In this digital age, consumers hold more power over brands than ever before. Your reputation is dependent upon the reviews, comments, and overall conversations that consumers make public online regarding their experience with your brand. What does this mean for you? It means that what people think and say about your brand has an enormous impact on the future of your company: cue brand reputation management.
The Keys to Brand Reputation Management
Brand reputation management can be thought of quite literally as managing your brand’s reputation. To go into more detail, this means establishing your company as a leading resource for the product or service you specialize in.
So, where do you begin? Actually, you’ve already begun. You’re reading this blog, meaning you’re doing the research to better understand brand reputation marketing so that you can apply it to your company. Listed below are some helpful tips on how your company can use reputation marketing to your advantage.
Optimizing Your SEO
SEO serves as a way to increase the amount of traffic to your online website through search engine results. When a consumer searches for something that your company offers, they’re faced with a long list of potential resources where they can shop. The goal is to have your company listed on that first page of results, as opposed to the “website graveyard” known as the second page of Google.
The key to improving your SEO is through quality content marketing. When a user makes a search in the search engine, Google algorithms will scan the web for content with keywords that match the user’s search. When you frequently publish content, you increase your online visibility resulting in more traffic to your website. This takes us to the next point, which is how exactly your company should utilize content marketing.
Content Marketing
The content you create is a driving factor in how your brand is perceived by the public. The essential components to great content are relevancy, consistency, and quality.
Relevant Content: To reach your target audience, your content must be relevant. Position your company as an insightful source for information on subjects that are relevant to your market’s wants, needs, and curiosities in the form of blogs, whitepapers, or other tools.
Consistent Content: If you want your company to become recognizable, it’s important that the content you release remains consistent in its tone, writing, style, and voice. Your content should represent the personality of your brand to encourage consumers to become familiar with your company.
Quality Content: This will ultimately influence a consumer to decide if your company is the one they want to purchase from. Show your site’s credibility and trustworthiness by using original research, citations, links, reviews, and testimonials. Also, engage with your audience by adding images of your products, your team, and yourself.
Social Media Management
Social media reputation management involves monitoring all social media content regarding your brand to protect your reputation. For example, if a user creates a positive post about your brand on a social platform, taking a couple seconds to reply and thank them for their kind words can go a long way. This engagement builds loyalty, trust and credibility between you and the consumer.
Responding to Criticism
It’s not easy to read that one-star review and acknowledge that someone had a poor experience with your product or service. It may be tempting to ignore the comment and forget it happened but responding to negativity is just as important as responding to the positives.
Unhappy customers want to know you’re listening to their words. Remaining polite while acknowledging their issues shows you’re devoted to your consumer’s experience and that you’re willing to acknowledge negative feedback and learn from it.
The greatness of today’s online activity means your reputation can make or break you. Managing your brand’s reputation is essential, but not simple. Here at Vision, our team of marketing experts are devoted to helping your company stand out amongst the competitors. Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you.