Brands only sell when people like them. So how would a brand know, aside from those sales?

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis can provide that insight. Companies can monitor how well or poorly their brands are thought of, simply by monitoring social media, online vendors and their own internal data streams.

That sounds great until you stop and think about how to do this. Data gushes like water out of a high-pressure fire hose. Just managing the data streams is a challenge. Even then, how many sources of data can you manage? And how do you draw inferences from the data you are tapping? There are different approaches to handling the challenge. Sociality.io gleans data from social media, while Lexalytics and Diffbot rely more on natural language processing to draw data from many online sources.

So if you want to mine opinions, where do you start digging? Different domains yield different types of data. Amazon will provide lots of “star reviews.” Twitter may uncover complaints. Human interpretation of customers’ needs may work for some B2B brands with relatively small customer bases. Mass markets with high sales volumes generate huge amounts of data that can only be analyzed by algorithms. The upside here is that sample sizes are large enough to yield statistically reliable conclusions.

“More data is not good data,” cautioned Sociality.io’s founder Hasan Toprakkaya. The volume of data is tremendous, so “be more specific. Be more focused,” he said. “If you are building any kind of product, you need one hundred loving customers who are keen to share your product with their friends,” he said. “You should focus on those people, using opinion mining.”

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Consumer intelligence analytics keeps Fortune 500 companies at the top of their game, and other category leaders are quickly following suit. Why does consumer intelligence drive every decision? It helps marketers uncover, understand and predict consumer behavior – and it’s much more sophisticated than most businesses realize.

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It’s not enough to place ads on social media or tweet out one-way culturally-aware observations. If consumers see your brand on social sites, they expect you to engage directly with them, according to a new study released by social media software producer Sprout Social.

The company surveyed roughly 1,000 consumers and 1,000 marketers this spring about marketing goals and consumer expectations. The two don’t always align perfectly. For instance, when consumers were asked what makes a brand best-in-class on social, nearly half (47%) indicated that brands should offer strong customer service. It was the top priority on their list. When marketers were asked the same question, only about a third (35%) named strong customer service as a sign of good social presence. Five other action items ranked higher.

Other functions are valued too. That’s not to say consumers don’t value the other functions social media marketers perform. Consumers and marketers see eye-to-eye on transparency, which placed near the top for both groups (44% and 42% respectively). Telling a compelling story, however, lost some of its shine in the eyes of consumers. 37% of marketers think that’s important, while only 28% of consumers are looking for storytime.

Why we care: So whose perspective is right? The customer, of course. 44% of customers will unfollow the brand because of bad service, the same study found. Followers, in this light, are not a vanity metric.

Above are the social response stats across various industries (courtesy Sprout Social Index: Edition XVII (2021). Where does your company rank against the competition? Does your company even track these kinds of response stats? Customers are paying attention.

Building great ad creative is more important than ever to grab your audience’s attention and drive better business results. As a result, agility in digital advertising is becoming a crucial strategy to take advantage of real-time creative opportunities and deliver the most relevant ad to the right customer, even as third-party cookies crumble.

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Google has introduced a new YouTube ad creation workflow designed with SMBs in mind. Now available globally on desktop and mobile, advertisers can create a campaign by simply uploading a video, selecting the audiences they want to reach and designating a budget. Along with the new workflow, the company is also launching a simplified campaign metrics dashboard.

Why we care. Until now, advertisers had to access the full functionality of Google Ads to launch a video ad campaign on YouTube, which may have been an intimidating prospect for SMBs working with fewer resources. This new workflow makes it easier for advertisers to get their campaigns up and running with a user interface that may be more appropriate for their needs and experience level.

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Join us online — August 17 — at SMX Convert: an all-new two-track program from the Search Engine Land experts that explores fresh, reliable tactics in organic and paid search conversion optimization. Book now for best rates!

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In this week’s Marketoon, we see how the right data can win your brand a prize.

Fishburne’s take: “Acquiring new customers gets most of the glitter and attention in marketing, but retention tactics can be more lucrative. And more granular segmentation can help ensure you’re not wasting resources chasing the wrong customers. As Wharton Marketing Professor Peter Fader observed: ‘Decisions about customer acquisition, retention, and development shouldn’t be driven by cost considerations — they should be based on future value…’”

Why we care. Centralizing customer data in a CRM or CDP is the first step toward removing the guesswork from customer lifetime value. Determining the value of your customers doesn’t have to be a bottle toss or a giant dartboard.