Gone are the times when brands didn’t care about name and image in the digital world. With the rise of social media platforms and the increase in the number of young consumers, brands are becoming more vigilant and responsible than ever. Hundreds of false narratives potentially destroyed brands in the past, and many brands can become victims of them, too if they don’t have a strong brand reputation management strategy.
Brand reputation management allows businesses to protect their brand’s integrity and authenticity under any harmful crisis situation. They work to create strategies and plans that ensure that their business’s reputation is protected and saved from any harmful events.
The Three Core Components of Brand Reputation Management
Social media has played a great part in enhancing their digital profile and making them a trusted entity in the market. One of the three main pillars of this strategy is listening data which comes from engaging communities. The next pillar is competitor data, and lastly, it is review data that marketers collect from review sites.
Listening to Data Through Social Communities and Groups
This is the data that users usually receive from their social communities and groups. Through social listening, marketers can listen to their customers’ pain points and get meaningful insights from them.
Social listening tools also help marketers in getting to know what’s going on around their brand’s name and image. Instead of assigning resources to different channel platforms they can simply get a comprehensive analysis of what’s going on with their brand and capture what customers’ experiences have been with their brand lately. On the other hand, brands can also listen to customers’ points of view through social communities and groups.
Gathering Data Through Competitor Analysis
Competitor data is another thing that businesses need to understand the industry and what position they are in right now. Listening data tells them their relation with the audience, whereas competitors’ data focuses on where their brand stands among other industrial brands.
Competitors are always the best source to improve your PR marketing efforts. They give us the idea and motivation for interacting with customers and finding ways to hone their brand reputation management. Consistent and routine social media competitive analysis gives marketers a glimpse of what their competitors are doing and what their own PR strategies should do to keep up with them.
Analyzing Data Through Review Sites
Online reviews play a great part in a brand’s reputation. One bad review under the sea of positive ones can simply ruin all the positive interactions and comments. Different review sites like Yelp and Glassdoor are the gatekeepers of review channels and cater to thousands of people who come to get the idea of brands, specific products, or services.
Many social media tools have come into the industry that tell how to manage incoming reviews and help them tackle positive and negative reviews from a centralized single platform.
How To Create an Effective Brand Reputation Management Strategy
Brand marketing is one of the main ways to improve Business-to-Business (B2B) branding efforts. Here are steps to create a brand reputation strategy:
Monitor and Audit Your Current Reputation
The first stage is to see where their own brands stand today in the reputational phase. During this stage, marketers need to go through different platforms and measures to see how their brand is making a buzz with their customers. They can simply get to realization by seeing what their customers are saying about them and navigating the ratio of positive and negative interactions.
Auditing one’s reputation score can be measured through:
- Their customer reviews
- Review sites
- Social media conversations
- Google’s presence
Prepare Your Crises Management Theory
After auditing their site, businesses need to fill their failings and improve their reputation score. There are many digital branding services that come in to improve brands’ reputation, but only brands and certain designated resources which places they actually struggle with.
Supposedly, if they found out that their brands are not responsive in tackling and responding to their site reviews or social conversations, then that’s the first thing they need to prioritize.
Tracks Your Social Results
To learn which reputation strategies are actually making a difference, social media marketers need to use different tools or adapt measures to track the results of their efforts. Some of the KPIs they set initially can be assessed easily by tracking their reputation. Some of the metrics include:
- Customer loyalty rates
- Customer retention rate
- Social media reach
- Employee satisfaction
Wrapping Up
Brand marketing is incomplete without making a comprehensive and updated brand reputation management strategy. These help businesses to tackle any unforeseen situations and protect their brand’s integrity from malicious actors. From analyzing competitors data to examining review sites, brands can reshape their reputation management plan to maximize their brand reach.
