Did you know that around 4 in 5 consumers need to trust a brand to consider buying from it? This shows how much trust and one’s reputation play a part in today’s world. Brands cannot survive without a strong online presence that is trustworthy, genuine, and positively perceived by the customers.
Online reputation management has means and strategies to protect brands from negative and falsified narratives. Its presence ensures that brand practices positively contribute to its target audience.
This blog will entail some of the benefits and strategies businesses utilize to protect and maintain their brand sanctity.
How to Create a Reputation Management Plan
Every business needs a strong reputation management strategy to keep its brand at the top of its consumer’s minds. Here are some of the essential ways to create an effective reputation management plan:
Monitor and Audit Your Current Reputation
The initial step to creating a reputation management plan is determining where their businesses lie in consumers’ eyes. This is the research process where businesses monitor and audit their current reputation and relevance among digital platforms.
Marketers hover towards the internet to listen to customers’ narratives, discussions, and perceptions regarding their brands.
Brands must collect feedback and listen to customers’ queries to improve their services and stance.
Some practical ways to collect users’ views and the company’s audit are customer reviews on their personal sites, review sites (third-party sites), social media, and business presence on Google’s Business Profile.
Develop a Tone Guide For Managing Customer Concerns
Brands must develop a tone guide for their customer service departments and other resources to ensure a unified tone approach on every channel.
The rise of younger audiences has made brands focus on practicing genuine practices instead of showcasing fake and inauthentic approaches.
Brands need to develop a basic tone guide that will be used to respond to customer comments and ensure the same tone guide is used in crisis management situations, too.
This will shape the brand voice and play a crucial role in humanizing the brand to customers.
Take Action Based On The Narratives
Brands are familiar with customers’ narratives regarding their brand presence now and have already developed a tone guide to respond to customer queries.
Now, brands must include ways to tackle narratives and influence customers’ beliefs and thought processes towards businesses.
Users’ pain points, problems, and complaints direct marketers to improve their production process and qualities. Brands must actively focus on improving product features instead of only responding to customer comments.
Track Your Results
The success of B2B branding is closely related to one’s reputation management practices. Brands can look at certain metrics and KPIs to see how customers maintain relations with them and how successful their reputation tactics are.
KPIs include customer lifetime value, repeat purchase frequencies, and social media recognition.
What Factors Contribute to Brand Reputation Management?
Below are some of the factors that can make or break any brand’s online reputation:
Social Media
Social media has become a major platform for brands to showcase their values, vision, and stance towards environmental and international sentiments.
Social media holds a big space in consumer lives to share their views or talk about businesses regarding their malicious or manipulative tactics.
Review Sites
Businesses’ integrity and professionalism are measured by the number of reviews they receive across the web. Reputable review sites play a great role in showcasing brand value, and because of mobile usage, reviews have become easier to find.
Therefore, brands must ensure that their presence is listed on review sites with positive affirmations.
Influencers
Influencers are the main factor contributing to any brand’s online reputation. Influencers always put in an excellent word for businesses among their target audience, which helps build brand relevance and authority in the industry.
This is the same as getting positive media coverage from news publications but in a more engaging way.
Collaborating with the right influencers opens opportunities for improving brand reputation and helps brands reach different niche audiences and markets.
Conclusion
Organic marketing is considered one of the best forms of improving a brand’s reputation. With SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing, brands can streamline their digital image.
Social media, review sites, and influencer marketing have proven to be some of the best factors in improving brand reputation and protecting brands against controversial remarks.
