Think about how you see your brand. Is it warm, inviting, and the apparent first choice? Now, consider how your customers view your brand. More importantly, think about how customers converse about your brand online. What is your brand’s reputation?
With the majority of information about your business residing online, your brand’s reputation is built and can inevitably be torn down online. Research suggests that a first impression forms within 50 milliseconds, so you want to put your brand’s best at the forefront of potential customers. When brand management is left unattended, perception is purely crafted by past, current, and potential customers or anyone who writes about the brand online. This unattended content may create a negatively skewed perception of your brand.
Getting started with brand management
Follow these tips to get started on your brand’s reputation management.
1 GET A BENCHMARK
Try to look at your brand from an outside perspective. What do reviews, social media posts, comments, and mentions say about your business? Aim to create a positive to negative ratio. Your initial perception and ratio findings will serve as a benchmark to help you with future data analysis and reputation management. If you have difficulty finding enough bustle about your business to make a proper analysis, your reputation management strategy should first center around collecting customer feedback and reviews. Reviews add validity to a business and attract new customers with adequate brand reputation management.
2 LISTEN IN REAL-TIME WITH BRAND MONITORING
Set up notifications for brand-related mentions, hashtags, keywords, or comments. Following what people say about your brand can help you get ahead of negative information, respond quickly, and resolve the issue. This attention enables you to retain existing customers and reflect a positive image to potential customers. Thanking reviewers, sharing positive reviews, and thoughtfully interacting with negative reviews are all ways to better your brand’s public persona.
3 START COMMUNICATING
Consider how messages are sent and received from your business. Your brand’s social media, emails, newsletters, and public-facing channels compose your communicative presence. Interacting with your mentions and reviews is just one opportunity to craft the narrative about your brand. If you think highly about your business, you should feel empowered to share that sentiment. By crafting social media posts, blogs, and newsletters, you can highlight your brand’s best and place it directly in front of your audience.
4 Brand management in the 21st century
Brand reputation management is becoming more innovative and accessible thanks to new tools and technology. In other words, you don’t need to actively monitor and respond instantly to every notification that comes in. Brand monitoring platforms can give you raw data and information statistics to understand your reputation’s standing. Services like Sprout Social and Mention streamline your social media feeds so you can monitor and respond to posts on your social channels all through one platform.
5 Brand equity
Brand reputation has value-added beyond a positive public persona. Brand reputation directly relates to brand equity—the commercial value derived from consumer brand perception. Contributing factors to brand equity include consumer expectations, word of mouth, and how well a business delivers on expectations. A business with positive brand equity is superior to competitors and may charge higher prices for its known quality and reliability. In short, through proven brand reputation management techniques, businesses can profit from brand equity.
Need help managing your brand? GROWL is here to help you tend to your brand’s online presence.