A proper brand reputation management is crucial for any type of organization whether small or big. A positive brand reputation creates loyalty and enhances customer confidence in your brand and product, ultimately enhancing bottom-line growth and sales.
On online forums, social media, news sites, blogs, search engines, and other internet sources, it’s crucial for your brand to have prominence and position as an informative, industry-leading resource and solution for your clients.
Effective Strategies for Brand Reputation Management
There are a plethora of key initiatives that are crucial to an effective brand reputation management strategy:
Public Relations:
A strong PR program places you as a leading leader and an experienced leader and expert in your field in leading newspapers, professional publications, blogs, and leading trade outlets. As an important component of successful brand reputation management, PR can improve brand perception, manage negative sentiment, inform customer opinion and increase your web presence. In addition to this, a good PR team can secure high profile speaking engagements and other award opportunities.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
A permanent SEO strategy puts you at the top of search engine results, where customers are searching for resources and solutions to problems on time. If you are not present where consumers are searching, you will be lagging behind competitors who are there. In brand reputation management, SEO leverages strategic keywords and useful content that increases traffic to your website and increases sales.
Improve employee satisfaction:
Many companies ignore employee satisfaction when developing their brand reputation management strategy. This is a big mistake!
Employee satisfaction programs work wonders to increase employee satisfaction. According to the Institute for Employment Studies, engaged employees, satisfied employees perform 20% better than unlicensed employees and are more likely to become brand advocates (more on that below).
Satisfied, engaged employees work harder, have higher morale, care more about the success of their company, and will go out of their way to help meet customer needs. In short, satisfied employees provide a better customer experience, which is directly associated with a positive brand reputation.
Employee engagement is easy to coordinate. Start an employee voluntary program, develop a matching gift program, survey employees about their workplace satisfaction and implement changes based on their feedback.
All of this will result in happy employees who truly care about the success of your company and your customers. When your employees are satisfied, they tell their friends how good it is to work in your company. The word will spread, and your brand reputation will continuously improve.
Content Marketing:
White papers, a company blog, contribution articles, and industry research reports are examples of the role of content marketing in brand reputation management. The production of lead-generating content across an array of channels raises awareness of the benefits of your brand and your products. Your company is becoming interested in your position as an informative industry source on topics that will get you more website visitors and potential customers.
Website Development:
A strong website that is easy to navigate and pleasant user experience can improve your brand’s reputation management efforts. It is easier to focus on customers and make it easier for them to get the information they want to improve brand loyalty and reduce site abandonment.
Personalize customer interactions:
When you use an all-in-one CRM, you have access to a 360-degree contact view. These provide information about each customer’s challenges, needs, interests, proprietary products, past support tickets, and more.
Your sales representative, support agent, or anyone who interacts one-on-one with customers can dig up that data before it reaches a customer. This allows them to find common ground before negotiations begin and more personal communication is given.
Personalized outreach makes customers feel valued and helps you build a rapport with them. This generates customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and improves your brand reputation management efforts.
Nurture brand advocates:
It is one of the most effective tools in your kit for proper brand reputation management. They are satisfied with employees, customers, or anyone else who loves your brand so much, speaks positively about it and recommends it to others.
Provide a great customer experience, retain satisfied customers and employees, and they are likely to turn to social media to recommend your brand.
That word amounts to word-of-mouth, which consumers believe more than traditional brand promotion. Brand advocates can increase your reputation from mediocre to extraordinary.
Use social listening tools to get alerts when someone mentions your brand. If the comment is positive, then engage the person properly, and you will open the door to create a new brand advocate.
Generate customer testimonials and success stories
Research indicates that today’s consumers rely more on product or brand recommendations from friends, peers, and colleagues than traditional advertising.
In a broader sense, all your current and potential customers are partners with each other. Developing customer testimonials and success stories allows current customers to share their positive experiences with their peers (ie, your prospects).
It is one thing for you to tell us how great your product is. But it carries so much weight when speaking positively about your brand to no avail, the customer says how great your product is.
Social Media:
Although social media is a relatively new field for many B2B companies, it is an integral part of brand reputation management. Social media is a great way to make your business accessible, personalized and focused to the customer.
In the bustle of normal business operations, it can be easy to lose sight of the importance of brand reputation management and its impact on corporate growth. But the lack of brand reputation management can significantly and negatively affect the overall success of the organization.
Walker Sands works with leading enterprises and startups in the technology and B2B sectors, providing public relations, search, social and marketing support as part of a comprehensive brand reputation management program.
Wrapping Up:
So these are some effective brand reputation management strategies that most of the good online reputation management companies follow. If you want an effective ORM Service for your brand, you can choose services from these companies and get your brand shine in the online world.