A Complete Guide to Strategic Brand Reputation Management

Brand reputation management isn’t the erasure of negative commentary but rather the careful monitoring of what others say about your company. The opinions of your customers or former customers can create a ripple effect, influencing audiences either for or against your products and services. What must go into online brand reputation management?

Here are the components of a reputation management strategy:

• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Social listening
• Customer reviews
• Brand advocates
• Employee satisfaction
• Customer experience
• Customer satisfaction

This guide to managing negative reviews and improving customer feedback will explain brand reputation and the importance of managing your reputation. We’ll also delve into the strategies above and recommend software solutions.

What Is Brand Reputation?

All brands have a reputation that precedes them. This refers to the perception that others hold of that company.

The “others” in question include customers, former customers, partners, employees, and former employees.

These parties are free to think for themselves and formulate their own opinions, but your company isn’t helpless in what others think of you.

As we’ll discuss more in this guide, the measures you take to improve your customer and employee satisfaction will go a long way toward bettering your brand reputation.

Why Is Brand Reputation Important?

Brand reputation is everything.

As a consumer, if you heard about a brand embroiled in a scandal, you wouldn’t have much interest in purchasing their products or services, right? Most people wouldn’t.

They’d assume that if the company got themselves in hot water like that, they’re not worth it.

Having a negative reputation trickles down into your reviews, which will also turn resoundingly negative.

According to software resource TrueList, 79 percent of consumers put high stock into an online review, valuing it as much as they do their friends’ thoughts and opinions.

Negative reviews will inevitably crop up, as it’s impossible to make 100 percent of your customers happy all the time.

However, when customers have issues with how you conduct business or the level of quality of your products or services, those are areas within your control. You can make changes based on feedback to improve and win back positive customer reviews.

What Is Brand Reputation Management?

That brings us to the crux of our conversation: brand reputation management.

As we mentioned in the intro, you’re not eliminating negative reviews by managing your reputation. Rather, you’re monitoring what people say about your company online and actively changing based on what you hear.

Reputation management has three components, so let’s go over them.

1. Review Data

The first part of reputation management is review data. As we’ve made clear, negative reviews directly influence brand image and reputation.

To engage in effective brand reputation management, you must comb the Internet for reviews of your products or services.

Look beyond your website, your socials, and your Google Business Profile. Browse websites like Trustpilot and Yelp to get your finger on the pulse of what people think of your company’s products and services.

You also want to monitor employee reviews using resources like Glassdoor.

Review data allows you to see what kind of feedback your customers and employees have left for you and then create a game plan from there.

2. Competitor Data

You might wonder why you should pay attention to what your competitors are doing when you’re trying to improve your brand. Well, you should always watch what your competitors do, as that can help you stay one step ahead of them.

Social data on your biggest competitors provides many valuable insights. You can see how much people talk about your competitor (and then compare that to your own social mentions).

You can also gauge how well-liked your competitor’s products and services are and what existing strengths and weaknesses those products and services have.

More so, through competitor data, you can glean the degree of customer loyalty your competitors have.

You can then use this data to determine which products and services of your own to prioritize and how to position them to drive customer loyalty.  

3. Listening Data

Lastly, you can use listening data such as social listening as part of your reputation management. We’ll talk more about this type of data in the upcoming section.

Brand Reputation Management Strategic Plan

Now that you better understand the importance of brand reputation, it’s time to implement a brand reputation management strategy.

Per the intro, here are eight pillars that strategy must possess.

1. Strong Content Marketing

Your company likely already produces content, but does it resonate with your audience? That’s the difference between regular content and strong content.

If the aim of your content has been selling, it’s time for a redirection. Instead, take a more educational stance in the infographics, blog posts, eBooks, webinars, videos, and other types of content you produce.

This high-value content will get noticed and, ideally, widely shared. If you can produce the next viral content, that can restore trust in a tarnished image or further improve a positive brand reputation.

2. Social Media Engagement

When your reputation takes a hit, going silent on social media may seem like the solution, but it very rarely is.

Rather, revise your social posting and possibly even ramp it up.

Now is also a good time to reevaluate your tone. You want your followers to enjoy your social posts, not dread them or wish to mute them. By maintaining an upbeat attitude (that enmeshes with your brand tone, of course), you’ll create the kind of positive atmosphere you’re striving for.

Reputation resource Reputation X reports that 71 percent of consumers will recommend a brand to their family and friends if they have interact positively with that brand on a social media platform.

Another 39 percent of consumers say they only trust a brand if they’ve had prior interaction on social media.

That’s all the more reason to get out there and post, respond to comments, and generally engage with your audience.

3. Social Listening

As promised, it’s now time to talk more about social listening. Reputation management software includes social listening tools for collecting feedback from others on social media.

The feedback can come from all sorts of parties but usually customers, leads, and former customers.

The social listening tool will comb social media platforms so you don’t have to, collecting every mention of your brand.

When you receive negative comments, you can respond to them directly to ameliorate the issue and restore some goodwill to your brand name.

