Do you know what other people are saying about your brand? Regardless of how amazing you think your brand is, if others aren’t quite so on board with your awesomeness, then you might have a problem. After all, negativity spreads a lot faster than love online. Before you know it, the handful of seemingly harmless negative experiences are being replicated.
Your brand reputation is one of those things that is solely under your control. It has nothing to do with anything else except the way you run your business. A good reputation means you can expand and support what you do by ensuring a healthy level of custom and ongoing repeat business.
In some instances, a poor brand reputation needs professional assistance in supporting the work required to change what people think of your brand and how they discuss it. Working with reputation management experts and implementing easy changes and practices can get you on the right path to improving and maintaining a good brand reputation.
Monitor Your Online Reputation
Review sites are essential for every restaurant, bar, or tourist destination. If you have a physical site, expect reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google. Those that offer tangible goods should monitor Amazon, eBay, and other internet merchants. If you provide a service or are exclusively an online store, you can benefit from being well versed in how and where people.
Aside from the usual review sources, look at blogs too. You would be wise to check out forums, blogs, news sites, and social media. All of this data is needed to understand your online rep.
Trying to keep track of all these talks can be futile. Fortunately, tools exist that can assist you, including AgoraPulse, Brand24, and BrandMention, to name a few.
Have An Online Review Strategy
Online reviews have become ubiquitous; they’re the first thing customers see when they Google your business. These days, over 80% of people will look for online reviews before purchasing or making direct inquiries with a brand. To enhance your online reputation, you must have a well-defined plan for managing online reviews.
Generally, people won’t bother writing you reviews unless they’re enraged and can’t wait to rant online. You do not want to throw up your online reputation to these irate clients.
A good place to start is by actively soliciting reviews following a transaction or after a consumer has used your service for an extended period. Maybe you want to add in an incentive to encourage people to leave reviews such as a discount code or money off their next purchase with you.
Use Influencer Marketing
Influencers mostly get an unfair rap for being freeloaders. However, it is just a small minority. Influencer marketing has been a hot topic in the industry for some time now. Big businesses create enormous ROI through beauty and fashion bloggers in the B2C sector, and the B2B world adores hearing from experts and industry influencers who’ve made it.
The benefits of influencer marketing done correctly are exposing your brand to an influencer’s audience and the trust and rapport they have built up with them over the years. While they might not have heard of you or your brand, they know of the influencer, and this collaboration has piqued their interest.