Brand reputation is one of the most essential aspects of running a business. Your company’s entire sales, revenue, and growth depend upon the reputation of your brand. A customer only buys from a reputable company, and an employee also likes to work only in a reputable company.
Therefore, you have to work to build the reputation of your company. There are various elements and factors in a company, and you can create your brand reputation only by following certain serious steps.
In this article, we have mentioned the 8 effective ways to build your brand’s reputation. Without any delay, let’s dive in !!
What is Brand Reputation?
Brand reputation refers to your brand’s perception held by your customers, employees, stakeholders, and competitors. It represents how much these people trust your brand and find it credible. The reputation of a brand is crafted based on direct and indirect experiences given by your brand to the customers.
The reputation is highly influenced by the company’s product/service quality, marketing, public relations, and customer support. A reputable brand has high credibility, trustworthiness, and desire for power amongst the employees. Thus, it creates a positive outlook for your brand and increases your overall sales and profit. Moreover, a good reputation also allows a brand to launch more new products and services in the market.
Why Is Your Brand Reputation Important?
Brand reputation highly impacts the success, profitability, and advocacy of a brand. And it is not difficult to maintain a good brand reputation. You just have to focus on your company’s fundamentals. When your brand has a considerable reputation in the market, more customers trust your brand and even refer to it further. Thus, it directly brings more sales for your business.
To maintain your trustworthiness among the customers, you need to maintain various aspects related to your brand. It includes product or service quality, pricing, on-time delivery, and an easy refund policy. If you properly maintain these elements, your brand reputation will reach its next stage and let you have many loyal customers. However, you have to make sure that you provide a better experience every time they purchase your business.
Moreover, a good brand reputation will also help you have word-of-mouth. It is one of the most powerful organic marketing methods that allows you to acquire new clients, increase sales, and enhance your brand image. You should also understand one thing. People prefer to buy products or services only from a reputed brand, as no one likes to buy from a negative reputation brand.
The Benefits of Brand Reputation
Here are various legit benefits of having a brand reputation:
1. Brand Advocacy
Brand reputation leads you to have better brand advocacy that makes the customers refer your brand to their friends and family. In simple words, when customers are satisfied with your brand and its services, they refer your products and services to others. According to Forbes, 84% of buyers make the initial buying decision with a referral. However, people do not buy from any brand with a negative brand reputation in the market despite knowing about their product quality and other services.
2. Stabilizes Your Employee Growth
The reputation of a brand completely depends upon the company’s core fundamental brand values and operations. Thus, a brand has to craft its core functioning in a way that makes the brand seem much better. In this function, you better the working environment for the potential employees. Here, you have to generate more opportunities for them and allow them to make meaningful contributions to your company.
3. Improved Customer Loyalty
When a brand earns a reputation in the market, it gets more customer loyalty. Simply put, customers who have great experience with your brand or trust your brand like to shop multiple times from your brand until they find anything more wrong. Therefore, you retain many of the customers and generate more profit than usual. You should invest money in building your brand reputation.
4. Better Customer Trust and Credibility
Brands that have good reputations in the market. They generally have higher trust and credibility factors amongst the customers. Trust and credibility is the key factor in a business. It influences various essential factors of a company, including a number of purchases, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy. Both these factors also help a company retain in times of crisis.
5. Higher Sales
Brand reputation directly leads your brand to generate higher sales and profit margins. All the factors directly or indirectly influenced by the reputation of your brand lead to eventually increased sales for your company. Moreover, your brand can also charge premium rates for your products and services once you get a considerable reputation in the market.
6. Gives You Competitive Advantage
As your brand gets more reputation in the market, you capture higher market share and value. It helps your brand to compete in this dynamic business world. Moreover, your brand becomes even more desirable to investors, stakeholders, customers, clients, and potential employees. Hence, it increases the overall value of your brand and allows it to compete against the heavy sharks.
How To Build and Manage Brand Reputation In 8 Steps?
Step 1: Build Your Brand Identity
Before directly jumping to focus on building your brand reputation, you should define a clear and cohesive brand identity. You should clarify what your brand stands for and in which direction you need to grow it. Therefore, you first need to showcase your brand identity in every touchpoint of your brand, including logo, packaging, web copy, and social media posts. Furthermore, you should also properly clarify your brand voice, vision, and mission.
