Mastering the Three Pillars of Brand Reputation Management

Your brand's online reputation may speak for itself, but you can still influence the narrative. You can continuously improve your company's public perception with the correct data. These large and small actions comprise your brand reputation management strategy, which is necessary in today's digital-driven world.

 Whether it's a botched Product launch or a spokesperson in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, there's an increasing number of events that can immediately impact your brand's reputation. Combine that with social, which can fan the flames or cool them off, and you have a new era of communications concerns and opportunities.

Navigating this new terrain necessitates an updated toolkit that uses social insights. Listening, competitor and reviewing data can help shape your audience's perception of your brand.

Here's how to go about it.

What is the Definition of Brand Reputation Management?

The process of monitoring and influencing public perception of your brand is known as brand reputation management.

It takes years to build a reputation and only minutes to destroy one. Even minor hiccups can have a long-term impact on how an audience perceives your brand. Communication professionals can use brand reputation management to control their brand's narrative.

Smaller businesses used to avoid having to worry about developing a comprehensive brand reputation management strategy. Word of mouth can now spread in the blink of an eye, and unexpected events can thrust local businesses into the spotlight of national debate.

As a result, businesses of all sizes require brand reputation management strategies that address both significant and minor issues.

The Three Pillars of Brand Reputation Management

Social media have revolutionised the importance of brand reputation. Fortunately, it also transformed the art of brand reputation management. Listening, competing, and reviewing data are three sources of social insights that can serve as the foundation of your strategy. These pillars provide real-time insights into your strategy, allowing you to quickly identify what's working and what's not.

1. Listening Data

The world's largest focus group is social media. Marketers can use social listening to tap into the social conversations that surround their brands, industries, and audiences.

Consider this: your mentions are only a tiny portion of the feedback, concerns, and praise that your audience shares on social media. You get the entire pie with social listening. These findings can help your brand reputation management strategy in various ways. For starters, they can shed light on potential opportunities. For example, your social listening insights could assist you in identifying and acting on long-standing customer requests.

This data also has a significant risk prevention benefit. By gaining access to the full range of conversations surrounding your brand, you eliminate blind spots that can quickly become problematic if left unattended.

You can use Sprout's social listening tool to listen in on conversations about your brand to ensure that you're increasing your share of voice in a relevant and positive way. Track drops and spikes in brand sentiment to better understand what's going on and why.

2. Competitor Data

90% of marketers agree that social data helps them stay ahead of the competition. Social insights can reveal the strength of a competing brand's customer loyalty and the weaknesses in its offerings.

If listening data helps you understand where you stand with your audience, competitor data lets you know where you stand within your industry.

Your competitors' social profiles are rife with information that can be used to create benchmarks for your brand reputation management strategy. Routine social media competitive analyses can reveal opportunities to exceed industry standards, giving you a leg up on competitors.

Once you've mastered the fundamentals of competitor reporting, you can supplement your analysis with a share of voice data from your social listening tool. Share of voice measures your brand's visibility by determining how well you dominate conversations in your industry.

3. Review Data

Online reviews are a complex beast to master. People use review sites to provide feedback on products, services, experiences at specific locations, workplace culture, etc.

There are numerous review channels for marketers to keep up with, ranging from Yelp to Glassdoor and beyond. While it may require effort, the benefits are too valuable. Reviews provide you with direct feedback from your customers on what they like and what needs to be improved.

Use your social media management tool to manage incoming reviews and centralise them into a single platform to shorten your time-to-insights. You can quickly sort through positive and negative reviews to identify patterns that will eventually inform your brand reputation management strategy.

Learn How To Develop a Brand Reputation Management Strategy in 5 Steps

Your company's brand reputation does not exist in a marketing vacuum. Every department in your company can impact customer satisfaction, which can either improve or harm the public's perception of your brand.