4. Customer Testimonials and Reviews

Per video testimonial company Boast, 92 percent of consumers read reviews before making a purchase. By sharing positive reviews and testimonials on your website and across your social media channels, you could influence your next customer to buy your product or service.

If you don’t have enough positive reviews, it’s time to begin collecting them. After a customer purchases your product or service, send an email asking them to leave a review.

You can incentivize your audience to take time out of their busy schedules to write a review by offering them a discount code or an entry into a contest or giveaway.

5. Brand Advocates

A good brand advocate can be huge for brand reputation management. These advocates vouch for your company because they’re truly passionate about and enjoy your products and services. They want to share that with others.

To find a brand advocate, start by looking internally. Your employees could be a good choice for an advocate; the same goes for your most loyal customers.

If you seek a third party to work as your advocate like an influencer, ensure the party you choose gels with your brand and its products or services. Your audience is smart and can tell when you’re pushing someone to shill your company that doesn’t mean it.

6. Employee Satisfaction

Reputation management can’t focus only on improving customer satisfaction (more on that in a moment) but employee satisfaction too.

That starts by elevating employee engagement. Here are some strategies you can use for that:

• Ask for and implement feedback
• Revise your onboarding experience
• Provide more flexibility for a better work/life balance
• Rebuild your company culture
• Recognize your employees when they do good work

7. High-Quality Customer Experience

You should also prioritize the customer experience as part of your online brand reputation management strategy.

From the moment a lead or customer lands on your website, what kind of experience do they have? Do you have a well-designed, fast-loading, easily navigable website?

When a lead signs up for your newsletter, do you send too many emails or just the right amount? Do the emails you send have high open and click-through rates?

Is it easy to shop on your online store and check out? You can ask for customer feedback to answer those kinds of questions so you can further sharpen the customer experience.  

8. Better Customer Satisfaction  

Emphasizing the customer experience is one way to improve customer satisfaction but not the only method.

Take your customer service to the next level. Improve response times if possible and implement chatbots to address customers when you and your staff leave the office for the day.

Actively incorporate the feedback your customers leave you in their reviews. Continue to work on becoming a better company and you’ll have a good reputation.

Brand Reputation Management Software

We’ve touched on reputation management software and the social listening tools therein. Now we want to introduce you to five options and review each one.

1. Birdseye

Birdseye is a social media software tool designed for multi-location businesses. You can scale up your brand reporting, monitoring, and even bulk publishing through Birdseye whether you’re a small business or an enterprise.

Here are some features of the software.

• Reviews: With Birdseye Reviews, you can generate and share your reviews across 200 websites on the Internet. Send texts through Birdseye to encourage customers to leave more reviews.
• Social media management: Birdseye monitors the biggest social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Their social media management tool also personalizes your posts with business location details.
• Insights: Birdseye uses Athena, an NLP engine that can break down big data so it’s usable for your company.

2. GatherUp

Cull your NPS scores, survey data, third-party and first-party reviews, and more using GatherUp. Integrating with sites like Google, Avvo, WebMD, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and the BBB, GatherUp includes lots of top-notch features.

Let’s take a look.

• Customer experience management: GatherUp is a customizable SaaS with customer experience management tools for all business levels, whether you’re a startup, an SMB, or a large business.
• Review management: GatherUp will pull all online reviews and feedback into one dashboard so you can monitor it at your leisure.
• Automation: With GatherUp, you can automate reminders, requests, and even content to free up more time in your schedule.

3. Signal AI

Reputation management tool Signal AI promises to save more time, identify unique opportunities to enhance your reputation, and provide around-the-clock insights through its monitoring services.

These are some other standout features.

• AI briefs: The AI in Signal AI shines through with automatic briefings that detail your search volume and other critical data of your choosing.
• Advanced monitoring: You select keywords to monitor, and Signal AI does the rest. It will even comb global regulatory content, online broadcasts, and print.
• Real-time alerts: When someone mentions you, you’ll know about it instantly with real-time update alerts emailed to you.

4. Podium

Built for small businesses, Podium is brand reputation management software to add to your shortlist. The software even has tools for collecting payments, so it’s doubly useful if you’re on a startup budget.

Podium’s review features are a standout, as you can use the dashboard to automate your review invites, track social media mentions, and check your online ranking.

5. SOCi

SOCi is a location marketing solution that calls itself a central command for multi-location marketers. Users receive real-time alerts of new comments and reviews to respond fast before a negative review can fester.

You can even use SOCi to make social media content when away from the office.

How to Improve Brand Reputation – Hire a Brand Reputation Management Company

Another great strategy for bettering your brand reputation management is to work with a reputation management company.

Mediaboom is a marketing agency with years of experience serving industries such as luxury goods, B2B, construction, real estate, manufacturing, and many others.

Whether you have an okay reputation and want it to be better or need a complete reputational overhaul, our team can help you make a more positive impact on your audience.

Conclusion

All companies must actively engage in brand reputation management, as bad reviews and commentary can actively drive away customers and cause your reputation to further slide backward.Contact Mediaboom today to discuss what we can do for your reputation!