Building Trust: 7 Strategies for Brand Reputation Management”
Brand Reputation Management: How to Build Trust With Customers Customers care about your products and services. But they also care about how you treat them, communicate back, listen to feedback, and respond in times of crisis. In other words, customers care a lot about your brand reputation. How well you manage brand reputation can make or break your relationship with customer
Managing brand reputation can either strengthen or damage the relationship with customers and the overall business. It is crucial to handle it effectively to maintain trust and satisfaction.
Among its many advantages, successful brand reputation management leads to word-of-mouth marketing, sales increase, and brand equity improvement.
On the contrary, without a brand reputation strategy, your business may become more vulnerable to everything from viral customer negative feedback to general economic instability.
Read this post to learn how to build a brand reputation, maintain a positive brand image, manage a brand on social media and manage risks proactively.
What Is Brand Reputation?
Brand reputation can be defined as the overall perception and opinion in customers’ minds about any company and its products or services. It involves the trust, credibility, satisfaction, and quality levels the public has in the brand.
A good reputation attracts new customers and engenders loyalty, providing value to a brand in the marketplace. A poor reputation undermines trust, ultimately leading to lost sales and sustained negative impacts on brand equity.
The benefits of a strong brand reputation
Your brand’s reputation can be a byproduct of the quality of your products and services, and your marketing efforts. It’s also something you can proactively work on, and it pays to do so for some reasons including:
1) Trust and credibility.
A strong brand reputation builds trust among consumers; naturally, they’ll want to end up with your business over others.
2) Loyalty & recommendations
Pleased customers are more likely to be repeat customers and recommend your business to others.
3) More revenue
Customer loyalty generates more predictable revenue. Word-of-mouth marketing drives new sales with relatively low costs for acquiring new clients.
4) Competitive advantage.
A good reputation can make a brand stand out from its competitors, helping it stay ahead in the long term.
5) Better crisis management.
Brands with good reputations are more in control and surmount any communication crisis or bad publicity.
6) Better employer branding
A well-reputed brand can seek and retain superior human talent with ease because people will associate themselves with it.
Strategic partnerships
A strong brand is sought after as a business partner and easily finds growth opportunities.
A strong brand reputation can help see you through even such times of uncertainty and instability we have had ample share of in the last few years.
Clients and stakeholders support and promote brands they like and trust, so let’s take a look at some of the ways to get a good business reputation.
Top 7 Brand Reputation Management Strategies
Building a brand reputation is all about consistency first. You need to be there long enough, and reliable enough so that clients and partners can regard you as a reputable business.
Brand reputations are no different from those of people. You don’t trust a person the first time you meet them, although if a friend gives them a good word, you likely would. First impressions count, but so, too, does how you act and speak on all future interactions.
It’s also essential to pick up social cues and modify the attitude and behaviour. Slip-ups do happen; how they are managed is what can make a difference.
Let’s take these unwritten common sense rules to brand and translate them into strategies that will help you manage your reputation with ease.:
1) Build and measure brand awareness
This is your first date with the customer. And maybe the second and third, if you prove to be trustworthy and desirable.
Building and maintaining brand awareness is the cornerstone of brand reputation. The more people know about your brand, the more chances you get to shape their perception in your favour.:
2) Great branding.
Make your brand look professional and visually appealing. Second, create rules of branding that everyone will follow to continue having you present consistently on channels.
3) Valuable content
Create and foster positive associations with your brand by publishing useful, relevant content for your audience on both your website and social media channels.
Conversation driven.
Let them interact with your brand so that they will be able to remember. One can ask questions, keep considerations in mind, respond to comments, and maintain a warm and friendly tone of voice.
Remember: being known is not the same as being loved.
There are usually differences that exist between fame and popularity. For example, according to McDonald’s had a 99% level of fame but only 63% popularity. In contrast,
4)Run periodic competitive analysis
In our personal lives, we often do too much competitive analysis. Obsessive comparisons with others can indeed be harmful, but to be aware of strengths and weaknesses in a broader context is to set realistic expectations and plot a path of growth.
Similarly, assessing the competition and each of their different reputations is a very great way to understand product quality, customer service, brand messaging, and online presence for what changes can be made to improve and set themselves apart.
Recall the above comparison between McDonald’s and M&M for fame and popularity. Without competitive analysis, a brand like McDonald’s might feel great when, as a matter of fact, other companies do a far better job in building positive brands.
Stay ahead by comparing your social media performance to that of your competitors.
Socialinsider helps you get insights into, find ideas that you could implement in your own brand reputation strategy, and find the weaknesses of the competition that could be your competitive advantage.
5. Be consistent and transparent
Consistency of brand messaging and action elicits trust and credibility.
To build a positive reputation, be transparent about your practices; listen and act on customer concerns, keeping your brand promise at all touchpoints.
Train your entire team, from social media directors to sales and customer service representatives, on the use of the brand guidelines, messaging, and values.
6. Deliver world-class customer experiences
Indeed, over 52% of customers will not do further business with a firm that has given them a poor customer experience. According to Zendesk, a great customer experience along touchpoints improves client retention and thereby revenue. It is, therefore, very important that quality support be extended and due importance given to customer satisfaction. Always try to exceed the expectations of your customers in each social media conversation, every post-sale feedback.
Fostering positive experiences will enhance your brand reputation and save you from those negative reviews that every business is afraid of.
7) Monitor brand reputation proactively
You work hard on building a positive company image and reputation, but if you’re not careful, it gets destroyed in days. While it is almost impossible to avoid communication crises, especially considering how fast information travels these days, you can foresee and get ready in advance.
Determine the potential reputation risks, develop an action plan, and take necessary actions prior to the situation getting worse. Social listening is one of the best ways to measure consumer sentiment and remain ahead of any issues that could potentially damage your brand’s reputation.
Measuring your brand reputation
The reason is that the brand reputation is intangible and, in essence, composed of a million different components. People are inherently subjective; reputation depends on many differing stakeholders; and perceptions have a character like quicksilver.
However, you can measure it with the help of special tools and methodologies, such as the following:
Brand awareness surveys.
Run periodic surveys that include questions on brand recognition, recall, and association to understand how well your brand is known in the market and what it is perceived to be.
1) Customer satisfaction scores.
Some well-known feedback mechanisms include the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT), and online reviews. High satisfaction scores mean positive associations about your brand; this might be a symptom of a reputational problem if the scores are low.
Social media engagement: Monitor the social media for likes, shares, comments, and mentions of their brands. High levels of engagement indicate interest; similarly, poor levels of engagement might denote disinterest or negative perceptions.
2) Sentiment analysis.
Monitor online mentions, and conversations on social media, and learn the general feeling toward your brand, using sentiment analysis tools like Socialinsider. Track the sentiment of positive, negative, or neutral feelings over time and find pain points to improve.
A combination of any of the above can give a full view to businesses about their brand reputation and thus strategize effectively to consolidate the position of their brand in the market.
Final thoughts
As Taylor Swift says in one of her Reputation songs, “I swear I don’t love the drama; it loves me.” With social media so pervasive, brands cannot avoid negative reviews, comments, or opinions. A great brand reputation doesn’t come from avoiding drama but from being continuously valuable and positive, listening attentively, and being proactive about managing your online presence. Socialinsider supports brands with actionable insights, intuitive analytics, and fresh social media benchmarks and trends.