To maintain control of your brand's narrative, a brand reputation management strategy that supports proactive responses to cross-functional risks and opportunities is required. Here are the five steps you must take to complete the task:

Step 1: Evaluate your current brand's reputation.

You may believe you understand your brand's strengths and weaknesses, but you will only know if you dig into audience data.

This procedure is more complex than other reporting procedures. When it comes to providing feedback, customers have numerous options. Although social media is the most popular, you should consider your other options.

After you've analysed your listening, competitor, and review data, add information from the following sources to your findings:

Inbound social messages: What types of comments and direct messages do you receive on social media? Work with your social team to determine the proportions of questions, complaints, and praise.

Customer feedback: How does your company gather customer feedback? Examine the most common responses from net promoter score (NPS) surveys, customer advisory boards, and other market research initiatives.

Data from the help centre: How does your company handle service or product complaints? If you use customer service software, inquire about recent customer service reports with your support team.

Create a list of brand reputation risks and opportunities as you dig through the data to inform your long-term strategic goals.

Step 2: Involve stakeholders.

Management of a brand's reputation is not a one-person job. Every department impacts customer satisfaction somehow, and collaboration is required to effect meaningful change.

To determine which colleagues should be involved in creating your reputation management strategy. Experts in public relations, investor relations, customer service, and sales may be included. Consider who manages the workflows in charge of compliments and complaints. After identifying key players, it's time to hold a kickoff meeting.

Use this opportunity to share and discuss the results of your initial brand audit. You should leave this meeting with a clear brand reputation management strategy plan.

Step 3: Establish a routine for monitoring.

Things can change at the drop of a hat regarding brand reputation management. To stay on top of consumer sentiment, you must routinely monitor the conversations around your brand.

Your industry and current events determine the frequency with which you review your brand reputation KPIs. Setting aside time each week should suffice if things appear relatively stable. If recent events upset your industry, please begin daily with a quick check-in to ensure you're not missing anything.

Step 4: Develop a crisis response strategy.

A crisis plan outlines how your company will respond in the aftermath of an unexpected event.

Because crises take many forms, it is not possible to be entirely prepared for things. Nonetheless, knowing who is responsible for what in a situation can help your company respond quickly, reducing the risk of long-term reputational damage.

Here are some common types of crises to consider when developing your plan:

• Product issues and customer criticism: Whether it's a botched launch or a flood of negative reviews, you must be prepared.
• Employee or branch errors: Your crisis plan should address how you respond to customer complaints that point to a specific employee or location.
• Outages on your site or platform leave your customers in the dark. A response strategy that uses all available communication channels (social, email, etc.) can boost confidence as your team works to resolve the issue.
• Global events, crises, and tragedies: As you may know, we live in unprecedented times. Audiences expect brands to respond to current events promptly and appropriately.

Depending on your company and industry, some crises may be more likely than others. Examine the risks identified while auditing your brand's reputation to develop an escalation management strategy and notify critical players so they know what is expected of them.

Step 5: Take advantage of opportunities for improvement.

Keep in mind that brand reputation management is more than just risk management. You need to capitalise on your brand's strength to take significant opportunities.

If your audience responds well to something, use that data to inform new campaigns and content types. As an example:

• If you consistently receive positive feedback on a product or service, incorporate those comments into user-generated content.
• Create a Listening Topic around a cultural moment that resonates with your audience to determine how best to join the conversation.
• If your competitors are receiving negative attention online, share that information with your sales team so they can focus on what gives your brand an advantage.

As you learn what works best for your brand and audience, share your findings with the rest of your team. This will enable more colleagues to serve as brand reputation defenders.

Management of Brand Reputation is an Organizational Responsibility.

Every employee stands to benefit from the positive brand reputation of your company. A strong reputation can shorten sales cycles, reduce time-to-hire, and keep customers returning to the brand they know.

Making sure everyone understands what's in it is the key to getting everyone on board with your brand reputation management strategy; hire a company that is a brand reputation management expert that can help you with this process.