If you have a positive brand image at your disposal, it will ultimately benefit your online business. The brand image will impact a user’s decision to buy a product. Doing this will also have an impact on the brand’s reputation. Nowadays, your online reputation is firmly based on the social media profiles and review sites that you administer. For example, a website owner may have to go through millions of reviews before they start trusting an online business.
As the brand image impacts the user’s decision to buy a product, you need to monitor your reputation management online. However, it feels like a time-consuming task, especially when you have so many things on the table to administer. Fortunately, there are numerous strategies and platforms to consider to protect your brand in 2021.
Introduction
Brand reputation management is the procedure of visualizing how the consumers regard your online business and taking critical action when required to improve your brand image. Nowadays, the management plans of your brand are associated with the monitoring and protection of your brand in online reviews, social media, and search engines (such as Google). This is a continuous process as it enables your brand to stay on top in terms of customer feedback and being responsive to catastrophic situations.
Features of a Management Plan
1. Happens Online
It is not your domain to control what a person feels about your online business. However, what you can do is control what they see, which impacts your brand equity. Nowadays, you may know that most of the communication takes place online. We talk to our friends, hold business meetings, resolve complaints and see the daily news and trends. Ever since the pandemic came to the surface, the scope of online conversations has increased even further. In fact, students have found a way to study online via Zoom calls. Therefore, it is pretty obvious that business reputation management also occurs online.
The management plan takes place online because it resembles the online conversations that usually happen in our daily lives. Basically, it has followed the trend of online conversations that we have seen in the last 18 months or more. However, there is also why you don’t see a person focusing on changing minds individually in the digital world. Instead, the people tend to focus on the arbiters of reputation, such as YouTube, Google, and Yelp.
2. Affects Sale and Marketing
Online reputation management is a practice associated with online sales and marketing. The reason is that what people interpret about the brand resembles everything about the brand’s influence. If customers don’t believe in your brand, it won’t be surprising that they will disband from your online business, and you will be unable to sell your product.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Hence, the most important thing for protecting your brand is an effective management strategy. By doing that, you can ensure that the authentic messages have the maximum effect on your online business. Once you start building your online reputation, your conversion rate will show the results. Strikingly believes in building a solid website for the protection of your brand. Here in Strikingly, it doesn’t take much effort as it is inexpensive, has many features, and is easy to use. Once you get yourself registered on Strikingly, you can look at all the features and tools required to shape your landing page and promote your brand.
Best Strategies for a Management Plan
1. Research and Audit
The most important aspect of brand reputation management is customer research. In this phase, you can visualize online conversations surrounding your business and what people think about you. As a high-quality businessman, you must consider all different types of conversations. The more feedbacks you administer, the better idea you will have regarding your business’ reputation.
You will be able to conduct an audit from these customer feedbacks on the review sites, on social media accounts, or simply by typing your business name or Google or other respectable search engines. Moreover, you can do business-related keyword research or look into your competitors’ feeds to better understand. Consumers usually talk online, so all you need to do is schedule the best time to meet them.
2. Management Strategy
Once you fully understand the brand management strategies for protecting your brand, you can find out the areas you need to address for improvement. For an effective business reputation management plan, it is always important to never stop improving and refusing to remain stagnant. For example, if people argue about your brand being out of touch, you would want to implement the practices that will improve your customers’ user experience.
Image taken from Facebook
The most crucial thing in a management strategy is online conversations. You must appoint an appropriate person who monitors these conversations. People who are already on board with the customer-facing teams must be reliable and equipped to tackle the customer demands. Most importantly, they must have a strong mentality to cope with the negative comments. If people do not think positively about your brand, it is easy to ignore them and refuse to listen to them. However, the best marketing planners always tend to take the strongest criticism on their chin and improve wherever possible.
3. Take Action Based on Feedback
When you choose to take actions based on customer feedback, it is important to choose the kind of feedback you want to take action on. For example, there can be a few online accounts that will just be there to make fun of you i.e. trolling or a few accounts that would be abusive or have a strong opinion about your brand. However, you must be strong to ignore them and look at the ones that must be replied to.
Image taken from YouTube
To have strong reputation management online, it is important not to ignore your customer’s comments. You must look into the fact that what customers expect from your brand and how your brand can improve or rejuvenate its own business. If your brand receives criticism, take it on the chin and look at the areas that seek improvement. If your brand receives plaudits, it will only indicate that your management strategy is going in the right direction.
4. Practice Steps
As we have mentioned earlier, effective online reputation management is a consequence of teamwork. Although it may feel incredible, it doesn’t mean that you will no longer experience any roller-coasters in your management plan going forward. Make sure that you look into the best branding tactics to have an idea of where your brand’s reputation stands. For example, going through the online conversations about your brand will make you understand the areas you need to improve. Hence, you can create a plan, follow its steps and fulfill the public demands.
Influence of Strikingly
Strikingly seems to be the perfect website builder when it comes to protecting your brand. Apart from making a brand image from your platform, you can also look at the other brand images created by the Strikingly users. Therefore, you can maintain consistency in your business reputation management by doing competitor analysis. Through your brand image, you can interact with your customers. This feature is applicable on both desktop and mobile versions.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Apart from that, Strikingly also enables you to protect your brand via an improved search engine optimization (SEO) performance. As inconsistent information can harm your local SEO, Strikingly allows you to fix any inconsistencies found within your business information. Moreover, this website builder also enables you to manage social media accounts and respond to authentic customer reviews, giving the impression that you have a complete understanding of your brand. Only an authentic brand image will result in your customers trusting your online business.
Conclusion
If you want to understand brand reputation management, you must understand the importance of a customer. They are the biggest asset of your online business, and you need to take them seriously by responding to them in a timely and appropriate manner. The protection of brands hasn’t gained this much importance before, and it completely coincides with customer trust. Technology has enabled us to get in touch with customers quickly. At the same time, it allows the brand to resolve customer issues quickly.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you want to associate yourself with a website builder for the building and protection of your brand, Strikingly ticks all the boxes. You can take advantage of our amazing features to create a unique personality for your website. All you need to do is go through the collection of our beautiful templates and customize them as per your will. So, get down to business, build your brand image and ensure that people trust your online business.
