Brand Reputation Management

Brand reputation management is a process of continuously monitoring and working on the perception of a brand in the public's eye.

Today, a comprehensive brand reputation management strategy is paramount as word of any unfortunate event involving your business can spread globally in a matter of hours, potentially dealing long-lasting damage to your hard work.

How to do brand reputation management

There are multiple areas to focus on in order to construct a working brand reputation management strategy. Here are some basic building blocks you can leverage:

  • Keep track on your social presence — to be able to act on potential reputation risks, you first need to be aware of as many conversations that happen around your brand as possible. Using a social listening tool like Awario for this task both expedites the process and helps eliminate any blind spots from relying on direct mentions alone;
  • Monitoring popular review platforms — the advent of the Web exacerbated public distrust of business promotions, which is why a lot of consumers look for reviews on products they're interested in from fellow consumers. While these are harder to monitor, the insights genuine user reviews provide are too valuable to ignore;
  • Respond to feedback — taking care to properly address a review or a complaint in a response is the action you should take as much as possible. Careful, humane response can help mitigate any negative aspect to the feedback you got as well as help earn some credibility and trust. While it takes time and effort, addressing the feedback and accepting any wrongdoing is the best course of action.

Brand reputation management best practices

Successful management of your brand's reputation means having a firm grip on your brand's messaging, imagery, and processes, as well knowing as what to do should you find yourself in a bad spot. Here're some tips to help you stay in control:

  • Have a crisis mitigation plan at the ready — while it's not feasible to account for every eventuality, some crisis situations are more likely to happen to your business than others. As such, outlining a response plan for these potential issues beforehand will allow you to respond quicker, reducing the risk of more severe reputation damage over time. At the very least, you can prepare a mitigation strategy for botched product launches or updates, unexpected service outages, individual employee errors, or even some force majeure situations;
  • Reputation management is not a one-man job — every facet of your business carries some influence over the public perception of your brand, so don't forget to account for the impact other members of your team might have and plan your strategy accordingly. Consistent brand visuals and messaging are as important to your reputation as addressing user feedback;
  • Use social listening tools — monitoring the social media talk around your brand by hand is too time-consuming and tedious a task. Social listening tools can help ease the burden by tracking untagged posts or articles where your name is featured.

3 tools for brand reputation management

Implementing and maintaining a successful brand reputation management strategy is no easy task. As a brand, you need to be able to quickly discover the conversations happening around you so you can react accordingly. Luckily, there are quite a few tools out that can assist with many aspects of reputation management. Here are our 3 picks:

  • Awario — being a social listening tool, Awario allows you to easily find any mentions of your brand on multiple social media platforms and the Web at large, especially untagged ones. It features an automatic sentiment analysis feature to help you break the stream of mentions down to being positive, negative, or neutral. Awario is helping you make the crucial first steps into brand reputation management world by letting you know of what is being said out there.
  • SEO SpyGlass — there are many edges to reputation management, and SEO is one of them. If your backlink profile, Google rankings, and website are impeccable, it is a huge boost to your reputation. This tool's job is to monitor your backlinks and ensure nothing suspicious gets associated with your website, helping you preserve your rankings. Beyond that, it also analyzes the authority for each of your backlinks and measures their Penalty Risk, helping your website avoid any search engine penalties, thereby making it easier to find for any potential consumer;
  • ReviewTrackers — a platform to help you tackle more than 85 review websites, such as Google Maps, TripAdvisor, or Facebook reviews. It will also present you with some insights on potential pain points based on what consumers mention most often in their reviews. Additionally, it allows you to skip checking the app on the constant with its email digest system and has a 30-day free trial;