Success is builton a great brand reputation. How consumers perceive your business is directly correlated to their desire to become your customers. Therefore, donāt make the mistake of underestimating brand reputation.
A good brand reputation will help you gain customersā trust, give you competitive superiority, and turn you into a long-term player. It will be your cost-free advertisement for the quality service that you offer. If you want to improve your brand reputation and transform your business into a strong and reliable brand, here are some strategies that can help you achieve that.
1. Establish Your Identity
People are drawn to strong personalities. For people to know your brandās name, you need to give them something to associate it with. Your brand identity is the bedrock on which reputation rests.
The identity is comprised of your voice, style, messaging, design, product packaging, and every element that is associated with your business.
To reinforce your reputation you need to be consistent with your brand image. Show off your identity on your website, social media accounts, customer service, etc.
Take Dollar Shave Club, a company that sells personal grooming products, as an example. Theyāve grown their reputation as a unique, quirky, and humor-driven brand. They identified themselves as such and the reputation grew quickly. You can notice their unique sense of humor everywhere from their website content over product descriptions to social media posts.
The key part of growing your reputation is creating an identity that your target audience will resonate with. The Dollar Shave Club is the perfect example for it as they employ raw humor and a direct approach that is favored by men, their target audience.
2. Analyzing Your Performance and Collect Feedback
Analyzing your current reputation status and collecting customer feedback can help you improve your reputation strategy. Pinpoint what works and what doesnāt and tailor your campaigns and methods accordingly.
If you think that monitoring is a given, just consider that 75% of small business sites donāt use analytics toolsĀ to track performance. Although there are free analytics tools like Google Analytics, there are still businesses that fail to put them to use.
Analyzing your current strategies can also help you spot your reputation inconsistencies. Igniyte, a business reputation management company, shared their case study for Mercedes-Benz and explained how their first order of business was to gather and analyze the data of retailersā online presence. Valuable insight derived from analysis is the key to making data-driven decisions for improving your reputation.
3. Keep Your Promises
With every promise you successfully deliver, your reputation will get stronger. Therefore, make promises only when you know that you can keep them.
Donāt oversell yourself as the truth will come out sooner or later. You can dazzle the audience with exaggeration but once they realize the truth, nothing can erase the feeling of being deceived.
If you promised high-quality educational posts, go here to access free essay samples that can inspire you and give you useful information. Remember that if you promise quality, you must deliver quality throughout ā from products to blog content.
Before you make a promise, discuss with your team whether it is possible to deliver it. Make sure that every promise is a sure thing. You must live up to customersā expectations.
4. Provide Great Customer Service
Excel in customer service and the word of your awesomeness will spread. Customer service is pivotal for building a great brand reputation. It can help you establish a connection with your audience and show how much you care.
What’s more, amazing customer service can help you avoid the unpleasantness of public brand shaming. Even if you have a dissatisfied customer, good customer service can prevent them from sharing negative comments online.
Do you want to ensure excellent customer service? Then, take the following into account:
- Make it easy for customers to get in touch with you
- Respond promptly to customersā inquiries
- Provide clear website navigation to contact information
- Create e-mail autoresponders
- Employ people with great communication skills
- Give customers a favorable solution
- Gift dissatisfied customers with a discount or free product
5. Give Your Customers a Voice
People trust each other more than they trust the brand. Thatās why you should turn your customers into faithful reputation-building helpers.
Give your local customers a place to express themselves. Encourage them to retell their experience about your brand and share their impressions.
Some of the ways in which you can give your customers a voice are:
- Offer a referral program
- Repost happy customersā posts about your brand
- Create a testimonials page on your website
- Integrate user-generated Instagram posts on your webpage
- Create a video that features your customers
- Use customer content in your marketing campaign
Methods such can help you build a reputation of a customer-centric brand.
6. Promptly Respond to Reviews
Online reviews have great power over businesses’ sales. They can practically make or break your business.
According to a study of hotel reviews on TripAdvisor when hotels respond to reviews they receive 12% more reviews and their ratings increase by an average of 0.12 stars (on a 1-to-5 scale).Ā Considering that TripAdvisor rounds up ratings, this can have a significant effect on the hotelās rating.
While you canāt control what kind of reviews people leave, you can control how you respond to them. Timely responding to review can help you establish yourself as a caring brand that values the opinion of every customer.
When a customer leaves a negative review, apologize and direct them to contact you via email, direct message, or phone. Keep your discussions away from the public eye.
Respond to positive reviews as well to show how important the customersā satisfaction is to you. Thank them for their kind words and encourage them to spread the good word.
Wrapping Up
The first step towards building a good brand reputation is to create a powerful strategy. The above-mentioned tips can direct you towards the right actions that can help you in this journey. Remember that reputation can’t be built overnight, so we’ll leave you with one last tip ā arm yourself with patience and consistency if you want to achieve your goal.
