5 Key Strategies to Improve Brand Reputation Marketing Today

Brand reputation is vital for the growth of the business. A positive brand reputation builds customer loyalty as well as increase their confidence in your brand and the products offered, thus driving sales and growth.

In today’s ruthlessly competitive business environment, being positioned as a brand with a good reputation is important. Your brand’s online reputation is evolving and re-defined by every social media comment, blog post, and review. So, it is essential to proactively manage and improve on all the feedback received online to stay ahead and keep business afloat.

Here we will talk about the 5 brand reputation strategy you can employ to improve brand reputation online, but before that, it is vital to know the concept of reputation marketing and its importance.

What is Reputation Marketing?

Ideally, reputation marketing is brand marketing but in a more specialized manner. Most businesses spend a lot of time and effort in their branding nowadays. This is because most customers make use of laptops, smartphones, or other digital platforms to search about businesses and their brand value. 

Reputation marketing is all about building the real-time identity of your brand. Businesses can build this identity using different mediums such as reviews, online comments, critiques, and complaints which are given by their customers or expert critics. 

Nowadays testimonials of real customers, especially video testimonials and word-of-mouth marketing concepts have become a lot more powerful. In the digital world, this word of mouth marketing is done via blog comments, re-tweets, likes on Facebook, reviews on Google Business, and liking/sharing/following on different social media platforms across the internet. 

By using this concept, businesses come to know about what their customers are saying about their services or products and can make use of it for their benefit, to make changes to their products or services, or to provide additional services. This can be ultimately used to improve its industry ratings and it has a direct impact on their revenue generation. 

Importance of Reputation Marketing:

Nowadays online reputation marketing is crucial because there is cut-throat competition and hundreds or even thousands of businesses operating in the same niche. Customers want to give their work to a business that they can trust. The base of this trust is created by checking the online profile of the company to see whether a company works on the same values that the customer prefers. If the customer is concerned about customer service but your company has negative comments about after-sales service, then they might move on to your competitor to do business.

Most customers lookout for reviews, testimonials, and online comments before choosing any product or a company. With the help of a proper digital marketing company and guidance, you can make use of reputation marketing to see your business grow considerably. Several different aspects should be considered while you are looking to improve brand reputation strategy. You must make sure to have positive reviews online across multiple websites. There are many platforms for customer reviews that are more preferred as compared to others. Make sure that you have reviewed such that they help you in reputation marketing.

We know it is tempting to write down fake reviews, but it is unethical, and you might get few customers for once, but the consequences of this can be horrible. You can encourage your real customers to post true reviews about your company with as much detail as possible. Also, reviews should be posted regularly because recent reviews get a lot more weightage as compared to reviews that were posted several months or years ago. If you are having hundreds of positive reviews, then few negative reviews will not matter much, but if you have a few reviews then your brand value can be questioned. These reviews are an indication of the consistency, quality, and reliability of your company. 

You can make use of these reviews for online reputation marketing to reach out to customers locally in your area or expand further, nationally, or globally. If you want to have your reach wider then you will have to investigate other aspects of reputation marketing as well. You can take the help of other digital marketing methods such as SEO to improve the rankings of your web pages and brand on search engine platform or you can opt to do paid search engine marketing i.e. PPC which is targeted to specific cities and audience so that you reach out to more people across a larger geographical area. 

It is also crucial to ensure that you have a mobile-friendly website for your company. This is because nowadays most people access the internet using mobile browsers. The website that you make should be easy to navigate and read for the user even from a mobile view. 

5 simple ways by which you can get success in Reputation Marketing:

Reputation marketing originates from what other people think and say about your business. So, you have little control over it, and you can just sit back and watch. You might be thinking, why spend money on reputation marketing when you cannot control what other people think about your business nor change their post or mindset. You should just leave them to what they are doing and just carry on with your business.

It is not the case, brand reputation marketing strategy is not all about what idea people have about your business that sometimes might be true or sometimes might be because of a lack of knowledge. Reputation marketing deals with the active management of the comments, reviews, and criticisms given by your customers to create the image of your brand as you desire. 

It is not complicated to do reputation marketing and you can do it easily if you stick to these simple 5 strategies that will help you achieve success in reputation marketing. 

