Today, digital has become a major strategic issue for cosmetic brands.

With almost 4.7 billion internet users worldwide in 2021 and more and more consumers using mobile phones, the importance of technology continues to grow, driving the evolution of challenges and opportunities for companies.

Today, the sources of information are multiplying as well as the nature of the data itself. This is why professionals are embracing new methods to exploit this data and leverage its potential.

Among these methods are semantic analysis of consumer reviews and social listening.

Here is what these two processes, increasingly used by professionals, consist of.

What is Social Listening? A tool to gauge the reputation of your cosmetic product or brand.

Social Listening is a monitoring activity carried out on social networks.

This activity involves the analysis of information shared by consumers, often related to a brand, on social networks : it can be hashtags, comments, keywords.

However, Social Listening remains a longer process than a simple watch because of the very broad content of the information.

This activity is often time consuming as the gathering of this information is only a prior step to the most important phase : the analysis of this data.

Moreover, professionals often use softwares to optimize their time and the quality of their studies.

Social Listening allows to obtain insights by identifying users' thoughts, which they express in their comments on social networks.

This analysis enables brands to better identify current trends among consumers or to know the problems they encounter in order to address them.

Thus, social listening represents a powerful solution to meet the challenges of marketers and communicators such as measuring their brand image, or optimizing their communication actions.

The advantages of Social Listening :

• Monitoring the brand's reputation : being aware of the references and mentions of a brand on social networks allows to determine how it is perceived by different users depending on the sentence and the context in which it is mentioned. This allows to react about it, for example, by redirecting unhappy users to the customer service.
• ‍Measuring the performance of communication campaigns : social listening enables professionals to obtain results on the campaigns put in place thanks to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as the engagement rate. Social listening can even participate in the development of actions that are part of a strategy, such as the search for ambassadors (social listening allows brands to find personalities that reflect them and share their values for the launch of communication campaigns).
• ‍Competitive intelligence : social listening gives access to a large amount of data, including information about competitors, and thus allows the analysis of their reputation or their communication strategy.
• ‍Acquisition of insights : the large amount of information exchanged on social media allows brands to obtain information, for example on user profiles.

What is semantic analysis of customer reviews? A tool to evaluate the performance of a brand's products.

If social networks have evolved a lot in the last few years, digital technology and the rise of e-commerce sites have also allowed the use of customer reviews to become widespread.

In fact, consumers are increasingly interested in reviews left by other consumers, which influence the choice of 93% of them when making a purchase.

This consumer interest in reviews written about brands and their products also benefits professionals in the cosmetics industry.

Indeed, it is as well possible to analyze the content of customer reviews to access valuable information.

Today, analyzing feedback from their customers has become the main method of collecting data for brands.

Contrary to information shared via social media, customer reviews allows to get more accurate and specific information about what consumers think about a particular product.

Thus, the semantic analysis of customer reviews allows companies to obtain detailed data about the level of satisfaction of their consumers towards their products, but also about their expectations, or even about their profiles.

This analysis can be performed on a brand's products but also on its competitors' products, as online customer reviews are accessible to everyone.

The advantages of semantic analysis on customer reviews :

• Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of cosmetic products : customer reviews allow the detection of verbatims with positive or negative tones related to specific features of a product. This analysis allows brands to know which product characteristics they want to keep, improve or renovate.
• ‍Analysis of consumer profiles and their expectations : reviews written by users provide information on consumer profiles and their expectations about existing products but also products that are not on the market yet.
• ‍Definition of an adapted communication strategy : consumer reviews allow brands to build a communication that better fits the customers and that is closer to them, but that also matches the image these consumers have of the brand and its universe.
• ‍Analysis of the competition : the public and thus accessible nature of reviews written by consumers on e-commerce sites gives access to all.

Therefore, professionals have the ability to analyze the consumer reviews on their competitors' products, which gives them the opportunity to adopt a more precise and relevant positioning on the market.

Thus, while social listening allows brands to monitor their image and reputation through social networks, the semantic analysis of customer reviews gives them access to precise data on the products they sell.

The analysis of customer reviews uses public data, the consumer reviews available online, to find out how their consumers feel about a particular cosmetic product.

This analysis turns out to be an efficient tool in the context of a product renovation, for example.

In the meantime, social listening uses the information shared on social networks: comments, posts, hashtags, etc... with the main goal of managing its brand image.