Commerce is increasingly moving into the ultra-competitive online space, and everything your customers say about your brand is stored forever online. Unfortunately, comments can be magnified a thousandfold with a single retweet. Brand management has never been more important to ensure your business thrives in this brave new world.
BRANDefenders specializes in building brand strategies that keep businesses relevant for all the right reasons – and protecting against the wrong information being seen. We’ll cover some brand management strategies that your company simply can’t live without.
1. Command the Conversation About Your Brand
Rule #1 is all about engagement. Don’t be a spectator to your online reputation: take control of it. Living in the conversation is one of the best brand strategies for several reasons:
It enables positive messaging
People respond well to positivity. Businesses that routinely put out positive information related to their field can cultivate an image as a friendly, accessible presence. For example, suppose your business is in providing affordable housing. In that case, you might share news articles that will benefit prospective tenants – you’re making potential clients aware that you’re focused on their wellbeing. You can also share positive information that isn’t closely connected to your business but will resonate well with your audience.
It means people will talk to you, not about you
There’s that thing that people say – “if you have a problem with me, say it to my face.” People often don’t strictly mean this as private individuals and only get more upset when the problem is raised.
However, this mantra is extremely useful for brand management. Maintaining an active voice on social media and other platforms means that your customers are more likely to come to you with issues rather than write negative reviews on third-party sites. You can address the issue directly and have it resolved for the world to see instead of sitting out there harming your reputation.
It’s great for promotion
If you maintain an active online presence, you’re already engaging with a broader audience than you’d have if you never used online communication channels like social media. When you want to promote a product or service, you’ll reach a broad audience that knows you as a brand that routinely puts out positive content. Your promotions will be seen in this light rather than as isolated messages.
It gives you a strong image to measure unreasonable criticism against
If the worst-case scenario happens and a client or another party posts harmful information about your brand, it’ll hurt more if you’re an unknown quantity. We’re less likely to believe negative claims if we trust the entity they’re being made about. If negative press makes it into the public domain, having an active, positive online presence gives you a head start in brand management and maintaining your good reputation.
The team at BRANDefenders offers expert guidance for brand strategies that help you control the narrative around your business. Working with BRANDefenders can ensure that you’re prepared and protected by your honest, positive online reputation if negative press emerges about your business.
2. Use Creative Media to Build Your Voice
Everyone skips adverts online, right? However, creative video marketing is still one of the best brand strategies. Imaginative video content is a great brand management tactic for expanding your voice beyond a “business” and engaging your customers personally.
Making Yourself Memorable
The golden days of the TV commercial saw some incredibly creative content. People still remember TV ad campaigns from decades ago – just think of Wendy’s iconic “where’s the beef?” commercial. Creating high-quality, memorable video content can give your business enduring credit, whether from nostalgia or simply because you make people laugh. This helps with brand management – Wendy’s is still a master of engaging brand strategies today, as its Twitter feed can attest.
Even the most ambitious brand management strategists know that the official public position on video commercials is that they’re not “real” content. This is fine – as long as your video content is getting your customers talking, it doesn’t matter whether it’s seen as advertising or a creative enterprise in its own right.
Building Positive Associations
At BRANDefenders, we understand that the best brand management tactics aren’t just about responding to negative reviews and bad press if they arise. There’s so much preparatory work that the team at BRANDefenders can put in, ensuring that your business has plenty of credit with existing and potential customers that helps shield you if you take a hit.
BRANDefenders also specialize in creating high-quality video content – if you’re going to invest in this marketing strategy, it’s worth doing it right. This helps boost your company’s image, familiarizes potential with your product, and can significantly increase engagement when the creative content is top-notch.
3. Employ Brand-Specific SEO
SEO is among the most important brand strategies for marketing purposes, but it’s also highly effective for brand management. Targeted SEO campaigns including your brand name and certain keywords can direct search results towards positive content that you’ve created rather than unfairly negative reviews or press.
A lot of SEO is curated towards the service you offer rather than your brand’s name. For example, “Hutchinson Roofing Contractors” would tend to optimize for things like:
- Common roofing needs that people have
- Local search terms like “roofing contractors in x area”
- Other researched keywords that score highly with Google
“Hutchinson” might not be a keyword when designing a landing page, as people are more likely to search for generic terms than your brand’s name. However, what if people are searching for your brand’s name? Top results might include popular business review sites or local news articles about your business. You want the top results all to be about you and your online presence – the Hutchinson homepage, Hutchinson social media pages, etc.
BRANDefenders is a specialist in brand-specific SEO. Our team conducts extensive keyword research for our clients so that we’re not just boosting their business’s online presence and helping them generate leads – we’re ensuring that what customers find is the client’s official contact channels and information that you’re in control of. SEO-based brand strategies can’t be overvalued in online brand management.
4. Monitor What People See First
It’s not just about what appears when your customers hit “enter” on a Google search. It’s also about what they see before they search. Search engines have drop-down lists of autocomplete predictions associated with the initial query, and if clients see something they didn’t expect, they might click on it.
Say you ran a parcel delivery business – let’s call it FasterParcel. When a customer starts typing your business name into Google, you don’t want them to see suggestions like “FasterParcel late,” “FasterParcel not delivered,” and… you get the idea. Even though it’s an almost inevitable business hazard, it’s not what you want to be associated with.
The team at BRANDefenders understands how damaging this can be for a company and can help push positive autocomplete suggestions up and work to remove specific negative suggestions. Sometimes the best brand strategies involve getting the content associated with the suggestion taken down, but sometimes it’s just about pushing positive keywords up in comparison.
You can’t force a search engine to remove search suggestions for what your customers should do if a parcel is late, but you can work to supplant this at the top of the autocomplete list. The BRANDefenders team analyzes each case thoroughly before determining the best brand management strategy.
5. Work with a Housekeeper
You can do so much to protect and boost your online reputation in-house. However, the best brand strategies are coordinated by experts with years of experience delivering high-quality reputation management solutions.
The housekeeping services provided by BRANDefender include all the leading brand strategies described above, alongside:
- Ensuring content on your website is up-to-date, relevant, and works for your business rather than against it
- Finding out where any negative press comes from and addressing it at the source
- Keeping your social media presence squeaky-clean and ensuring that your accounts are engaging positively with potential customers
- Promoting positive search results compared to negative or problem-based search suggestions
Good housekeeping is about ensuring that your business is putting on its best face for the world, from the front of your shop to your loft. It’s about ensuring that if a passer-by asks someone standing outside your shop if this is a good business, the answer is a resounding yes – because you’re engaging with the people who will give word-of-mouth reviews. BRANDefenders offers all this and more.
Putting Brand Strategies Into Action: Final Thoughts
Online brand management seems tricky, but when you’re working with experts, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to curate your digital presence. Let your customers meet you at your best, translate your positive image into leads, and build a trustworthy image by working with the team at BRANDefenders.