Best reputation management strategies for small business

Best reputation management strategies for 2023

Brand reputation management helps you to increase the trust of your customers as well as your credibility as a business.  Improving online reputation is not only about boosting confidence, but also about growing your business. A positive brand reputation is integral for the success of your business. Achieving a good reputation depends upon the online reputation management strategies you implement in your business.

Are you asking yourself these questions? Then, jump on!

• What is the definition of brand reputation?

• Why is online business reputation important?

• What is brand reputation management?

• How to improve online reputation?

• Best online reputation management practices

• What is the definition of brand reputation?

Brand reputation is what shows how your brand/ business firm is seen by your customers and the public. It is about the trust of your target customers in you. Managing business reputation- therefore- is about influencing the way your customers think of your business.

With the sweeping impact of the internet along with the infinite possibilities it offers changed the definition of brand reputation altogether. Through social media, review sites and other forms of engagement, modes of customer interaction grew considerably.

Why online business reputation matters

What makes people trust your business? What is the key behind the growth of your brand? What is the way to create loyal customers? What decides the value of your company? The answer to all these questions is one- your business reputation.

Plus, as the market is growing day by day, you need more loyal customers to stay ahead of your competitors. With a good reputation, your business can stay on top of the competition.

Maintaining a good online reputation is what it takes to get and retain loyal customers. In other words, this is what attracts new customers and maintains the existing ones.

Brand reputation management

Knowing the importance of brand reputation is not enough. Managing brand reputation is about monitoring the brand’s reputation along with the trends and shortcomings in it to assess the best strategies to improve it. Brand reputation management practices help you to improve and maintain your business reputation.

How to improve brand reputation

Customers are too careful about the reputation of a brand today. To stay on the court, you need to meet their expectations and ultimately, improve your brand reputation.

Customers look for several factors while purchasing a product/ service. Trustworthiness, quality of the product/ service, customer reviews and buying experience are some important things they look for. Managing business reputation is about taking care of every one of these. The Internet offers a wide range of opportunities to manage brand reputation.

As we discuss here, It’s just a matter of some practices and strategies to improve the online reputation of the business.

Best online reputation management practices

Let’s dive into some reputation management tactics and best online reputation control practices that will help you to monitor your brand reputation.

Here we go:

Invest in SEO and Content marketing

Have you ever entered your brand’s name in the search query to see what the results are? The first thing anyone does while considering a purchase will be searching on a browser. As you may already know, a business website is a must. In fact, it is just the most basic criterion  today. It takes more than an optimized website to rank in search engines like Google. Research your possibilities and create an SEO strategy that will work best for your business. Plus, update your Google business listing and make sure it’s verified (read this article to learn how to create and verify Google My Business account). This will help customers while they search for local businesses online. Creating content that will help your customers is another step to make sure more people discover your brand.

Content marketing is an effective tool to reach your target audience. Create content that revolves around the problems your audience usually has. Some informative content on the subjects related to your area which can help your potential customers will do the trick. Market and design your content in a way that it doesn’t look like something entirely praising your product/ service in an attempt to sell.You’ve to give the impression that you’re not doing this just for the money but to educate your audience. It’s good to begin with simple educational content blogs, supplementing your blogs with videos can further drive home your message. With tools like VEED, you can add subtitles to videos making it more accessible. Utilizing VEED's automatic subtitle generator can save a significant amount of time, allowing you to focus on creating quality content. Additionally, the video caption generator features can emphasize key points, improving your audience's understanding and engagement.

Once your articles or any other content get noticed by your potential customers, your brand reputation will automatically increase.

Focus on Customer satisfaction and Customer experience

Well, this is the most obvious. Focus on customer satisfaction and work on your customer support team. Excellent customer services will back you up in creating top-notch customer experiences. Satisfied customers must be your primary goal. This directly impacts your brand reputation and what’s more, loyal customers can be your greatest advertisers. The secret to boost your online brand reputation management is creating long lasting relationships with customers.

Today, customers value customer experience more than your product or service. Customer experience is about effectively engaging with the customers on a regular basis. As we’ll see later in this article, personalising your interactions is the key. Directly contacting the customers with frequent and timely updates about your new features, offers or news can help greatly. Arranging subscriptions to mail, newsletter etc can work this way ( but not too much spamming of course). Tailored content for specific customers can have a great deal of impact on potential customers searching for the best options.

Staying in touch is what matters. Keep the relationships with them, maintain it even after the purchase and offer a great support system. Reach out to each of your customers personally through every platform possible. It’s also about valuable feedback. Ask them about their experiences and learn and adapt from them.

Collect and manage reviews

The first thing that attracts the attention of a customer will be your reviews and ratings. Online reviews play a great role in influencing a customer’s decision to purchase. So, it’s very important to be present on all popular review sites related to your business. To make sure that your customers are leaving reviews, you’ve to request for reviews. Otherwise, people most probably won’t care to put a review. Make the review requests timely and convenient.

Positive reviews are like trophies of achievement that you can display to increase your revenue even more. What about negative reviews? Contrary to general understanding, negative reviews influence your business for the better. They help you a lot in realising the mistakes and shortcomings on the correct time to take timely and relevant actions. By responding to them in a prompting way, they can be used as powerful weapons. More than the positive reviews you’ve got, It’s how you respond to and handle negative reviews or comments that shows your sincerity, credibility and responsibility. Check out our article to know more about responding to negative reviews.

