 Your business’s reputation, its brand, is largely seen online now. Customers read reviews and take them seriously, according to marketing studies. In addition to other peoples’ reviews, other online sources that reveal your brand include your website and social media channels. It can be a lot to keep up with. That’s why reputation management services can be so vital. By now, you probably know what it means to build a brand. Every business needs to be clear about what its brand is. Brand encompasses many things:
Brand is more than a logo, colors and a company name. A good brand associates specific emotions and states of mind with your business. Every interaction a customer has with your business, product, or service builds a perception in their minds, so you have to be very intentional with each and every customer experience. Therefore, reputation management is extremely important. WHAT IS REPUTATION MANAGEMENT? Your business’s reputation, its brand, is largely seen online now. Customers read reviews and take them seriously, according to marketing studies. In addition to other peoples’ reviews, other online sources that reveal your brand include your website and social media channels. It can be a lot to keep up with. That’s why reputation management services can be so vital. What Can Brand Reputation Manage Do for Your Business? Here are several things a brand management team can do to refine the image and perception of your business: INVESTIGATE & REPORT During this phase, your reputation management team will audit your brand as it is. This includes customer reviews, social media reactions, and review sites like Yelp. They may also look at your website and evaluate everything from the colors and graphics to the wording for your text. From these sources, a brand management company can tell you if your brand seems cohesive and if your customers seem to be having the experience you want them to. CREATE A STRATEGY The company that you choose should understand the size and scope of your business and recommend a strategy that fits the intent of your business and the amount of time and skill you have to manage it perpetually. Here are a few things to consider when designing a reputation management strategy that will carry your business forward: Who will be in charge of monitoring your online presence? At least one person should be in charge of responding to online conversations on behalf of your business. Choose someone who is naturally inclined to customer service or someone who is willing to learn advanced customer service strategies. For larger businesses, this role may be managed by more than one person, but it is important to have the same person or people providing online customer feedback to retain continuity. Which comments and reviews get responses? In the beginning, you may think it is possible and preferable to respond to every customer comment, question, and review. But as your business grows, you will discover that this is an impossible goal. To determine which comments and reviews to respond to, prioritize your brand’s intentions. You should definitely try to respond to direct questions from customers. You should also make an effort to respond to both positive and negative comments and reviews. One thing you should never do is respond to internet trolls and fake accounts. There are resources online that can help you be better able to detect fake accounts and reviews so you don’t waste your time. What tone will your responses be given with? This is the main reason to have a single person responding to all your social media comments and online reviews. It will be easier for this person to genuinely maintain the voice of your company rather than multiple people having to learn how to embody the same tone. Being consistent with tone can be quite challenging. It can be hard to take criticism, but you have to maintain a consistent tone with negative and positive reviews alike. When determining the tone of your brand, you need to decide small things, like whether or not you will use exclamation marks in responses, to more serious topics, like how you will diffuse a volatile situation. Once you have done these three things, you can move on to the final step, which is actually reacting to the feedback that you get from various channels. MONITOR ONLINE FEEDBACK By continuously keeping an eye on customer reviews and comments, you’ll be able to tell if your strategies are working. You’ll also see if you are straying from the brand you have worked to create. Now that you have determined who will be responding to online customer feedback, which comments and reviews this person will consistently respond to, and the tone they will use, you can put these practices into play at this stage in the reputation management process. Moving forward, you’ll do these three steps over and over again. Reputation management is an ongoing process because the internet has accelerated the speed of customer reactions. Fortunately, it also makes it easy for you to turn things around for your brand quickly as well. REPUTATION MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE This type of software can be implemented to help you monitor your brand with little or no further support by your brand management team. It puts you in the driver’s seat in terms of brand management. Once you understand how much your business’s reputation matters, your brand management team can recommend software that will suit your needs and allow you to do all of the following things:
To get started aligning your brand to represent your values and expectations, contact a reliable reputation management company like APEX Local to start exploring all the ways you can represent your business on your terms. You can contact us here for more information! Comments are closed.
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