Phases of Brand Reputation Maintenance
Building, maintaining, and recovering reputation are the three phases of brand reputation management.
Reputation Management – Building
Every new company must begin somewhere. This level of reputation management focuses on laying the groundwork for your company’s growth and success.
This is a crucial stage in the creation of any reputation management plan. Your major aim at this point is to keep an eye on your internet reputation and build a strong, good presence. New businesses attempting to gain a larger proportion of brand exposure typically begin by:
- Reputation monitoring
- Website
- Basic social media profiles
- Review management program
A basic reputation strategy utilizes extremely minimal resources, which is a desirable feature of a tool like this. The goal is to start with the easiest-to-manage aspect of brand exposure management. This type of program can concentrate on only five or six online pages, allowing a corporation to concentrate on producing high-quality content and managing reviews.
Management of the review: Choose the top two review sites where your rivals are most active. These review sites are likely to rank for your brand as well.
Reputation Maintenance
Maintaining a positive reputation requires effort, but it is less effort than repairing a damaged one. The bulk of your online reputation management strategy will revolve around preserving a good image and enhancing it where you can.
Unless you already been there in corporate for a while, and your reputation online is decent, you probably need to maintain something that. Eventually, nearly all companies get nailed online whether they deserve it or not. However, because they already have a strong online presence, a corporation that has generated and maintained favorable sentiment online will find it simpler to defend themselves.
Once your organization has matured, you will spend most of your reputation management efforts on maintenance. It’s like insurance in that you put money into it “just in case.”
You should have created an internet presence as well as guidelines for how you communicate with customers by now. You can focus on improving what you have and boosting your good presence in search and social arenas now that those critical building blocks are in place.
To do this, you’ll need to complete the following:
- Makes Sure to see whether your website is designed for google search. That means a flexible mobile site, pages that load quickly, as well as plenty of relevant, elevated material that is maintained and added to on a constant basis.
- Develop ties with websites that can help you improve your industry’s reputation. Offer to be a guest author on an industry website if you already have your social media presence up and running. Try to include your brand’s name in the title of any articles you create for another website, since this can help them rank higher in Google.
- Make SEO a priority. Tags, keywords, picture descriptions, and other elements used correctly can go a long way toward persuading search engines that your material belongs at the top. Here’s how to get started with SEO.
- Keep up the good work with your review management.
Reputation Recovery
Although a reputation crisis can strike at any time, frequently during the day, it does not have to be permanent. When a reputation crisis occurs, recovery is the component of reputation management that deals with responding to and resolving it.
When the inevitable storm arrives, if you’ve created and maintained a complete reputation program, recovery will be lot simpler. Unfortunately, most businesses do not start a reputation management effort until something goes wrong.
Even the most reputable businesses may be tarnished by a reputation problem. Even if you’re doing everything right, you’ll always have a dissatisfied customer who wants to tell everyone about it, or a rival who wants to drag you down. You’re in excellent shape if you’ve already created a strong, positive presence, but you’ll almost certainly need to conduct some damage control.
- Negative feedback. Customers make public complaints because they want their grievances to be heard. Always reply to unfavorable reviews on sites where the reviewer has the option to edit or remove their review – try to resolve the issue. Hopefully, their opinion will change.
- Poor ranks. If your search rankings aren’t high enough, or if the first page or two of results for your name contain too many bad results, you’ll need to take proactive steps to improve your position.
- Direct assaults. Bloggers and competitors may try to hurt you directly in the battle for clicks. Bloggers frequently employ the approach of writing something unpleasant to generate clicks. While you do have legal remedy in situations of libel, you’ll almost always have to either ask (politely) for the information to be withdrawn or focus on promoting enough positive stuff about yourself to drown out the negative. Unfortunately, today’s online structure favors those who exploit negative bias for selfish gain.
How can you protect your online reputation?
If a company cares about its image, which I believe every company should, media monitoring is a critical component. People use social media in the digital era to discuss a wide range of topics, and many of them include a mix of them in their postings.
When consumers gripe or wish to vent their grievances about their brand experiences, they frequently add brands. If the individual criticizing the business has a tiny following, the harm may be minimal, but it may be unpleasant when an important person or website attacks you.