A good online review management software can be a lot of help in sorting out the reviews and responding to them accurately. This way, you won’t lose track of them and can assign them to give each case special, individual attention. There’s more in this than just collecting online reviews. More important than that is how you make use of them, to reach your full potential. Use it in a way in which they can act as both marketing tools and seeds of improvement.

Deliver top-notch customer service

In customer service, two things matter most: time and efficiency.

It’s of utmost importance that you address customer grievances as fast as possible. The quicker you respond to the issue, and the quicker it gets solved, the better. You have to establish a customer support team for this purpose. You must give special care not to miss any of the customer queries or problems. That’s why getting a customer management software like Cloodot is the best way to strategize your customer support. It helps you in handling all the customer interactions and ease you in managing the reputation of your brand.

Customer support is not limited to the purchase. You’ve to be there for them even after purchase. How you support them even after purchase and how quickly and promptly you manage to solve the issue at hand influence your brand reputation.

Your customer service must be active and alert all the time. You must be present in  whatever channel they choose to reach out to you like Whatsapp, Facebook,Web Chat or SMS. To deal with the issue in detail, you can also schedule private calls if needed. Whatever the issue is, it’s important to focus on solving and fixing the damage. Again, your brand reputation depends upon how you address and solve the issues faced by your customers. Remember that the person who handles the issue must be an expert who clearly knows what they’re doing. A reputation management software helps you to assign conversations to most accurate people. It’ll be a great aid in categorizing high priority issues to be addressed and giving them special attention as required.

Make use of Social media

Social media is a great way to connect to a lot of people as the population using social media is rapidly growing. It can be used as a tool to reach out to more people. Networking opportunities are a lot greater with social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin. Active engagement with your customers through social media is inevitable for effective customer service. From useful and catchy content to instant messaging, you have to be interacting with them frequently. Make full use of opportunities that social media offers. In short, active social media engagement helps you to establish a strong brand reputation by personalising interactions and making it customer centric.

Publishing user generated content on social media is a great way to attract more people. Customer stories can do magic. Testimonials from real people who have used your product can tell their experience. Just like recommendations from loved ones, these stories can appeal to your potential customers very effectively. Sharing these stories publicly in an attractive manner can influence others to share like that too. When a customer says positively about your product, it will have much more value than any other form of advertisement. To put in another way, the experiences of these people, if used effectively, can be great advertisements themselves. Researches tell us that the customer stories can influence more people than any other form of advertisement or marketing. Generating these testimonials can be a great part of your marketing strategy.

Turn loyal customers into brand advocates

Loyal customers are your brand ambassadors. Your aim must be to create long-lasting relationships with customers so that they recommend your product/ service to others and talk positively to everyone around. This is all about best customer experience and maintaining the satisfaction of employees and customers. These brand advocates can be someone who just mentions you in a social media post. You have to keep track of people mentioning you in social media and instantly engage with them to make use of the opportunity. In the age of social media influencers, it’s always better to connect with people through people. The audience of an influencer may be comparatively small, but the results will be much greater. The mass psychology makes it sure that people start using whichever product recommended by their favourite influencer.

Not all customers will be ready to share their experience or recommend it to other people. If you’re asking influencers, you may have to pay for their content. Other than that, you can make use of gift cards, discounts and other incentives to motivate people. This will make them enthusiastic about referring your product/service to somebody else. Again, all of these depends upon the quality of your customer experience and interactions.

Put some effort in Employee satisfaction

It’s not only about customers always. Your employees have to be engaged in work with greater satisfaction. The employee satisfaction influences the quality of customer interactions and services and thereby directly impacts the overall reputation of your firm. Thus, it determines your income too. Satisfied employees will work for your better reputation and perform greatly in customer interactions. To develop a best brand reputation strategy, it’s crucial to have a great team, like customer support teams actively engaged in making customer service better.

Employee satisfaction programmes must be one of your key focuses in brand reputation management practices. As we said earlier, happier employees are more likely to dedicate themselves more to the growth of the company. Take regular feedback from them and work on it. When you build a convenient and comfortable atmosphere for your employees to work, your reputation will automatically improve.

Personalise customer interactions

Focus on offering one-to-one customer interactions. Collaborate with your team to make the customer experience as personalised as possible. The best way to implement this effectively is a multi agent customer experience software like Cloodot. Teaming up with Cloodot will also make your job a lot easier.

Give that humane touch and connect with your customers with more ease. Each of them must feel that they’re given special attention. Collecting their personal info can be of a huge help while creating personalised/ tailor-made experience. Personalization boosts the value and quality of your customer engagements and therefore reflects in brand reputation. Read more about personalisation in our article on customer experience.

With changing customer expectations, maintaining a positive business reputation has become the top priority for any kind of product/service. Customer-centric businesses are stealing all the spotlight. So, the key to a good brand reputation management is to switch to a customer centred approach, by focusing on customer interaction and employee satisfaction. Creating a personalised and tailor-made customer experience is also a must in order to establish such a good corporate reputation. Adopt these strategies to boost/ enhance your digital brand reputation and get going!