment analysis accuracy and more relevant detections and extractions.
Contact Lexalytics for pricing information (not available on website).
Repustate
Repustate’s sentiment analysis software is built to give clients targeted, granular insight in three key areas:
- Customer Experience — Continually improve products/services with customer feedback
- Employee Experience — Foster a better workplace culture with employee feedback
- Patient Experience — Create better healthcare outcomes using patient insights
This 360-degree approach to brand sentiment analysis gives you a complete picture of how your brand is perceived by all stakeholders—not just those buying your products. Notable features of the Repustate platform include:
- Customizable sentiment analysis APIs and dashboards
- Ability to extract sentiment from videos
- Semantic search using NLP across any text, PDF, or video
- Entity recognition to identify key names and brands
Repustate is one of the more affordable plans on our list, at $199 per month for their Standard Plan, and $499 per month for the Premium Plan. See the complete pricing packages here.
HubSpot’s Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is an all-encompassing customer service platform, but it includes a Customer Feedback tool that can break down survey data to evaluate qualitative responses as having positive or negative intent, then organize them according to sentiment.
Results can then be viewed within the larger customer service data dashboards so you can use insights to take appropriate action.
For companies seeking more complete customer service solutions, HubSpot Service Hub could be the right choice. Service Hub Pricing is $450 per month for the Professional Plan and $1200 per month for the Enterprise Plan.
Rosette
Rosette’s Text Analytics platform comes with a Sentiment Analyzer trained to analyze text and detect sentiment relevant for a number of teams within your organization, including:
- Public Relations teams — Get quickly alerted about potential issues
- Marketing teams — Track campaign effectiveness and competitor activity
- Human Resources Teams — Evaluate churn risk based on employee feedback
- Political Teams — Track public opinion and understand constituent priorities
- Innovation Teams — Identify trends and emerging market opportunities
The tool supports multiple languages, can be deployed on-premise and in the cloud, and comes with a Field Training Kit so your teams can continually maximize ROI on tool usage.
You can try the demo right on Rosette’s website or start a 30-day trial to explore the tool in-depth. Pricing options are available for organizations of all sizes.
MonkeyLearn
MonkeyLearn is a no-code, highly visual text analytics tool designed to bring actionable customer feedback insights to your teams. Branded as an “all-in-one data visualization studio,” MonkeyLearn features include:
- Custom charts and visualizations to maximize digestibility for all users
- The ability to combine and filter multiple data fields
- Pre-trained classifiers and entity extractors so you can hit the ground running
- External data import capabilities and custom tags
- Templates to match different data types and problems you’re addressing
- Integration capabilities with other applications and BI tools
Pricing for MonkeyLearn’s “Team” plan is $299 per month. Business plan pricing is customizable and available by contacting the MonkeyLearn team directly.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an intelligence platform with three key areas of focus: Consumer Intelligence, Social Media Management, and Influencer Marketing. Their Consumer Intelligence tool includes sophisticated brand sentiment analysis capabilities, such as:
- A defined four-step process to search, segment, analyze, and act on millions of brand mentions across multiple channels
- Databases that include 1.7 billion historical conversations dating back to 2010, plus 501 million conversations added in real time every day
- Firehose (real-time streaming) access to social platforms like Twitter and Reddit
- AI capabilities like image analysis, an AI analyst, and automatic data segmentation
- Flexible UI and customizable visualizations
Brandwatch is one of the most wide-reaching brand sentiment analysis tools on our list. If you’re looking to never miss an insight on any channel, get real time updates, or look back at mentions from years prior, this tool is one to consider.
Pricing is available by contacting the Brandwatch team.
Final Thoughts
There are plenty of brand sentiment analysis tools on the market—ones that serve different industries and data expertise levels, place emphasis on different features, and fit into varying price ranges.
It’s important to vet the potential tools you consider and choose one that works best for your business. But if there’s one non-negotiable, it’s this—to stay on top of your brand reputation and leverage it well to grow your business, you need to have an accurate understanding of how your brand is perceived.
Michael Brenner is a keynote speaker, author and CEO of Marketing Insider Group. Michael has written hundreds of articles on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Guardian and he speaks at dozens of leadership conferences each year covering topics such as marketing, leadership, technology and business strategy.