A solid and positive brand reputation serves your business in a multitude of ways. Reputation management depends on having a well-structured reputation strategy.
Contents
Why Does Reputation Matter?
What is the Primary Goal of Reputation Management
What is a Reputation Management Strategy?
How To Develop a Reputation Management Strategy
What Are the Three Phases of Reputation Management?
How To Implement a Reputation Management Strategy
Why Does Reputation Matter?
Money isn't the only thing that talks. A poor brand reputation can result in public negative reviews, comments from dissatisfied customers on social media, reduced interest from investors, limited options for making good hires, and more.
It's important to consider your reputation as an integral piece of your business strategy:
Quantifying why brands need to maintain a positive perception
According to the Global Risks 2012 study by the World Economic Forum (WEF), on average more than 25% of a company’s market value is directly attributable to the way it is perceived.
In its Global Survey on Reputation Risk, Deloitte noted: "Eighty-seven percent of the executives we surveyed rate reputation risk as ‘more important’ or ‘much more important’, and 88% say they are explicitly focusing on reputation risk as a key business challenge."
In its World PR Report 2020, the International Communications Consultancy Organization, a public relations body, found that the good name of a business is consistently ranked by corporate leaders as their most valuable asset.
What is the Primary Goal of Reputation Management?
An organization’s public standing is the sum of everything it says and does: the products or services it provides, how these perform, the customer experience offered, and the public face of its employees and upper management.
Companies are increasingly being held accountable for their actions by a growing cohort of Gen Z and millennials who hold a massive amount of purchase power.
The goal of reputation management is to keep on top of potential issues, prevent and mitigate crises, and to proactively implement programs or brand initiatives that will increase brand equity, and strengthen your brand with longevity in mind.
What is a Reputation Management Strategy?
A reputation management strategy is the how behind your plan to shape and maintain your brand image. Your strategy could include things like brand building exercises, PR campaigns, crisis management frameworks, or marketing initiatives.
Reputation management strategy is not the easiest concept to think about in a proactive way. You likely are more familiar with the idea of "damage control" in times of brand crisis when it comes to reputation strategy.
But having brand reputation management strategies in place that also look ahead and have an eye toward ways to fortify brand perception, as opposed to being purely reactive, are the ones that will yield the most powerful results for your business.
How to Develop a Reputation Management Strategy
Reputation permeates your entire company, but because it is so often tied to decisions made by leadership, it should be set at the C-suite level and involve the likes of the marketing director, public relations director, CEO, and others.
Tip: Have a plan for getting executive buy-in for reputation monitoring tools like social listening, which area great way to scale online reputation management strategies.
What to include in your reputation management policy
Here are some suggested items that a standard reputation management strategy should cover in order to be effective:
Allocation of external or in-house resources
Decide whether the business will hire an external reputation management company or only use internal resources. This decision may be based on budget or human resources considerations.
Monitoring scope: offline and online
Decide the extent of your monitoring and social listening and consider using a social media listening tool or a media monitoring software. Prioritize what parameters and audiences matter most. Different teams may choose to monitor different groups or keywords depending on specific needs.
Be clear as to how the organization should respond
Make sure all departments have a clear understanding for who is responsible for responding when brand reputation issues or crises arise. The newest hire on the social media team may be suitable when it’s a bad product review, but if it’s a bubbling media frenzy involving harsh criticism online, the responsible person should be a senior director or executive who understands the vision and voice of the brand.
Set tight timelines for responses too. In the digital age, the court of public opinion does not keep office hours or respect the chief marketing officer’s long-weekend getaway.
Learn more about crisis response: Crisis Management Guide, Ultimate Guide to Crisis Comms, Mastering Media Relations for Crisis Comms, Measuring the Impact of a Crisis on Your Brand
Now that you have set the high-level reputation management parameters and obtained buy-in from the organization’s most senior people, it’s time to drill down to day-to-day actions.
How to Implement a Reputation Management Strategy
Monitoring the life of your brand image online on a regular cadence will keep you abreast of any potential issues and give you a strong sense of how your brand is holding up against competitors. Track various metrics such as SERP placement, content marketing performance, and brand mentions in reviews on podcasts, or social media sites.
