How does your brand look in other people’s eyes?
If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, you’re already off to a good start when it comes to brand online reputation management. This topic is concerned with ensuring that anyone who encounters your brand online has a positive impression of it.
We’ll explore how that works, as well as why you should worry about reputation management, shortly. First, though, it’s time for a quick definition.
Put simply, online reputation management for your brand is all about working out what people think of your brand, then implementing strategies to shape and direct that perception. It’s usually focused on ensuring that people have a positive impression of your brand.
Brand reputation management helps you create the exact image of your brand that you want to create, ensuring that customers see you the way you’d like to be seen.
Now, you may be wondering how you can get inside customers’ heads and change the way they think of you. We can assure you that it’s a simple yet highly effective process.
Here’s how it works.
A major component of brand online reputation management is SEO (search engine optimisation). This is the process of overhauling your web pages to help them rank more highly in relevant keyword searches.
In the context of ORM, this means promoting pages that create a positive impression of your brand.
For example, you might ensure that an article about your brand’s great achievements ranks highly enough that it’s the first thing people see when they type your brand’s name into Google. This creates a link in customers’ minds between your brand and its achievements.
Any company that deals with customers is likely to have to deal with negativity in some way, at some point. You might encounter a negative reviewer who’s determined to make your brand look bad, or a journalist who’s dedicated to giving you a virtual thumbs-down in the form of disparaging articles.
What you don’t want is for people to have their perceptions of your brand shaped by that negativity.
That’s why ORM focuses on promoting the positives – as well as outshining or burying the negatives. If a customer sees all your fantastic achievements before they ever start seeing negative reviews, they’ll be influenced to associate your brand with its positives
Branding is all about giving an identity to an inanimate entity. Your brand’s personality may be playful, for example, but your company itself still has to operate within the serious context of the modern business world.
Brand ORM lets you focus on promoting and shaping your brand’s identity. You can do this by, for example, posting on social media using the branded tone of voice and replying to customer reviews in your brand’s signature playful way.
That way, your customers see the brand identity whenever the brand name appears, which shapes a powerful image of your brand in their minds.
Next, we’ll tell you what makes online brand reputation management services so useful in terms of marketing and branding.
According to research done in 2018, nearly 60% of consumers in the US avoid spending money on brands that they consider untrustworthy.
This clearly tells us that the majority of customers care about the perception they have of your brand. It also signals to business-savvy companies that they can turn that statistic around and draw in customers by making sure that their company is perceived as trustworthy.
In other words, brand reputation management helps attract new customers.
There are plenty of factors you can’t control when it comes to running a business and building up a brand. You can’t make customers click ‘purchase’ even with the best marketing tactics; you can’t force your competitors to cede their businesses to you; and the list goes on.
What you can control is your brand’s online reputation.
With brand online reputation management, you can ensure that you’re always in charge of how your brand is perceived online. This allows you to make tactical decisions regarding how you’d like to grow and evolve your brand, which means you always get to have a say in what your customers think of you.
No brand comes into existence in its final form. To achieve true brand excellence, you’ve got to be prepared to grow and change for the better through the years.
Fortunately, online brand reputation management helps with this.
As you’re determining which reviews, posts, and other types of content to promote, you’ll encounter valuable feedback that tells you where you can evolve. For example, you might find customers repeatedly bringing up unresponsive customer support teams. This then tells you that you’ve got to work on improving that area in order to grow your brand.
Whether you need large or small business SEO services, Digital Glory is here for you.
We’re an SEO and ORM agency that knows everything there is to know about creating a robust and reliable brand reputation online. Whether you’re an established company looking to improve customers’ impressions or a brand-new startup with no existing reputation, we can help you get the best results every time.
Our comprehensive approach to ORM includes auditing, research, link building, and SEO strategising.
We’re always ready to help you shape and enhance your brand’s online reputation. Simply give us a call on +44 (0)20 3918 4735 or write to us at contact@digital-glory.co.uk and we can work with you to perfect your brand online reputation management strategy.