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Consumers are now more connected than ever before, and their perception of your brand can significantly impact your bottom line. You must consider your online reputation and enact ways or strategies to improve this reputation to ensure that your brand continues to thrive. The following information will look at five key ways you can build and maintain a positive online reputation, so you can ensure that your business has the kind of reputation that is working towards your goals and not hindering them.
The following information will breakdown the necessary parts of a comprehensive reputation management strategy, making your reputation a good representation of your business:
1. Proactive Brand Building
The first step in a good management strategy when it comes to your reputation is to define your brand identity. This helps you engage with your audience and leverage influencers to successfully establish credibility, creating a consistent brand voice across all marketing channels. In other words, you will want to take the time to create a purposeful impression or story that your brand is putting out into the digital sphere. Your brand voice or impression is what makes your business different from other brands. It will effectively get your brand noticed.
According to a Crowdspring study, some 90% of customers expect brands to offer them a similar experience across various platforms. This means that you must ensure that your brand is the same in packaging, email communications, social media, and more. In other words, your business is recognizable, and customers know what to expect from you each and every time they interact with your brand.
2. Monitoring Tools
Utilize Google Alerts, social media listening, and review management tools to stay informed about brand mentions and proactively address any emerging issues. Using monitoring tools like these can ensure that you are blindsided by an onslaught of hits to your reputation that you didn’t see coming. Instead, this will let you know what customers are saying about your brand in the digital world, allowing you to make the necessary changes to improve your reputation before it takes a huge hit.
3. Review Management
Respond promptly to reviews, encourage positive feedback, and learn from negative comments to show customers that their opinions are valued and improvement suggestions are taken seriously. While it can be tempting to put your head in the sand, so to speak, and avoid dealing with negative comments or even unfair feedback, it’s important that you actually respond, especially to negative comments. This will show other readers and/or potential customers that you do care about your reputation, customers, and more and want to improve upon what might not be going well.
To improve positive comments, encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences with your brand. Also, make sure that if you see the same negative comment coming up over and over again, you address the issue, if possible, to prove that reviews do matter to your brand, as you are taking the feedback and putting it into action.
4. Crisis Response Plan
Designate a crisis team, communicate transparently, and use various challenges to address crises effectively, showing empathy and a swift resolution to regain trust. This crisis team will step in when or if something happens, meaning your reputation needs immediate action. This could include a response from your brand that will be the public message that goes out into the digital world or could include steps to address the problem that created the issue in the first place.
With the increased challenges presented within the digital space, like live streaming videos and more, the number of crises that made headlines rose more than 80% for corporations. This stat shows the importance of having a crisis team in place and a general plan of action worked out to counteract an issue before it blows up too big.
5. Employee Advocacy and Training
Finally, train employees to represent the brand well, encourage advocacy, and maintain open internal communication, which fosters a positive company culture that resonates externally. In other words, ensure that your employees are well-trained to know how to handle pushback from customers as well as potential reputation problems. Communicate with them what you want them to say when these issues come up and how to maintain a consistent voice and message throughout your brand. This isn't advocating dishonesty in any way. Instead, it is just a unified message and a way to handle things that will ensure that all members of your team are on the same page and fighting to keep your brand’s reputation positive. Having a unified front will ensure that your brand presents a consistent message throughout its many outreach and marketing strategies.
Creating a Reputation Management Strategy
By implementing these five key elements, your business can build and maintain a positive online reputation, fostering trust and loyalty among your target audience. Building a strong reputation takes time and effort, but the benefits of a positive online image are well worth the investment. At fuze32, we understand the need to be purposeful with your brand’s online reputation, especially in today’s digital market. Remember, when you fail to plan, you most certainly plan to fail! So, don’t plan to fail, instead, plan to succeed when it comes to successfully managing your brand’s reputation!