Here are 5 key elements to implementing a successful online reputation strategy:
1. Manage your SERPs
When people want to know something about your brand or its products, they will commonly look you up on a search engine such as Google. So the last thing you need is the first thing they see to be bad reviews of a product that was discontinued years ago, social media rants by disgruntled customers, negative Glassdoor reviews, or a decades-old news story about a lawsuit brought agains a former CEO.
If these are the kind of results showing up, part of an online reputation management strategy is looking at the low-hanging fruit first: Add a company response to negative reviews or posts and offer assistance. Make it clear that you care. In the case of negative press, this might feed into a robust PR strategy aiming to get bylines for your leadership talking about new products, ESG initiatives, impressive technological advances or other pieces of thought leadership.
Once these movements are in place, you can dial it back and take a look at your content marketing strategy which will help you get on Page 1 of the SERP with SEO-optimized content.
Also read: tips for a better B2B content marketing strategy
2. Invest in high-quality content marketing
Let's talk a little more about why content marketing is so integral to your reputation management strategy.
Readable, useful, credible information never goes out of fashion. When you prioritize quality over quantity and craft engaging content that answers real questions, your SERPs will start to improve. A good place to start if you're feeling stuck is to simply look at what your competitors are writing about. Look for any gaps in knowledge that you can help fill in your articles.
Good quality content that you produce in-house is something you can control. It allows you to shape your own narrative rather than depending on potential customers getting their information from review sites or social media.
But always remember that, as with any form of marketing, digital marketing requires that you remain true to your corporate image and brand voice.
What type of content should you focus on?
This is totally up to you! Create blogs, eBooks, infographics, videos for social media, quizzes and polls. Invest in white papers. Publish in-depth, credible, and well-researched industry reports that will benefit the industry and be of interest to other stakeholders, including the media. Done correctly, this type of content will help to position your organization as the industry leader and spokesperson.
3. Develop your online profiles and presence
Is the organization’s website attractive, modern, and populated with up-to-date content? Is the latest annual report there? Are the executive team’s profiles current? Does the ‘latest’ blog post date back several years or just a couple days?
Does the company have a presence on all the major social media platforms? If not, do some consumer research first to understand where your audience spends the most time. Once you have this information, start setting up your business profiles. Social platforms are useful places to provide news and updates about the business, share content pieces, and for offering information about your products and services. Remember to make the best content shareable as this amplifies your online presence and brand voice.
Look at: the best B2B Instagram profiles, the best time to post on social media, guide to creating a Facebook business profile, and download our free Social Media Marketing Toolkit
4. Be diligent with your response strategy
Your reputation management policy has determined the scope of your monitoring and social listening. Now ensure that you’re taking the appropriate actions and responding where needed, in accordance with the policy.
Are people complaining about confusing instructions for how to use a product? Perhaps you could tap your engineering team to update a help article and then take to social media saying you've heard the complaints and addressed the concerns. These kinds of actions can go a long way toward moving a three-star product review rating up to five.
Is there a negative report in the media about an alleged environmental breach at the company’s factory that requires an urgent response form the CEO? Make sure the response is vetted by legal and any other important departments before it gets posted. If the CEO doesn't have a strong social presence, determine if you should use another executives profile, or if just a press release will do.
Perhaps you have a situation developing on a community Facebook group, where a customer is claiming the company is refusing to honor its warranty. Ensure the social media team issues an immediate holding statement and then get the relevant marketing executive to follow up with a phone call or email to the client as soon as possible.
Also, be aware that a response strategy isn’t limited to mitigating negative reviews and responding to unfolding crises. Where someone has something good to say about the brand online, thank them and ask if you can share it to the organization’s social media platforms and website.
5. Treat all reputation management activities as market research
A reputation management strategy is not only about polishing the brand image and mitigating negativity. It’s also a highly effective market research tool!
Analyzing all of your interactions and comments, whether positive or negative, gives you valuable insight into how your organization is perceived in the marketplace — and how your products and services are actually performing. Give that feedback to relevant departments such as marketing, sales, and product development so they can continue to make improvements.
The world is unpredictable and consumer behavior is rapidly evolving. So, corporate reputation management needs to move along with it. Issues that were irrelevant to a good brand image a few years ago are now center stage. Technological advances make monitoring and responding to conversations far easier, so it's crucial that businesses take advantage of this.
Meltwater offers a comprehensive suite that can help you master your brand management. If you want to learn more about the Meltwater solutions that help you master your brand reputation, simply fill out the following form and we will be in touch.