Step 2: Utilize SEO To Establish a Strong Online Presence
This is the 21st century, and every person searches for a company over Google before blindly trusting it. You would have also done it often. Therefore, you have to build a strong online presence and fill the Google SERPs with positive content regarding your brand using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In simple words, customers won’t directly trust your own website, and you also have to fill your relevant websites with positive content, as it will shape your brand’s reputation in their conscious and subconscious. This is not rocket science, as it is elementary with the help of modern SEO.
Step 3: Be Specific and Authoritative
Nowadays, there are multiple options available on the internet for any product and service with the help of social media and digital marketing services. Therefore, you should craft your brand around specific products or services. It will make you even more authoritative in the industry and allow you to lead that particular domain. Your customers will generate more faith in your products and services. You can even enhance your brand reputation by indulging certain USPs in your products/services.
Step 4: Listen To Customer Reviews and Feedback
After using your brand’s products and services, a certain group of people leaves certain reviews and feedback regarding their experience. You can find these reviews and feedback over your business mentions, including Google My Business, Yelp, or any social media handle. These reviews and feedback can be one of the most useful weapons for your brand if you can utilize them properly. In simple words, you are running your entire business based on the estimated customer preferences. Here, customers are directly telling you what they want and what not. Thus, you should undoubtedly listen to your audience and make the required improvements. Any company that listens to its audience generally establishes a better future for themselves. Make sure to read the reviews carefully, and don’t think that 3-4 people aren’t your audience, so have patience.
Step 5: Craft Personalized Customer Experience
Personalized experience is one of the most important elements in today’s low-span world. You should make your brand elements more relevant and personalized to your audience. To personalize your efforts, you should send name-based mail, relevant material, and more. You can use the CRM database to create personalized marketing efforts. From the data, you can opt for the customer’s purchase details, specific problems, tried solutions, and previous customer support experience. This information is enough to craft a personalized experience to manage your customers.
Step 6: Also Focus On Real-World Reputation
The online market is a very big place that can make you forget about the real world. There are so many brands that have an exclusive online presence, but they forget to maintain their reputation in the online world. However, the real world has more importance that makes you get more customers and promote your business through organic reach. No matter how good a reputation your business has in the online world, people majorly make their decisions based on real-world experiences and references.
Step 7: Build An Exceptional Company Culture
A company should not be respected by its customers but first by its employees. If your employees are not happy with your company culture, then you will never attain a market reputation. Most of the employees generally respect the company’s healthy and growing environment. The best way to improve your company culture is to implement transparency, trust, and an easy communication medium within your company hierarchy. You should also have a proper medium to listen and resolve the employees’ issues.
Step 8: Don’t Neglect Corporate Social Responsibility Activities
Social responsibility activities generally uplift the company’s status in the country. Therefore, you should properly work with certain NGOs and other governmental organizations to create positive impressions in the minds of customers and society.
Real-Life Example of Bad Hits To Brand Reputation
Example #1: Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson was one of the most iconic products in the market that used to be known for its baby products, especially Johnson’s Baby Powder. The majority of customers used to have blind trust in the company as far as the baby products were concerned. But, their talc was contaminated by the asbestos that causes cancer to thousands of babies. When the company got approximately 6,500 lawsuits, they badly lost their years of reputation.
Example #2: McDonalds
McDonalds is one of the biggest and fastest food chains ever. But in 2004, Morgan Spurlock directed a documentary about McDonald’s. In the video documentary, he ate only McDonald’s meals for an entire month and always agreed to supersize his meals after their staff offered them. It has badly affected their health, making them gain over 25 pounds and surpass their body mass and cholesterol levels. When this documentary was released, it badly impacted the overall image of McDonald’s and started their downfall for a certain period, which they recovered after very hard tries.
Wrap Up
These are the 8 effective steps to build your brand reputation in the online and offline market. If you follow these steps accurately, you will have a craft reputation for your brand. There are tons of benefits to having the reputation of a brand. We hope this article helps you create a reputation for your brand.