Everything from how you design the logo, to the words in the website copy, has an impact on how customers perceive you and your products.
Customers trust brands online and offline, which means they are more likely to purchase your products or services. You can shape the perceptions of your customers by building brand experiences that reflect their needs and values.
This article will explain why brand reputation matters and provide tips and tricks for building and maintaining it.
What’s brand reputation?
What customers, partners, and employees think of a brand is its reputation. People will trust and advocate for it more.
Perceptions of brands can be influenced by both direct and indirect experiences. The buying decisions of consumers can also be influenced by the influence of family members and other influential people.
Over time, a company’s brand reputation can fluctuate. This applies to both individuals as well as the wider society.
Strong brand reputation strategies have many benefits
Building a strong brand takes effort. This is what the best brands and people have shown. This strategy will be invaluable when your brand is in trouble. Here are additional benefits of having a strong brand reputation strategy for your company.
You respond faster to the competition
A brand strategy is a way to identify the most effective marketing and sales strategies for your company when you face a threat. This will allow you to decide whether to concentrate on existing customers and sell your spirit, or if you should focus on new clients in unserviced areas.
Stabilizes your employee growth
Your vision of how you want your company’s growth to look will guide you in building and maintaining an internal culture that’s reflective of the outside world. Companies with a strong reputation and brand will offer these kinds of opportunities to potential employees.
Companies with a solid reputation attract loyal employees and lower turnover.
Creates more loyal customers
Long-term loyal customers are a key factor in many companies’ success
Amazon is a leader in brand loyalty within the US, for an example. Amazon Prime is an online retailer and video streaming service. They offer two-day free shipping, as well as additional perks like music and video streaming.
Ways you can manage and build your brand’s reputation
A reputation management strategy must be proactive and reactive to ensure your brand reaps the benefits.
- Make your brand identity
- Establish your online presence
- Respond to reviews.
- We would love to hear from you
- Improve the customer experience
- Create a great company culture
- Create a style guide
- Hiring a team of professionals in public relations and/or a process
1. Create your brand identity
Before you can think about your brand, you must build a strong brand identity that will reflect your company’s values.
Corkcicle offers innovative barware, canteens, and tumblers. Corkcicle understands the needs of its customers and uses strong colors and creative packaging to communicate with them.
These should be part of your brand identity:
- A consistent visual language, using branding elements like your logo, colors, and imagery
- Consistent brand voice
- A clearly defined company vision mission and value statement
2. Establish your online presence
Your website may be the first place that people encounter your brand. You should design a website that allows visitors to feel your brand identity and gives them a true impression of your business.
A brand should be simple to use and professional. If you want your brand to stand out from the rest, replace your copy with large, high-resolution photos that clearly show your message.
3. Respond to and ask for reviews
Your brand has an online presence. Your brand has an external online presence. To start collecting reviews, create a profile for your brand.
Customers can review and rate the purchase.
No matter what language they are in, customers will notice that you respond quickly to their reviews.
4. Listen to your feedback
There are many things you can do to influence the perception of your brand. You don’t have to be a beta tester or customer who has used your product.
You have many options to track what people are saying about your company as it grows.
- Google Alerts lets you create as many alerts as you like and receive an email notification when your keyword (in this case, brand name) appears on Google. This will help you stay in the loop and make your brand stand out.
- Monitor software for social media can help you analyze the comments about your brand online.
- Other reputation management tools, such as Brand24 or Local, will allow you to expand your listening skills to websites and blogs.
These KPIs will help you evaluate how your strategy can be adjusted based on the data you have gleaned through social listening.
- Sources: What is your audience talking about? “
What other opportunities are there? How do you build brand awareness and reputation across other platforms?
- Time: Is this information indicative of an upward trend? Do they match specific seasons?
- Sentiment – What are the general attitude to your brand and related search terms? Is it positive? Do you see a pattern in how people refer to your brand?
You can determine the brand’s emotional weight by looking at brand mentions. To visualize this data, a word cloud may be part of your reputation monitoring tool.
Once you have the data, you can analyze the emotions and behavior of your customers. This will help you ensure that your social media presence is well-received and your marketing campaigns are effective. This will help you to strategically grow your business.
Airbnb is an example. It was initially a site for vacation rentals. Airbnb has grown to be a multifaceted business model that revolves around experiences.
Airbnb considered all aspects of its branding and designed a new logo. The logo features the Belo symbol which represents their shared values. They introduce their followers and highlight the many activities they can do while at their properties.
Airbnb’s consistency has been a strength. This makes them a trusted company that will continue to thrive on a global scale.
5. Improve the customer experience
According to data from Microsoft, 58% of customers will leave brands if they are not satisfied with their service.
Customers who have had a bad experience with a company are more likely to leave reviews than those who had a good one. While potential customers and existing customers might not look for reviews on employees, they will search for other customer experiences.
According to a ReviewTrackers survey, 35% will only consider doing business with brands that have a star rating of at most 4 stars. 10% will choose 5-star companies.
The survey revealed that 94% of respondents believe that a negative review is enough to make them reconsider doing business with a company.
One person can have a negative experience with a company that makes it difficult for others to do business.
Customers can have better experiences online, on the phone, and on social media.
Tip: Customers’ experiences matter.
6. Inspire excellence in your organization
The brand reputation strategy of your company will allow you to grow. Positive and healthy workplaces make a difference. Give your team meaningful work and empower them to take charge of their professional lives.
This can make a big impact on your brand’s perception. Happy employees are more likely to take pride in their work, and to do better work.
Although your team might not be directly dealing with customers, they will make decisions that impact how your brand is perceived by the public.
A positive company culture can have a positive effect on your internal brand reputation.
7. Make a style guide for your brand
People will begin to see your brand the moment they first see it. This could happen when they visit your site, visit your storefront, or see your ads on Facebook.
To ensure the growth of your company, you must ensure consistency in your brand’s design, communication strategies, and customer service quality.
Take a look at our brand styling guides to get some inspiration.
8. Public relations team or process
As your company grows, you’ll likely need to hire someone (or a team) who actively looks for opportunities to make positive headlines about your brand.
- Manage your website and make announcements to internal audiences about awards and other honors
- Send press releases via Newswire
- Contact your local newspaper for information about major company developments.
- Secure speaking engagements for industry leaders at conferences
Public relations professionals can help you improve public perceptions by actively promoting and promoting your brand.
It’s possible to avoid potential mishaps or problems.
All businesses, big and small, should remember this when weighing the merits of hiring a PR team. Although you can’t predict the future, it is helpful to have the plan to help you deal with any problems.
