Brand Reputation and 3 takeaways you should know

Maintaining a good reputation has become a major challenge for brands because online reviews and social media posts can be easily accessed by consumers. One minor mistake could cause serious damage that takes years to rebuild. It is important to protect your brand’s reputation. You need to watch out for any threats and fix them before they get worse. In this guide, we will explain why brand reputation is important, how you can measure it, and how you can improve it.

What is brand reputation?

Brand reputation is the way that everyone sees your brand. This includes how consumers, stakeholders, media, and competitors see your brand. The perception of your brand can be changed by many things such as the quality and price of your products, how you treat customers, your marketing strategies, and how employees feel about the company.

Your brand reputation is what makes people trust you and want to buy your products or services. People’s loyalty toward your brand, and whether or not they advocate for you, want to work for you, or choose you over the competition is also influenced by your brand reputation.

Therefore, it is very important to keep track of and manage your reputation closely. In fact, 87% of executives in a Deloitte survey said that reputation risk was the top strategic risk for their business. Negative reputation events can have a large-scale impact on your business. According to a survey, 41% of companies lost revenue and brand value after a negative reputation event.

An example of a negative reputation event was held by Pepsi. The brand created an ad alongside Kendall Jenner and was accused of trivializing Black Lives Matter. After suffering criticism, Pepsi pulled the ad out of the air and formally apologized. 

Measuring brand reputation

It is important for businesses to understand their brand reputation. However, many businesses do not know how to improve it because they do not even know how to measure it. Keeping a close eye on your brand reputation will help you manage it more effectively.

When deciding which key brand reputation metrics to track, think about the biggest questions you want to be answered. 

This will help you figure out what is important to you when it comes to reputation monitoring. Most efforts to track reputation focus on the following key performance indicators:

• Reach is a way to measure how popular your brand is. It looks at things like how many followers you have on social media and how many people watch your videos on YouTube.
• Share of Voice (SOV) is a way of measuring how much conversation your brand is having in comparison to your competitors. This can be determined by looking at how often your brand is mentioned in relation to others.
• Sentiment means how people feel about your company.

Improving brand reputation

Your customers are the best people to tell you how to improve your brand reputation. They deal with your business directly and they can tell you what is going well, what needs improvement, and what is wrong. So listen to their social media conversations, collect feedback, and actively monitor reviews to get a better understanding of what they are thinking.

This can give you valuable insights into what issues your customers are facing, how you can improve their experiences, and what you need to keep doing. Plus, listening to them shows that you value them. This will make them have a good experience with your company and will also make your company look good.

Your employees are the next best source of information about your brand. They have a direct line of contact with your customers and can learn about the problems they are facing that might be affecting your brand’s reputation. And since they have an inside view, they can also provide insights into which processes need fixing to solve those problems.

For example, long wait times to contact customer support may be very frustrating for your customers. This might cause them to tweet about the poor customer service. However, your employees know why those long wait times happen and what could solve the issue. This might be live chat support to divert some of the phone traffic or better tools to make their job more efficient.

If you don’t keep your promises, it will be hard to keep people’s trust and your brand will suffer. This could be because you said your product or service could do something that it couldn’t or because you didn’t deliver on time, issued refunds too slowly, or didn’t follow up when you said you would.

When customers contact your business, they expect a response. Even if you don’t have the answer right away, they at least want to know that you are trying to find it for them. If you don’t respond to people who are contacting you about your service, they may get frustrated and tell other people about their bad experiences.

Bold Creators Club can help you reach your goals

Dealing with social media influencers is not always easy. Actually, most of the time, companies and influencers can’t communicate clearly, as there is a lack of a cultural, linguistic, and social bridge that connects both.

When it comes to Latin influencers, this communication barrier is even bigger. Not only because a lot of people in countries like Brazil or Colombia don’t English, but also because these countries are highly multicultural, with cities with completely different styles, slang, social and cultural movements within the country. 

In the case of Brazil, this aspect is so strong that there are even completely different cultures within the same city, in big metropolises like São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. 

It is really hard to keep up with the constant changes in the pop culture and in the internet world, so contacting an agency whose job is to always be updated about what the influencers are doing, how is the stability in the country, and more important information for your company, is the best strategy.