6 Expert Tips to Master Brand Reputation Management

Did you know that nearly 93% of customers take the time to read online reviews before making a purchase? Yes, it’s crucial to have a positive reputation to succeed. That’s why I have 6 powerful tips to help you become an expert at managing your brand’s reputation.

Let’s dive in!

Brand reputation is the overall public perception of a brand or company. It is influenced by various factors such as the quality of products or services, customer experiences, online reviews, the effectiveness of marketing efforts, and alignment with declared values.

Maintaining a strong brand reputation is essential for enhancing customer loyalty, attracting new customers, and strengthening market presence.

Table of contents:

• What is brand reputation management?
• Brand reputation management strategy:
  • 01 Monitor your brand’s Reputation Score
  • 02 Track online conversations and brand mentions
  • 03 Monitor customers reviews
  • 04 Respond promptly to customer concerns
  • 05 Build brand reputation proactively
  • 06 Get ready for an image crisis
• Conclusion

What is brand reputation management?

Brand reputation management is taking control of how people perceive and think about a brand. It involves monitoring what people say online and offline and ensuring the brand has a positive image.

By managing brand reputation well, businesses can protect their image, keep customers happy, and stay ahead of the competition.

Brand reputation management efforts include:

• Monitoring brand mentions, reviews, and feedback to stay informed about the public’s perception of your brand.
• Responding promptly and professionally to customer inquiries, comments, and concerns on social media, review sites, and other platforms.
• Encouraging positive reviews by providing exceptional products and services, as well as engaging with satisfied customers.
• Maintaining a consistent brand voice and message across all marketing channels and customer touchpoints.
• Addressing negative feedback and criticism in a proactive, empathetic, and solution-focused manner.
• Developing and implementing public relations strategies to maintain a positive brand image, including managing potential crises.
• Collaborating with influencers and industry experts to build a positive brand image.
• Continuously analyzing customer feedback and using the insights to improve products, services, and overall brand reputation.

 The goal is to build customer trust, address problems or negative feedback, and handle crises effectively.

6 Tips for effective brand reputation management

Managing brand reputation looks like one tough cookie. Thankfully, I prepared a short guide to brand reputation management!

You don’t have to follow every guideline we listed. Choose the ones that suit your needs the most and are relatively easy to implement.

Ready? Here we go!

01 Monitor your brand’s Reputation Score

Reputation Score is a metric that reflects a brand’s overall reputation on the internet.

Tracking this metric gives you an idea of how well your brand reputation management strategy is working.

Here you can see the Reputation Score of the Netflix brand:

As you can see, there are some rapid changes in number of mentions. Netflix’s Reputation Score can go up or down depending on different factors.

For example, the score goes up if people are excited about new content and like it. But if people don’t like it and post a lot of negative mentions, the score can go down temporarily.

Furthermore, any controversies related to the company or its executives can result in fluctuations in the Reputation Score.

02 Track online conversations and brand mentions

Brand reputation management starts with brand monitoring!

To be able to react to online mentions, your PR team has to be aware of everything that is being said about your company, product, or service online.

You can monitor mentions you’re interested in manually — type the name of your company into any search engine and examine the results one by one.

This approach to brand reputation management has one benefit — you don’t need to pay for any additional tools.

The list of disadvantages is a bit longer. For starters, manually searching for online mentions will take a lot of your time. You risk missing some crucial comments. That might spiral and hurt your brand reputation in the long run.

Moreover, many brand monitoring tools will offer additional analytics metrics that will help you measure the results of your marketing campaign, your hashtag reach, or sentiment around your brand.

Here you can see Nike mentions detected by the Brand24 tool:

Moreover, Brand24 offers multiple AI-powered features. One of the most interesting is the Anomaly Detector. What’s all about?

First, check the following chart presenting the volume & reach of mentions regarding Nike:

As you see, there are exclamation marks above each of the chart peaks.

This means that the AI Anomaly Detector identified unexpected behaviors, such as unusual spikes in mentions. At the same time, it uses artificial intelligence capabilities to find out what caused detected anomalies.

Let’s click on one of the exclamation marks.

The Anomaly Detector reveals the increased volume of discussions & higher level of negative sentiment are related to women’s sizing and skimpy swimsuits for female athletes.

03 Monitor customer reviews

According to research provided by Bright Logical, 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34).

We live in a time of massive advertising, and it’s impossible to verify if these ads are describing products or services fairly or not. Due to much false advertising, people limited their trust to businesses promoting their products or services.

That’s why review sites are so popular.

Nowadays, people much more trust online reviews written by other customers rather than regular ads. It happens because people are looking for real, honest, and unfiltered reviews and opinions made by real users and based on their experience with the brand.

91% of 18-34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

That’s is why online reviews are crucial for your brand reputation – they are an excellent way to build a more significant social reach and establish trust, which converts potential customers into paying customers.

Feedback and business improvement

Another benefit you get from online reviews is feedback about your product. That’s why you should pay attention to what people are saying about you.

Even if a review is negative, you should read it carefully and try to draw conclusions. Negative surveys can help your business by showing you the weakest links of your product or service. Thanks to that, you can correct all the mistakes and improve your business according to your customers’ desires!

Monitoring reviews and upgrading your service will lead to growth in sales, will help you determine the priority of features development

What’s also essential – negative opinions may show you in a favorable light! It all depends on how you respond to them. If you admit that you’ve made a mistake, apologize and show that you drew conclusions from the review, people will accept it.

