Studies have shown that over 85 percent of buyers check out online customer reviews from multiple reviewing sites before buying from a brand. The reason behind this is that modern customers consider online reviews as the primary merit of a brand’s credibility. These reviews and comments can build or tarnish your brand reputation, affecting sales.
A lot of things rely on brand reputation, including the brand’s sales, its reach, revenue generation, and relation with existing customers. Plus, undesirable reviews, comments, and engagements can negatively affect everything. This is why proper reputation management is important.
What Is Brand Reputation?
Brand Reputation is the overall image of your brand that customers see on the internet. Various factors determine a brand’s reputation. These factors include reviews and ratings, social media engagements, and comments about the brand that are available online for everyone to see. Moreover, how you deal with engagements also impacts brand reputation.
Why Is Brand Reputation Important For A Brand?
Brand reputation plays a major role in the success of a brand. Consumers are highly likely to buy from brands they consider reliable. Moreover, modern customers conduct research before buying from a brand, and if your brand has a positive reputation, they are more likely to buy from you.
However, if they search your brand’s name and come across negative reviews and ratings, they’ll build a negative image, losing potential clients and sales. In this way, brand reputation directly influences revenue generation and a company’s overall success.
This is why big brands spend heavily to maintain their brand image and reputation. But the investment is worth it because once their credibility is maintained, it drives an insane amount of leads and sales. Brand reputation also helps improve reach, attracting new customers.
Building and maintaining a positive brand reputation is especially important for new, growing brands as they are still in their initial stages. By building a positive brand image, they can attract new clients, and get a good initial boost.
What Is Reputation Management?
Maintaining brand reputation is known as reputation management. A lot of things are involved in reputation management. Primarily, taking care of all kinds of engagements, comments, and DMs comes under reputation management.
Dealing with negative comments, reviews, and ratings is also a part of reputation management. Including reputation management in your marketing strategy is important as it will help you build a positive brand image, which will drive traffic toward your brand and improve sales and help you build good relations with existing clients.
Why Should I Consider Reputation Management For My Brand?
Here are major reasons why you should consider including reputation management when developing your marketing strategy.
#1. Build And Maintain Your Brand Image
Primarily, reputation management helps you build and maintain your brand’s image. As discussed earlier, over 80 percent of consumers consider brand image when buying a product or a service. A positive brand image will attract potential customers, generating sales.
Your brand image does not only have an impact on new customers, but it also affects existing clients. For example, if a regular customer comes across negative reviews about your brand, this will decrease their trust, and they might even decide to switch. You can avoid this with proper brand reputation management, as it will help you maintain a positive brand image.
#2. Attract Traffic And Potential Customers
Reputation management will help you attract huge amounts of traffic and potential customers. As most potential buyers rely on online reviews and ratings when deciding which brand to select, you can attract customers by maintaining them through reputation management. You can even ask satisfied customers to send positive reviews and have them highlighted on review sites.
You will see a considerable increase in your sales with proper reputation management techniques. This will improve revenue generation and help your brand grow.
#3. Build Relations With Existing Customers
Existing customers are a company’s most valuable assets. They not only buy from your brand, from time to time but also recommend it to others, such as their friends and family. Proper reputation management will help you maintain your relations with existing customers.
These relations are maintained by properly replying to client queries, engagements, and DMs. All these things fall under the collective term of reputation management. Moreover, by maintaining a positive public image of your brand, you retain existing clients and attract new ones. This way, reputation management will also help you improve your brand’s reach.
#4. Remove Negative Content
One of the major aspects of reputation management is removing negative content. Negative content can tarnish your brand image and reputation, which can have serious adverse consequences, such as a sudden decrease in traffic and sales.
For example, imagine a potential buyer considering buying from your brand. But when they search your brand on Google, they first encounter a negative review on a popular local reviewing site. This will automatically build a negative image of your brand in their mind and drive them away, causing you to lose a potential sale. You can avoid that with reputation management and timely removing such negative reviews and low ratings.
#5. Improve Your Brand’s Reach
With reputation management, you will be able to improve your brand’s reputation and image, resulting in increased reach. Because of this increased reach, you will see better traffic, more leads, and increased sales.
An effective marketing technique must aim to improve reach as it generates revenue and promotes brand growth. You can achieve all this by incorporating a proper reputation management strategy in your marketing technique.
#6. Attract Engagements
Engagements, especially social media engagements, help improve a brand’s overall image and people’s trust in it. These engagements include comments, tags, likes, shares, and DMs. When customers engage with your brand on social media, their followers also get to see them, which is basically free social media marketing.
Reputation management assists you in attracting more engagements. The process includes many strategies that promote customer engagement, thus improving reach and building a positive brand image.
#7. Improve The Hiring Process
Brand reputation also has an impact on the hiring process. The majority of candidates research the companies whose job positions they’re about to apply for. And if they come across negative content, it will automatically demotivate them, making it difficult for you to hire suitable employees. By helping you build your brand’s image, reputation management makes hiring much easier for you!
Where To Start?
Now that you have an idea of reputation management and why it is important, you might be wondering, where can I start? And how can I incorporate reputation management into my marketing strategy? Well, there are many ways to do it.
First of all, start by yourself. If you manage your brand’s social media accounts yourself, try to engage with customers as quickly as possible. Reply to customer queries in DMs in an appropriate and polite way. Moreover, keep a close eye on your brand’s reviews and ratings on popular review sites.
If you see negative content related to your brand, try to get it removed as soon as possible as it will potentially damage your brand’s image. There are many ways to do this. You can contact the site’s administration, request the search engine to remove undesirable results or take proper legal action.
Investing in marketing strategies that work to promote your brand’s image is also an effective reputation management strategy. However, if you find all this difficult to manage, you can also hire a brand reputation management company.
Hire A Reputation Management Company
Reputation management companies offer their services to help you build, manage, and maintain your brand reputation. These companies have employed trained professionals who work to improve your brand’s image through different techniques.
A reputation management company will take care of many things for you, such as social media management, marketing, negative content removal, engagements, and more! All for a small price. However, many different brand reputation management services are available in the market. So while selecting one for your brand, conduct thorough research. Compare the pros and cons of multiple companies and only select the best one!
Conclusion
Reputation management helps you build, maintain, and protect your brand’s online image and reputation. Today, consumer traffic, sales, and revenue majorly depend on a brand’s reputation, which is what makes reputation management the most important part of a marketing strategy.