Proven Best Practices for Online Brand Reputation Management

A positive brand reputation increases customer loyalty and helps position you as a trustworthy brand in the industry. Thanks to today's ruthlessly competitive world, brand reputation has become more important than ever before. When a brand’s reputation shifts from average to excellent, the company gains a 3.2x increase in customer trust.

But, with all companies in your industry striving to build and maintain brand reputation, how do you stand out? You need to follow strategic best practices for online brand reputation management.

Best Practices for Online Brand Reputation Management

First things first! Reputation management is a continuous process. To stay on the top of your online brand reputation, you've to keep putting effort into this.

So, create your own unique brand reputation management strategy using the following best practices.

Develop Your Clear Strategy

Planning always helps, no matter what. The same goes true for your brand's online reputation. Create a strategy that focuses on all the platforms and channels you want and should access. Start with popular social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

Then, branch out to niche-specific platforms; for example, if you run an online travel agency, choose Tripadvisor, Pinterest, and alike. In this way, you’ll find multiple ways to reach out to your customers.

As the next step, you've to create and share relevant and unique content while keeping your brand personality in mind. Finally, reply to all reviews, customer queries, and any mention of your brand.

Finally, initiate conversations, collect customer feedback, and understand how customers perceive your brand. Accordingly, you can take the necessary steps to improve and strengthen your online brand reputation.

Audit Your Website

This is one of the best practices for online brand reputation management. Before putting your brand reputation strategy in place, it’s essential to conduct your website’s audit concerning online reputation management.

Does your website reflect your brand personality? Does your website present you as a reliable and trustworthy business?

You’ve to answer these questions. Plus, you want to avoid confusing your target audience. So, follow these ways to be sure that your website's content, design, and functionality are up to the mark:

• A consistent tone of voice: All pages on your site should have a consistent manner. So, you can create a style guide to ensure this. In addition, your customers should perceive your writing accurately every time they read your content.
• Consistent formatting: It gives your site an instantly recognisable identity and contributes to your online brand reputation. So, be careful when placing ad banners, images, pop-ups, etc., because they can change the visual design of your website.
• Use Keywords: This not only helps your SEO but also makes your web pages relevant and discoverable to potential customers.
• Start a Blog: People love information, especially when it's unique, valuable, and accessible. So, start a business newsroom or blog to educate your potential audience. As a bonus, your blog will also help drive traffic to your website.

In these ways, you will add consistency and authenticity to your brand. This further helps build customers' trust and confidence, which are key to online brand reputation management.

Monitor Your Brand Mentions

Tracking brand mentions provides comprehension of how and where your existing customers and prospects interact with your brand. So, it provides an excellent opportunity to improve your business reputation online.

You get feedback that shows how people perceive your brand. Sometimes, you receive critiques that should not be entertained and add no value to your business. No matter what, you’ve to track your brand mentions to tackle all positive and negative talks about your brand.

By using Backlink.Watch reputation management tool, you can easily track your brand mentions. The platform provides real-time email notifications every time someone mentions your brand on the internet.

By using its brand tracker, you can get valuable insights on:

• Who is talking about your brand?
• Where are they talking?
• What are they saying?
• How do they feel about your brand?

Your brand tracker dashboard shows the number of brand mentions, social media reach, brand engagement rate, tone of conversations, and influencers talking about your brand.

You can add a filter and select what you want to check. Then, it will show you the link that you can open or do follow-up tasks. For example, you can contact someone who says something negative about your brand. And, you can offer a discount or send incentives to those who are saying positive things about your brand.

Using Backlink.Watch brand mention tracker, you can immediately find out the tone of the conversations you are mentioned in simply by looking at the 'mood.' This is called 'sentiment.' So, follow this as one of the best practices for online brand reputation management.

Here, it’s worth mentioning key metrics for all your brand mentions:

• Sentiment: Quickly understand whether the tone of review or comment on your brand is negative or positive.
• Strength: Understand the importance of a mention based on the domain's influence and the number of total shares.
• Passion and Reach: Measure your brand voice and figure out the reach of every brand mention. You judge this by its number of engagements, like retweets, shares, comments, etc.
• Domain Influence: Understand the authoritativeness of the domain that mentioned your brand.

Engage Your Audience on Social Media

Staying on top of every single feedback can be tricky, even if you're using the best tool. This is especially true of social media, where things often get chaotic.

But the best part is that you can easily get engaged with people on social media. So, it provides an instant and real chance to address any issue quickly. This directly impacts your brand reputation.

By using Backlink.Watch Social Mention tool, you can easily track and measure what people say about your brand. The tool aggregates content from across the web into useful information in place. You can use this tool to:

• Figure out who is talking about your brand.
• Gain valuable customer insights
• Monitor your brand & social presence 24/7
• Respond to social media mentions instantly and protect your brand reputation.
• Find out the right influencers and create proven marketing strategies accordingly.

Take Quick Actions on Comments, Feedback, and Reviews

As mentioned above, understanding your customers' perception of your brand is the key to strengthening your online brand reputation. You can achieve this by tracking people’s comments, feedback, and reviews on your brand.

Their pain points and criticisms direct you to weak points or loopholes in your business or services. These are the areas that often need your attention and improvement. On the other hand, positive comments give you more confidence in what you’re doing right.

People want their actions or comments (negative or positive) to be responded to. When their feedback, reviews, or comments go unanswered, this may hurt your brand's reputation.

But how do you quickly find out which comments are negative and which are positive? This is when Backlink.Watch sentiment analysis comes into the picture.

By performing sentiment analysis, you can quickly sort positive mentions from negative ones. Accordingly, you can better plan a customer or client communication strategy for your company.

Once you’ve figured out the sentiment, don’t wait for answering comments on your brands, especially the negative ones. Answer all complaints with a genuine desire to resolve the issue at hand.

Moreover, it's always a great idea to thank unhappy customers for being willing to discuss the issue with you. This shows that your brand cares for them and wants to take action to fix their issues. As a result, your efforts enhance your online brand's reputation.

Create Influencer Marketing Strategies

Influencer marketing is one of the most proven methods of increasing brand reputation. Partnering with them allows you to focus on a small number of individuals who regularly interact with a larger target audience. Just make sure you find the right influencers and connect with them.

But how do you find the right influencer for your brand? Reach out to those who mention your brand. By using Backlink.Watch, you can easily and quickly discover the top influencers that mentioned your brand.

You can sort them by using various filters available to you.

Next, here’s how top influencers can help build your brand reputation:

• Good influencers have an established voice. They use a clear and concise way to connect with their audience. So, if they mention your brand positively, you’re more likely to win new customers and more trust in your brand.
• Influencers are frequently requested to write on popular online news and blogs. So, if they recommend your services or products on these sites, this can give your brand a boost and help improve your reputation online.
• With influencer marketing, you can target a small, specific audience. Please note that you still need strategies to get your business ahead of more and more audiences. Top influencers attract dedicated followers, giving you a chance to present your brand to these targeted audiences that will share it with others in their circle.

Start with Your Online Brand Reputation Management Now!

Make online brand reputation management easier with Backlink.Watch. Create your free trial account now and start navigating through all your brand mentions, provide fixes, and provoke positive sentiment online.