1. Create a system to collect valuable customer feedback

Rather than just watching out for what people think and say about your products or services it is crucial to go out to your customers and capture their feedback yourself. We do not mean going out personally to them, but there are multiple ways by which you can remind your customers to give feedback or even reward them for giving feedback.

Customers are generally eager to review products they like and weigh in their opinions, so you should create proper forums or review forms or links for them from where you can collect the data. 

Usually, businesses gather online feedback for their brand using contests, surveys via social media platforms such as the Facebook page or you can do it use email too. You can share links of your blog posts so that your customers can share their comments or tweet out to your followers with questions regarding your products or services. 

You should inform your customers of the methods by which they can give reviews and then follow up with them a few times so that they can give their valuable time to put a review for you. This method of collecting data is priceless and gives an idea about what your customer is thinking about your business. 

This information can then be analyzed to prepare your reputation marketing strategy which helps you to connect more with your customers, listen to their issues, and work accordingly. This also gives you an idea about the buying patterns, age group of customers, and their location too. It also gives information about the products or services of your company that are more in demand as compared to others. 

2. Build your Brand Reputation

Just waiting to build your good reputation is not going to work and is not a good marketing strategy. If you are looking to get positive reviews and feedback about your services and products, you should put the energy and time for that. For that, you should be aware of the reality of your products and services. 

You should search for relevant hashtags, read comments, and look on the internet for comments of your business or brand. By knowing about what people say about your business, you can then harness this information. If there are bad reviews, do not overlook them. You should deconstruct them and understand what is going wrong. 

If the same thing is mentioned in multiple comments, then you should change the product or the way you perform a particular task in your business. This can create a big shift in the minds of your customers. By doing so, you can improve your brand reputation .

If there are positive reviews, then check for the areas in business for which you are getting praise. Try to improve in that area so that you can perform better and remain ahead of your competitor. 

With reviews, you can gather a lot of information, you will get to know about the likes and dislikes of the customer about your products. In this way, you will be able to turn around and give them exactly what they want.

3. Market Your Reputation

When your customers are doing marketing for you It does not mean that you should stop communicating with your existing channels about your brand message. 

If you want to use reputation marketing, then take the advantage of it by creating the campaigns, and then pay close attention to it. 

This is more than the reviews which you are taking from the customers. You should get to know here either your customer feels positive or negative about your product.

Drill down to the specific things which have been told by the customer.

Pay attention to the keywords which are kept on popping in the online comments and reviews. This would inspire you in your next campaign and will also help in direct addressing to the comments.

For example, if you are continuously seeing the word inconvenient then this will be taken as the negative review. You can create the marketing campaign and the strategy on social media which would be the focus and highlight the convenience of your product and the service.

In this way, reputation marketing will help in identifying the problem and creating the solution which can drop directly in the lap of the customer.

4 Managing Reputation

In reputation marketing, you will get a wealth of information from the customers.

For the comments and reviews of your customer, you will have to spend some time with the customers and keep them engaged with your products.

If you will introduce a new product then you will see the sudden spike in the reviews and the comments. 

After several months’ customers will lose the momentum and then turn their attention to some other place.

If you want to manage the brand reputation and want to keep the dialogue open, then you must try to keep the hype going. In this way, you will never fall from the radars of the customers. To do this you can generate offers and promotions, host events, special offers for your followers or give exclusive discounts to your customers. By using these tactics, you can motivate your customers to make a purchase when they might be usually looking out for some other brand or the next offer. 

5. Monitor your Reputation

To monitor your brand reputation, you should follow repetition. This does not mean that you read your reviews once and then do not check them at all again. The conversation with the customers keeps on changing every day. 

What might seem to be boring and irrelevant to customers today might become the hottest trend in the future. So, you should monitor your reviews regularly to monitor what are the talks about your business and brand. 

You can read your reviews regularly either weekly or daily and keep track of your posts on social media, look out for online reviews and scroll through the messages posted on your Facebook or blog page. This will help you to see if your marketing is working or nor or your business is de-railing back after a short gain. 

If you see your comments in a year, then you would miss out on the negative comments on which you could have made any changes or taken any actions. By keeping track of the comments, you can identify your business areas that need improvement and take prompt action on it. 

If you want to satisfy your customers, then you should satisfy their needs and listen to their opinions. So, you should listen to them and respond accordingly. 

Keeping your customers happy is the key to successful brand reputation management.