Creating and maintaining an online presence in today’s world is vital for growing your business. When consumers are looking for a product to purchase, one of the first things they do is a quick Google search.
Although word-of-mouth advertising and information still exist, people often turn to the internet for information and product reviews about companies.
Leveraging search results, social media, and other online tactics can help create a solid online presence and improve your brand’s reputation.
One of the best ways to start is by creating a strong marketing strategy that gives your company direction and a vision for where to take your brand and how you want others to view and value your company.
What is Brand Reputation and Why is it Important?
The reputation of your brand, in its simplest form, is how consumers, stakeholders, and future buyers view your brand. Whether that is positive or negative is up to you and how you manage your online presence.
As mentioned above, the internet is the way to market and manage a brand these days. The internet is a place of free-flowing information, and it can be a brand’s most significant asset or biggest downfall.
Creating and maintaining a positive online reputation is extremely important. If you decide not to care about your reputation, you may miss out on critical information that will help boost your brand and take your business to the next level. Not to mention negative news trending around your brand could turn customers away and toward your competitors.
Brand reputation management is essential because it allows you, as the business owner, to be in the driver’s seat. It gives you the power to control what is being said about your brand and monitor reviews, content, and other information about your business.
Cultivating a strong brand is vital to growing a business. If you pay attention to and create robust marketing strategies around your brand, your business will soon have a reputation that everyone knows about; and more importantly, all for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.
Why is Marketing & Strategy Important For Brand Reputation?
Simply put, if you don’t have a strong marketing strategy, it will be hard to cultivate an image and positive reputation around your brand.
Not to mention, every brand and business runs into problems at one time or another. Even the biggest companies like Apple, Target, and Delta have faced public relations problems. Without a strong marketing strategy, it will be even more difficult to fight these fires when they come.
When a business has a strong brand identity, it’s much easier to manage what is being said about them online through marketing campaigns and strategies. Knowing what you want your brand to become can help you anticipate potential problems and eliminate them before they occur.
Marketing and brand reputation go hand in hand; one becomes stronger with the other. This article will outline seven marketing strategies that can help you positively build your brand reputation and eliminate harmful content about your brand on the internet.
7 Marketing Strategies to Improve Brand Reputation
1 – Stand Out With Excellent Content Marketing
Content creation and content marketing are critical to brand management. Content consists of internal and external content published consistently to high-quality websites. It can also include social media posts, videos, press releases, etc.
Creating content that helps your target audience feel engaged with your brand is a great marketing strategy to improve your brand reputation. It is also essential to focus on relevant content for your brand.
If you create blogs and posts that are irrelevant to your business, you won’t gain much trust from your customers. Instead, focus on content that helps to answer their questions, gives them expert advice, or allows them to get an inside scoop on how your business runs.
Content creation can be overwhelming and takes a lot of time to strategize what will help your brand the most. Hiring social media marketers or brand reputation experts with experience in content marketing will help you stay up to date with the latest trends and the most popular content, making your business relevant and improving your online reputation.
2 – Improve Customer Satisfaction and Experience
Engaging your customers with your brand will help to improve your online reputation, but focusing on their satisfaction is equally important.
Customer reviews are critical to a brand’s reputation, and reviews are often the first thing people read when looking for a product to buy. Many consumers will look for reviews about a product from various companies and compare the two. Focusing on customer satisfaction is essential to edge out your competition in this category.
Also, many people are more likely to share their negative experiences with a brand or company than positive ones. Check reviews, address customers’ concerns, and take their feedback to improve processes, products, and the consumer’s overall experience.
3 – Deliver Great Customer Service
Negative customer reviews are left when a person has a bad experience with customer service or can’t seem to get their questions/concerns answered.
Almost every person has had an experience waiting on the phone for hours to talk to a customer service representative. It’s never a good experience and often leaves consumers bitter about your brand.
Investing in team members who care about customer satisfaction and give the best customer support possible is a great way to improve your brand reputation.
Many companies are known for their excellent customer service, and when bad reviews are left for these brands, it makes it harder to believe because of their reputation for excellent customer support.
This may not feel like a marketing strategy, but it’s an integral part of marketing your brand to be the best it can be, so others always turn to your company for reliability, trust, and consistency.
4 – Increase Employee Satisfaction
Equally as important as customer satisfaction is team member satisfaction. Without the support of employees, it will be hard to keep customers happy and won’t be good for your brand’s reputation.
Just as customers leave reviews about companies, employees do too. Websites like Indeed are important to monitor and maintain so that those looking for a job want to work for you.
Team member reviews can also sway a customer’s purchase decision. If something is vitally wrong with a company and a team member puts it on the internet, it will likely hurt your reputation and influence the customer to shop elsewhere.
Help your employees feel engaged and valued at your company. Suppose team members have higher morale and care about the work they do. In that case, it will only influence their work, creating a domino effect for improving marketing efforts, revenue, and brand reputation.
5 – Increase Social Media Engagement
The first step to social media is creating profiles. If you are a business consulting firm, your audience’s best social media channel is likely LinkedIn. Whereas if you are a boutique shop selling women’s clothes, a more proper channel may be Instagram or TikTok.
Finding the right social media channels and consistently posting can help to improve your brand reputation. Besides, social media accounts rank high on search engine results too. This will help consumers and potential customers to engage with your brand before they buy.
Social media is also a vital tool for converting potential customers into purchasers and repeat customers. Often those who follow and engage with a brand on social media are more likely to buy than if the company doesn’t have social media.
Keeping your customer engaged with your brand through social media is excellent brand reputation management. It is a strong marketing tool that enables customers to interact with your brand. It can give you quality feedback through analytics that will help adjust and grow your marketing strategies.
6 – Create A Brand Style Guide
Consistency is critical when it comes to branding. Creating a brand style guide will help every product, social media channel, website, etc., have the same look and feel. This is important to brand reputation management as it creates a brand image that people will recognize.
People will start to form opinions about your brand, whether walking into a storefront or browsing a website. Their opinions can change over time, too, so creating an image around your brand that represents your company identity is vital.
It can hurt your brand reputation if you are not consistent with your brand’s image and style. Be sure to focus efforts and hire the right employees to help maintain the image you have worked hard to create.
7 – Have a Public Relations Team or Reputation Management Company Help
As your brand grows, your team needs to grow too. Hiring outside help like a PR firm or reputation management company like BRANDefenders adds value to your business.
It can be a lot to take on all the responsibilities of running a business; that’s why hiring an outside firm is essential. Leaving it up to the experts to strategize and help with your brand’s reputation can give you peace of mind and the ability to focus on other business pursuits.