Every mention your brand receives, no matter how large or small, impacts the wider perception of it online and through other channels. A positive mention can indeed be powerful, but any negative review, criticism, or association can be remarkably harmful. Improving your online reputation is more crucial than it has ever been, as the stronger the reputation you have, the greater respect, confidence, and trust consumers will have in your brand, product, service, and values. This, in turn, boosts sales, customer loyalty, and even your reach.
The right approach to branding and reputation management is essential.
Key Insights
- Branding and reputation management work hand-in-hand: a brand with consistent messaging and clear values builds greater trust and boosts how it’s perceived online.
- Online reviews are powerful drivers of reputation, credibility, search visibility, and conversions, supporting SEO and enhancing brand perception.
- Every brand will inevitably receive some negative feedback, and how this is managed and responded to matters enormously. The right approach can transform challenges into opportunities.
- Twelve12 Branding and Marketing Agency in Orange County is here to help when it comes to improving your online reputation.
What is Brand Reputation Management?
The process of owning, monitoring, influencing, and driving public perception of your brand is referred to as “brand reputation management”. A form of public relations and closely linked with branding, it helps you uncover and understand how your brand appears to consumers, how your customers feel about you, and considers everything from macro trends to micro influences. This information is then used to design and prioritise savvy improvements, handle crises, and thereby strengthen the brand to enhance the customer experience for their utmost satisfaction and loyalty.
What is online reputation management?
Online reputation management is simply the digital aspect of overall reputation management. Today’s consumers have many instantaneous ways to share their opinions on the businesses, products, and services they use and, from social media posts and comments to Google reviews, search engine results, user-generated content, and mass digital media (e.g. online news), opinion has never been easier to share in the public domain and cause positive or negative influence – by absolutely anybody.
Reputation management can be incredibly important to your brand’s perception – and it could make the critical difference between your business’s success or failure.
Online reputation management:
- Gathers and analyses information about public perception of your brand – includes social listening, competitor insights, and customer reviews
- Helps you manage negative online reviews and other commentary
- Shows that you care about customer experiences and feedback
- Demonstrates your core values nd that you “walk the talk”
How reputation management improves brand perception:
Businesses must be competitive in terms of trust and loyalty as much as sales; the way consumers feel about your brand, product, service, and business overall is everything. Consumers prefer and are loyal to those brands they trust, and may even spend more when they find their right fit.
Effective reputation management:
- Develops and maintains a positive brand image
- Increases brand awareness
- Strengthens client/customer relationships
- Enhances trust and credibility
- Supports SEO
- Proactively manages crises
- Delivers a distinct competitive advantage
How Do Reviews Impact Brand Reputation?
Your brand’s reputation can be greatly enhanced by positive online reviews – Google reviews, onsite reviews/testimonials, social media reviews, and more. When consumers voluntarily share great experiences, it builds credibility, authority, and trust, which in turn supports customer loyalty. New prospects often rely on reviews to help them make purchasing decisions, and a high number of very positive, genuine reviews is powerful for a brand. Moreover, positive reviews are flagged by the Google algorithm and can improve search engine rankings.
Genuine reviews can help:
- Show what consumers like
- Generate leads and sales
- Drive clickthroughs and conversions
- Improve your decision-making processes
- Build your expertise
- Improve and support SEO
- Build trust and loyalty
- Enjoy a free marketing boost
Conversely, negative reviews can be extremely damaging. Many people who’d never bother leaving a positive review will be more than willing to criticize and share (and even exaggerate) a substandard customer experience, where their expectations have not been met in some way. They can lead to a decline in sales, deter customers, and spread like wildfire, especially via social media.
The key is to transform the negative into a positive and use negative feedback to transparently and authentically show your commitment to your customers in a professional, proactive, and prompt way.
7 Ways to Improve Your Brand’s Online Reputation
- Invite and encourage customers to leave a rating or review.
- Maintain consistency across all of your brand assets – visual identity, tone, colors, fonts, content, imagery, communications, etc.
- Establish clear brand reputation guidelines, including your brand identity, mission, values, how you communicate, and how you respond to feedback/criticism.
- Promptly acknowledge and respond to customer concerns in a calm, polite manner.
- Create and maintain an active social media presence for your brand and use it to build relationships with consumers.
- Invest in a professional search engine optimization campaign strategy delivered by an expert, experienced SEO provider. Search engines reflect almost 70% of all online experiences, and the higher your website ranks, the greater its reputation, credibility, and authority appear.
- Consider investment in online listening tools to monitor for and track brand mentions and references on social media and other sites, including Google Reviews.
- Explore the potential offered by user-generated content for your brand.
Twelve12 Can Help You
Is your business investing in building and maintaining a positive, healthy brand reputation?
With Twelve12’s branding and marketing services, including PR, we can help you exploit customer reviews and other brand reputation management strategies to improve your business outcomes.