Many things that affect your company’s growth happen in places you’re not aware of.
According to Gartner, over half of small to mid-sized businesses use user reviews when looking to purchase software. Other studies have found that customers will read at least ten reviews before making a purchase, and that 76% of software buyers trust online reviews just as much as referrals.
Potential customers will take into account what other people say about your brand before deciding whether or not to make a purchase. Now is an excellent time to begin paying close attention to your brand’s reputation.
This article provides an overview of how to carry out a brand reputation analysis, as well as some tips on what to avoid.
What Is Brand Reputation?
Brand reputation is how customers, employees, partners, and others perceive the brand. A brand’s reputation is key to its success. The stronger the reputation is, the more people will trust and advocate for the brand.
The users’ perception of a product can be influenced by both their direct and indirect experiences with it, as well as by outside factors. The company’s brand reputation can be impacted by things like the company’s activism and philanthropy, internal employee policies, as well as the brand reputations of the company’s partners. Peer pressure and social media influencers can persuade people to buy certain products.
The effects of brand reputation are evident in many different aspects of life. A brand’s reputation can change over time on an individual and societal scale, affecting various aspects of life. companies need to monitor and manage their reputation closely
Benefits of a Strong Brand Reputation Strategy
It is not easy to build a strong brand, as many successful companies and individuals can attest to. A brand reputation strategy will help you not only achieve your goal of achieving your ideal consumer and employer perception, but also become incredibly handy when your brand inevitably runs up against a crisis.
Some additional benefits of having a strong brand reputation strategy for your business are that you will be more likely to get more customers and that your customers will be more loyal to you.
Quickens your response to competition
A brand marketing strategy allows you to identify which marketing or sales levers to pull when your company faces a competitive threat. This can help you take advantage of opportunities and minimize threats. For example, if a new corporate bakery delivery service opens up across town, your brand reputation strategy will help you decide what to do. You will be able to tell if it is a better idea to prioritize a marketing campaign that would focus on selling your current clients on your company’s image, or if it would be better to focus on acquiring new customers from an untapped market.
Stabilizes your employee growth
brood about how you want your operation to grow can help you actualize and perpetuate the internal corporate culture that you’ll need to project outward. If you state how you want your brand to be seen, it is simpler to find employees that fit into that culture/recognize good potential hires. People look for jobs in which they believe they can make a meaningful contribution to something they find fulfilling. Prospective employees will find the most opportunity with companies that have a strong, easily recognizable brand identity. These companies have earned positive reputations, and are more likely to have rewarding positions available.
A company will have a more devoted workforce and lower levels of turnover and turmoil if it has a great reputation both inside and outside.
Creates more loyal customers
A lot of businesses make most of their money from a group of regular, reliable customers. You can improve your brand reputation by focusing on marketing and sales strategies that are more likely to appeal to and keep loyal customers.
brand loyalty among Amazon users is high in the United States for both online retail and video streaming services. An exclusive membership for committed customers who receive free two-day shipping, plus extra perks like video streaming and music. This increases brand trust and repeat customers.
Why Perform a Brand Reputation Analysis
Are you familiar with the adage in the IT industry that says, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM?” It implies that IBM is a safe choice because the company is well-known.
The statement’s most important point is that IBM has a better reputation in the IT industry than most companies.
Companies should always look for ways to improve and manage their reputation. Reputation analysis can help you understand what people are saying about you when your marketing and sales material fail.
It’s important to know what people are saying about your brand so you can address any negative sentiment and protect your reputation. Also, a brand reputation analysis can help you identify any areas where you need to make improvements.
Conducting a reputation analysis gives your brand a competitive edge.
It is important to know how the general public feels about your brand. You can quickly analyze the leading companies in the market and sketch outgrowth perspectives for your brand. This will help you better understand how to position your company in the market and what opportunities are available for your brand to grow.
Take Nike, for example. Most of their commercials are based on social issues or controversies. Even though these campaigns aren’t generating a lot of results, Nike’s audience still identifies with them. Pepsi tried to copy Coke’s marketing strategy by collaborating with Kylie Jenner, but it blown up in their face.
The main point is that you will be better off than your competitors if you are always looking at how people see your brand. This type of analysis lets you know what your audience prefers.
Conducting a reputation analysis increases your income.
Excellent brands have 230% more revenue growth than the average growth of the S&P 500. To clarify, the S&P 500 is a list of the 500 largest companies in the United States that are traded on stock exchanges. The market value of these companies is over 40 trillion.
The study showed that the most reputable companies had an EBIT growth of 1.040% over the last ten years.
It is possible to improve your brand’s reputation by analyzing it objectively and taking measures to improve it if necessary. Having a good reputation has many benefits.
Ways to Build and Manage Your Brand Reputation
Your brand needs a proactive and reactive reputation management strategy to enjoy all the benefits and avoid any negative consequences. Here are some tips and tools to guide you.
Build your brand identity
You can’t manage your reputation unless you have a strong brand. if you want to create a strong and unified brand identity, you need to have a clear idea of what your company represents. this will help you make decisions in different situations, and allow you to expand your business with new products or services without losing the essence of what your brand represents.
