The online reputation of a brand is vital for its success. How consumers view a brand often determines sales numbers, society perception, and strength in its respective industry. Managing and monitoring how society sees your brand is something that should be constantly examined. When drops in sales occur, it is likely an issue with your brand’s current reputation in the industry.
Control Over Online Brand Profiles
Preservation of a brand’s online reputation is part of managing and monitoring it. In order to preserve your brand’s positive online reputation, it is ideal to regularly search user-created review websites, such as Yelp, to see if your brand is present. If your brand did not create this profile, it is ideal to contact the service to claim ownership of the brand. From here, the brand can clean up the profile with complete information and take necessary steps to create a reputation preservation strategy.
Monitor the Competition
What your competition is doing within your industry may have an impact on your brand’s reputation even if it is not directly involved. It is ideal to monitor industry news, competitor controversy and attempts to bash your brand. Your brand can create a plan of action to tackle the rumors and set itself apart from the rest of the competition.
Ability to Consult Industry Competition
Take time to pay attention to what industry competitors are doing and what they aren’t doing. Brands in an industry do speak amongst each other regarding trends, operations practices, and even consumer reactions. Brands can and should consult each other to assist the industry as a whole to have a better reputation. When an entire industry, or at least its major forces, band together, it can reclaim a positive reputation for an entire industry which helps each individual brand supporting the efforts.
Ability to Manage Interactions from Reviews and Social Media
Does your brand pay attention to what is said about it online? If not, it should be. Consumers report to use online reviews 70-percent of the time to make buying decisions. Consumers only want to make purchases from reputable companies. If your brand has a poor consumer rating, poor satisfaction and consistent negative reports regarding product quality, some work needs to be done to turn the reputation around.
Your social media reputation matters, perhaps more than a review left a year ago on a popular website. These are real-time, current reactions to brand interactions on social networks. A single social media manager should be in place to monitor commentary and interactions for all of the brand’s social media channels. This person should be given the task of positively interacting with consumers, reporting vulgarities and negative commentary and working with the marketing team to develop a new strategy to improve the online reputation.
Change Online Personas
Has the brand ever thought that its multiple online personas are leaving a bad taste in the mouths of consumers? It happens more often than marketing teams think. Sure, a fun online persona is great for some attempts at making a brand seem more approachable. This can, however, come across as trying too hard or seeming desperate for attention. It is important to create the right personas for your audience. In some cases, multiple personas are required to address multiple audiences and varying demographic groups. Change or discontinue using personas that are not perceived well as those are damaging the reputation of your brand.
It can take several months to see results with a new persona as the previous may have turned consumers completely off.
Notification of Brand Name Tarnishing
Monitoring software can include features to notify a brand when its name is being used in a negative manner. Brands can then step-in quickly and begin risk management and plan a strategic marketing plan of attack to regain a positive reputation. It only takes one negative story going viral to completely ruin a brand’s reputation.
Construct a Re-Imaging Plan
Take some time to conduct surveys indirectly to gain data to for re-branding or image reconstruction. In some cases, starting with a clean slate redirects society’s initial impression of a brand and allows a second-chance opportunity. Consider where you want to focus your energies, such as a press release, video marketing or social media content releases and create compelling content re-introducing the brand.
Final Thoughts
Rather than creating a human workforce to monitor your brand’s reputation, use automation. Big data, and fast data can provide analytics quickly to put damage control measures in place and immediately respond to negativity in a positive manner. Sometimes, using tactful ways of responding to reviews and bashing works well enough to Band-Aid a brand’s reputation after a scrape from negativity.
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