Essential Brand Reputation Management Tips for Startups

Ever felt like you’re shouting into the void, wondering if anyone even *hears* your brand’s message? It’s a common frustration. Many leaders are secretly concerned they’re perceived poorly but maybe are afraid to admit it or talk about brand reputation management.

Think of brand reputation management as crafting the story people tell about your company when you’re *not* in the room. It is more than responding to negative reviews. It is shaping a perception that attracts loyal fans and creates a positive brand reputation.

Table Of Contents:

• What Exactly is Brand Reputation Management?
  • Why You Should Prioritize How Your Brand is Perceived
• Key Elements for Shaping Public Opinion
  • The Importance of Tracking Public Perception
  • The Right Way to Respond
  • Crisis Brand Reputation Management
• Building Positive Connections with Customers
  • SEO to Help Spread Your Brand Message
  • Showcasing Customers’ Own Voices: How Word of Mouth Influences Others
• Ways to Gauge Online Sentiment
• Conclusion

What Exactly is Brand Reputation Management?

Brand reputation management is about monitoring what people say about your brand, both online and off. You must respond to customer complaints, letting potential and current customers know you understand them. A brand reputation management strategy helps with growth and building a community that connects to your vision.

Think about brands like Apple or Tesla. These brands didn’t build customer loyalty by only chasing sales. They connected through experiences, great customer service, and an inspiring purpose, influencing public perception of a brand by proactively addressing potential concerns, as shared on a post titled, “Master the 3 Pillars of Brand Reputation Management” by Sprout Social.

Why You Should Prioritize How Your Brand is Perceived

It is simple. A positive reputation often boosts revenue. A study has shown a whopping 90% of consumers consider it essential that the companies they support align with them on relevant societal concerns.

Building customer trust helps a brand with long-term value, which many say is “priceless”. Forbes published “A Guide To Online Reputation Management For Brands.” They wrote about how proactively engaging can greatly help companies gain positive reviews.

Brand trust is crucial for long-term growth. By building a good reputation, your customers will trust your brand more. They will become loyal customers, especially when a company is aligned with them on societal causes.

Key Elements for Shaping Public Opinion

Many areas in the business contribute to brand sentiment, which is key to keeping things positive. From the support team to leadership, it should involve every business unit, like customer service. It might even mean that reputation management isn’t just the task of a single person, but that of every customer-facing employee.

These business areas work together by providing customer feedback, reporting any concerns or trends. This needs to include customer concerns and the perception in the current landscape. Having teams like support and marketing aligned makes things more seamless.

The Importance of Tracking Public Perception

Social listening helps identify potential issues *before* they spread. It gives context about who, where, and what needs to be done. It can provide real-time insights into the conversations happening around your brand.

Using these services to understand social mentions means identifying potential trends as they happen. With technology improving every day, social listening tools will improve and offer features like sentiment analysis.

Checking review sites regularly needs to become common practice. Keeping up-to-date and actively checking social profiles must become second nature.

The Right Way to Respond

Acknowledge problems and address customer criticism. Focus on making things right when people complain, especially on public platforms.

An effective brand reputation management process lets you do things with intention instead of being caught off guard. Thinking through messaging templates for common things is a wise approach. However, making things too canned and not caring might come off robotic.

The personal, human approach will go far to building brand connection with potential customers and customers. This is especially critical with addressing negative customer complaints, where empathy will help the most.

This should make you ask what does reputation management mean for business operations. This also will make companies question what the cost of having crisis reputation management will be.

Crisis Brand Reputation Management

Think of reputation management in advance. Many don’t have plans for how to handle something bad happening, like product issues, platform outages, or unexpected global events. This type of thinking will give brands direction about how to act *before* the need arises.

Here is how companies can manage negative reviews and still come across authentic:

• Show empathy for any of their frustration or the perceived issue that might have happened.
• Be active with providing a potential path, reassurance, or possible resolution.
• Have continued open dialogue so there is a solution found or one worked on until solved.

Every business eventually makes some mistakes or unpopular decisions. If reputation is high, they might navigate through with very few things noticed. For businesses that are on unstable ground and not tracking conversations, those are big blows.

It could easily take down companies who are not connecting on a more personal level with current customers. Those companies are also likely not focused on brand management.

Building Positive Connections with Customers

It isn’t all crisis aversion. Customers love to be heard, so they should be asked regularly for their honest feedback. Soliciting customer feedback is essential to learn what can be improved upon.

Authenticity goes far these days. Even having a business rating between a 4-4.7 is ideal.

Why is this you ask? Having all positive “5 star” reviews will potentially make customers suspect something isn’t legitimate. Some things, though rare, just are not 100% every time.

SEO to Help Spread Your Brand Message

Around 68% of online experiences typically originate from a search engine. Being very intentional with how you manage your online perception will help. It’s important for local businesses to have a focus on this as much as big companies do.

Things like creating fresh and very targeted content. It must be answering people’s problems and needs to increase rankings. Here are other factors:

• Be accurate on business info on websites, profiles, posts or anywhere it is published.
• Build high-quality link backs (do-follow and high authority preferred).
• Create unique, detailed products pages with search term included and search relevant (not only commerce) search term and also variations to not do things in a robotic way.

Many businesses struggle to get brand awareness where they want, which an intentional brand reputation management strategy would help with that. If you need help knowing where your brand reputation stands right now. Using all of the tactics explained here should do it.

Showcasing Customers’ Own Voices: How Word of Mouth Influences Others

It’s shown 69% of customers trust recommendations from their favorite social media influencers. It’s obvious why aligning with authentic voices through partnerships can create a strong connection. Brand awareness increases significantly. Shopify Collabs will find creators, help promote, bring on more customers and sales to help scale your company.

User-generated content is great also, such as an employee experience, or customers using something cool in real life. Those feel like true perspectives and more credible than a generic customer testimonial.

Ways to Gauge Online Sentiment

Having hard data, like reviewing the metrics of your brand reputation and understanding how to track brand awareness will keep you on the path.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measurement that asks, how much would you recommend us to family or friends, if you don’t mind sharing it here?
  • High levels would be scored a 9-10 and “promoter”.
  • Middle, like 7-8 are “passive” ratings.
  • On the lower side, scoring 1-6 is very concerning as its a “detractor” in this model.
• Tracking things like repeat customer rates and orders can provide clues. Are you getting a lot of feedback for refunds?
• Understanding social reach helps. You may need social media management and media management assistance for this.

If you have never heard of any of this information above before, then you are likely flying a bit too blind with perception management. You most likely need a reputation management tool and more active data. A small business likely needs online reputation management services in the same way.

Some owners or founders might not see or admit the importance of understanding data, even more reason to care. They should learn about industry standards and what’s expected by customers.

Conclusion

When there are a few critics, taking accountability is really smart to do, even on seemingly very small things. When companies make mistakes and aren’t forthcoming, this creates issues to have customers stay with the company if they want or feel valued enough. Customers put high value on a brand’s narrative being authentic.

Brand reputation management has to do with constantly building relationships with those that already bought from you. Those customer relationships will benefit a business for a really long time. By gaining the customers’ opinions, you can make sure your company meets customer satisfaction metrics and increase the lifetime value of customers by turning them into repeat buyers.

It becomes your competitive edge. Building a comprehensive brand strategy can help minimize reputational damage in the long run.