For example, Corksicle produces barware, canteens, and tumblers that are targeted at a specific consumer group. They communicate with this group through strong visuals, including bold colors and creative packaging. Corksicle’s consistent branding can be seen in everything from their logo and packaging to their website content and social media posts.
Establish your online presence
If you want people to form a positive impression of your business, it’s important to design your website in a way that reflects your brand identity.
You want your brand to be seen as professional and easy to understand, so make sure your visitors have a good experience. You may want to check for spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. If you want your brand to be seen as more focused on visuals rather than words, use large, high-resolution images that show your message instead of describing it.
Actively ask for and respond to reviews
Your brand’s online presence includes everything that is said or written about it on the internet, whether you have control over it or not. W People who care passionately about your brand, whether they love it or hate it, will find ways to share their thoughts in public forums. People’s perception of a brand is shaped greatly by reviews on sites such as Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Facebook, even if they have never had any direct interaction with the brand. If platforms like Yelp and Google My Business are relevant to your business, be sure to create a profile for your brand and start collecting reviews.
One way to ensure customer satisfaction is to create a space on your website for reviews and testimonials. This allows customers to leave their feedback in a constructive manner, and also provides you with insight on ways to improve your business. If you have an eCommerce website, you should have an area for customers to rate and review their purchases. This allows potential customers to see what others thought of the product and make an informed decision about whether or not to buy it.
It is important to respond to all of your reviews, even the negative ones. This shows that you are taking the time to hear what your customers have to say and are willing to improve your business. If you handle customer complaints quickly and honestly, you can often keep the customer’s business. Additionally, it demonstrates to readers of the reviews that you are willing to listen to and address problems and concerns.
Mistakes That Bias Your Brand Reputation Analysis
It is beneficial to analyze your brand’s reputation, but it is not helpful if you do not eliminate bias. There are some things you should avoid if you want to keep your analysis data clean.
Putting metrics over strategy.
In every organization, there are daily problems with strategy being taken over by individuals. You can associate Nike’s “Just do it” strategy with the number of sales it generated, Coca-Cola’s “Love story” with the number of recycled plastics, etc.
Strategy is an abstract concept that becomes more concrete when associated with numbers.
However, in the competition to make the theoretical concrete, many firms end up putting the cart before the horse – which always causes a negative reaction.
Take Wells Fargo, for example. Their employees opened 3.5 million credit cards and deposit accounts without customers’ consent as part of their “cross-selling” campaign. Why did they do this? They wanted to execute the said strategy to make it successful.
The campaign became a nightmare because they cared more about metrics than strategy.
Not tying customer satisfaction to brand romance.
Although “number of people who like/dislike our brand” is a good metric to start with, it may not be accurate.
Even though I may like your company, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m content with the things you sell. This is a subtle point, but it’s worth thinking about. Although you like Microsoft, you are not pleased with Windows Vista. You may be disappointed with the Tesla Cybertruck, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t like Tesla.
Companies are basing their focus on measuring surface-level sentiment, when the feeling underneath is completely different.
When a customer says they love Amazon but their customer service sucks, it means they think highly of Amazon but disapprove of their customer service. Not the way you think.
When you ask a customer if they like Amazon, their answer will always be yes. After asking a few more in-depth questions, it becomes clear that their main feeling is that “they don’t really like Amazon.”
Top Brand Reputation Analysis Tools
If you’ve been keeping up with our reasoning from the beginning, you should be able to tell that you can’t do a practical brand reputation analysis by yourself. Tracking, organizing, and tracking data requires the use of tools.
Here are four brand reputation tools that you can easily add to your digital marketing strategy:
Google Alert
Google Alert is a free mention tracking tool designed by Google. It only takes a few moments to set up an alert for a specific keyword. Just enter the keyword you want to be alerted for and your email address.
After you complete that task, you will get an email notification from Google anytime there is a mention of that keyword. The email will include a link to where the mention occurred. So, it’s reliable and straightforward. However, it does not track social media platforms. You can try it here.
Social Mention
Technically speaking, Social Mention is an improvement on Google Alert. This tool is not as advanced as other brand mention monitoring tools. It’s also free and straightforward to use.
You just need to enter the name you want to monitor online, and you’re finished. The dashboard displays mentions and some accompanying analytics. You can try it here.
Mediatoolkit
Although Google Alert might claim to be reliable and straightforward, these qualities are nothing new to Mediatoolkit. Furthermore, its lack of features is a major downside.
To get a complete and accurate brand reputation analysis, you need a tool that you can trust at every stage of the process, from collecting data to making sense of it.
The Mediatoolkit platform provides a variety of tools that can help you optimize your workflow. The tool tracks your mentions on both Google and social media platforms. Many businesses rely on Mediatoolkit because it has lots of great features.
Brand24
“Buffer” recently rated “Brand24” as one of their favorite tools for tracking brand reputation. Brand24 is a tool that allows you to track online mentions of your brand and provides analytics to help you understand and improve your online presence.
The tool gathers public brand mentions in real time and covers everything from review sites, newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and forums to social media networks. You can use this tool to see how often your brand is being mentioned online and what people are saying about it.
This software not only has great features such as sentiment analysis and social media reach, but it also notifies you in real-time when you get mentioned.
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