For brands to thrive in today’s competitive landscape, they must learn how to protect company reputation.
Consumers engage more with brands whose reputations they trust. A strong brand reputation also allows companies to increase customer lifetime value, reduce capital costs, and deliver sustained earnings and growth.
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4 Ways to Protect Your Company Reputation
Reputation management or protection isn’t simply about hiring a PR firm for your company or investing in reputation management software. While these certainly help, your team should play a proactive role in protecting the reputation of your brand.
As you build a long-term strategy, keep the following best practices in mind.
Measure Your Reputation and Identify Your Reputation Metrics
The first step that will help your team proactively protect company reputation is to learn how to measure it. This is essential to understanding how people really feel about your brand and what they think of when they come across your company’s products and services.
To this end: your company must be able to identify your key reputation metrics, monitoring these regularly and making sure your brand reputation stays healthy. These metrics often include:
- Online reviews and ratings
- Website traffic
- Conversion metrics
- Social media reach and engagement
- Customer referrals
- Customer experience analytics and sentiment analysis
- Local search rank (use a local search rank checker to monitor this metric)
- Customer feedback
If you know how to measure brand reputation, it will positively impact the financial health of your company. It saves money in the long run, helps protect company reputation, and strengthens your entire foundation, so that a negative social media comment, a critical online review, or an unflattering search result won’t send your brand reeling.
Take Control of Your Online Listings
Your company’s online local listings are powerful marketing assets that help your brand or business get found online.
When people search for your brand online — or when they search for the types of products and services you provide — your listings are (ideally) displayed in their search results.
- 92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results. (SEO Expert Brad)
That’s why it’s important to take control of your brand’s local listings. Think of it as a way of planting your company’s flags across all the important digital properties where customers may find you. You want to make sure that your business information — such as your business Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP), along with store hours, menu, payment methods, etc. — is always correct, consistent, and complete.
A sound local listing management strategy not only helps protect company reputation; it also helps improve your visibility in search results, attract new customers, and supercharge your traffic and revenue performance.
Respond to Reviews (Both Negative and Positive)
Learning how to respond to negative reviews not only protects your company reputation; it also allows consumer perception of your brand to immediately improve.
Research indicates that 80% of consumers believe that a business cares more about them when its management responds to customer reviews.
Brands that are responsive to reviews are also usually the ones that can more easily build goodwill, inspire customer loyalty, and extend customer lifetime value.
Be sure that your team also acknowledges positive feedback by responding to positive reviews. (Not sure what to say? Check out this list of amazing positive review response examples.)
Regardless of sentiment, always remember to say thank you in your review responses. By engaging with customers and showing that your company appreciates and values their feedback, you can minimize the impact of negative comments and reinforce positives in the customer experience.
If you’re managing a brand with hundreds or even thousands of business locations, you may consider investing in online reputation management software to help your team effectively manage reviews.
Have a Social Listening Strategy
Social listening refers to a wide range of processes that involve tracking and monitoring online mentions and social media comments containing your brand name.
It’s a strategy that helps protect company reputation and lets you listen in to the Voice of the Customer on social media — without wasting valuable time and without missing anything important.
Social listening also helps your team avoid delays in responding to customers, regardless of where they choose to engage with your business.
By having an effective social listening strategy in place (this may entail the deployment of free social listening tools), you can foster consumer trust in your brand and improve your company reputation. After all, the sooner you can get back to your customer, the greater your chances of winning them over and attracting them to your business locations.