Show your human face, let people know that there is a real person on the other side of the screen. We are all human and making mistakes is a human thing. Your reaction is most important.

04 Respond promptly to customer concerns

First, you need to identify urgent customer concerns that require immediate attention. 

You can do it by sorting important negative mentions. Also, keep an eye on overall brand sentiment. Sentiment analysis will inform you whether any negative trend appears. 

It is a good idea to conduct a topic analysis to identify which topics are causing customer problems.

Netflix has recently introduced new guidelines on password sharing, which has not gone down well with its customers.

After detecting the issue:

1. Respond to the customer promptly.
2. Let them know that you are working on finding a solution.
3. Show empathy and understanding toward their frustration or dissatisfaction.
4. Keep the customer informed throughout the resolution process. 
5. Once you have all the information, it’s important to give a clear and easy solution that addresses the person’s concerns.
6. After successfully resolving the customer’s concern, follow up with them to ensure their satisfaction and check if they require any further assistance. This shows that you care about their feedback and want to make sure they’re satisfied in the long term.

Check: The Best Customer Feedback Tools

05 Build positive brand reputation proactively

It’s crucial to maintain a positive brand image. Here are some great tips that will help you do that:

• Promote positive customer experiences
• Boost customer satisfaction
• Provide an excellent customer experience
• Build an engaged community
• Collaborate with influencers and industry experts

Promote positive customer experiences

One way to build customer loyalty is by encouraging them to share their experiences through reviews, testimonials, or surveys.

These testimonials can be used to showcase positive experiences on your website, social media channels, and marketing materials, highlighting your value.

Another effective method is to create a loyalty program that rewards repeat customers with exclusive discounts, offers, or other benefits. The goal is to make them feel valued and incentivized to continue doing business with you.

You can also surprise and delight your customers with personalized thank-you notes, or small gifts to show your appreciation.

Check: How to Get Customer Testimonials?

Boost customer satisfaction

Monitoring customer conversations should lead to improving customer satisfaction.

Happy customers stay longer with your company and provide a long-term revenue.

Customer loyalty can provide a perpetual motion to your company. Not only will they form a loyal customer base. Satisfied customers will spread the word about your product or service. And there’s nothing like word-of-mouth marketing

When it comes to managing your brand reputation and boosting customer satisfaction, time is of the essence. Try to resolve your customers issues as fast as possible.

To do that, you have to be aware of the problem. That’s why monitoring mentions around your brand is so crucial.

Furthermore, you should offer multiple levels of communication. Your clients should be able to choose the channel that suits them best, for example, social media, live chat solution, email, or phone.

Provide an excellent customer experience

Customer experience is slowly becoming one of the most important decision-making factors when it comes to purchasing decisions.

How do you distinguish your customer service from other players on the market?

Firstly, think about personalisation of your message. Every customer expect that their needs will be met and they will get exactly what they need.

You can prepare a dedicated path within your marketing automation tool and try to deliver the most suited message possible.

Moreover, you should ask your customers for feedback and implement the solutions. You can send surveys or just monitor the issues your customers report repeatedly.

It’s important to stay in touch with your customers. Regularly sending newsletters will form a bond between your customer and your company, provided you can deliver content that is interesting.

If you won’t provide en excellent customer service, your clients will turn to your competitors. Don’t worry, in that case, we still got you covered!

Build an engaged community

Social media are the easiest way to communicate with your customers, so it’s crucial for you to know how to improve social media engagement. Also, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became the first places people go for customer support, product queries, or to say how awesome your brand is.

80% of 18-34-year-olds have written online reviews – compared to just 41% of consumers over 55.

What’s more, people love positive interactions with brands on social media. It makes them feel important as a customer.

According to Sprout Social research, 30% of customers who are neglected by brands on social media are more likely to switch to a competitor.

Social media posts are, by design, public and easy to comment and share so if you have an engaged community it’s easier for you to go viral if you post something funny (but related to your brand), or you’ll positively shock people with your world-class customer service as Virgin Trains did:

Collaborate with influencers and industry experts

Teaming up with influencers and industry experts can really elevate your brand. It’s amazing how their support can boost your credibility and build trust with people. 

Working with industry experts shows that your brand knows what it’s talking about. 

Furthermore, collaborating is like getting a stamp of approval. This social proof convinces others to trust and engage with your brand too.

Working together with the right people is crucial. It’s always a good idea to team up with partners who are in the same industry as you.

How to find proper people? You can use a brand mentions tool for this purpose. Such a tool will list profiles that match your brand.

06 Get ready for an image crisis

Effective brand reputation management strategies need to have a brand crisis plan in place.

Why? When a crisis happens, time is crucial.

Having a plan means you can react quickly, deal with the problem, and give accurate information.

Also, a crisis plan helps you manage the situation so it doesn’t get worse. Take a look at our blog post to discover ways to handle a brand crisis effectively.

Is brand reputation management important?

To sum up, brand reputation management is crucial for growing a business. A positive brand reputation builds loyalty and increases customer confidence in your brand and product, which leads to an increase in sales.

In the multitude of daily duties, it can be easy to forget about the importance of brand reputation management, but if you want your business to grow, you need to keep your finger on the pulse.

Lack of brand reputation management can seriously harm your brand and cause damages, which will take a lot of time, money, and effort to repair.

Do your want to know more about media monitoring and online reputation management? We got you covered! Take a look at our Udemy free course in media monitoring!

Read also: What Is Corporate Reputation Management?