It’s usually a good thing when customers or clients give you feedback, but it can be incredibly challenging to interpret the "gray areas" of what they are telling you. Within any positive or negative review, there's lots of nuance.

For example, what emotions are customers really feeling as they describe their reactions? Knowing those can make a huge difference when it comes to refocusing your campaigns on a granular level.

So, how do you determine them? Try sentiment analysis — simply defined, it's a technology that uses algorithms to determine the details of how your customers really feel, beyond a simple "yes" or "no." But how does it work in terms of mechanism and key usage?

Sentiment analysis essentially judges the underlying emotion underlying the words your customers express. CMS Wire data explains that this is accomplished in several key applications, and the algorithm you use will compare text with previous examples culled from training data and previous cases.

To do this, a rule-based approach can be used involving scripted language, including tokenization or stemming elements. An automatic approach can also be utilized — this involves machine learning techniques and works the problem as classification so statistical models are used to interpret the information. Or, a hybrid approach can be employed, which mixes techniques from both rule-based and automatic theories.

An overview study from the University of West Indies on sentiment analysis by researchers Meena Rambocas and Joao Gama found that another advantage to the data mining that sentiment analysis can provide is that it yields results in real time. Plus, this study found that the technology is inexpensive when used as a component of machine learning, which your brand may already be implementing.

Sentiment analysis can not only help you overhaul, refocus, and/or tweak your marketing campaigns, but it can help you get out in front of any potential crisis for your brand, according to data from Mention. You can monitor commentary that could point to product safety issues; find out that a product you offer has serious operational issues; or even analyze the comments of your competitors to anticipate a change in their branding message that could adversely affect your company's image. Then you can quickly take action to fix any pending problems and preserve your consumers’ faith and trust.

How can you get started easily and practically using sentiment analysis? Resources like Google Insights, HootSuite, Open Text and Facebook Insights are great ways to dip your toes into the strategy in a simple way.

You can also build your own algorithms, or work with a company (like Lexalytics) to customize your needs. The bottom line is that sentiment analysis could be just the game changer your marketing approach needs to this year — give it a try and see where it takes you!