Brand Reputation Management: 10 Strategies to Avoid Damage
Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:44 am
What is brand reputation?
Brand reputation is the widely held public opinion about your brand. What exactly do people think and write about your brand and product?
In a perfect world, your reputation is based on your overseas chinese in worldwide data past behavior or actions, but sometimes one misstep can turn the world against you. (Or worse, false rumors can spread and poison an otherwise impeccable public reputation.)
What people think of you as a person may or may not matter to you, but when it comes to your brand, your reputation is everything.
Nearly 75% of shoppers rely on word of mouth to inform them about their purchases.
92% of business-to-business decision makers rely on trusted reviews when making purchases.
Even a 5% improvement in reputation can lead to a 2.5% increase in revenue.
Your brand reputation is influenced by many different factors, such as:
The quality and relevance of your products or services.
How you interact with customers or potential customers.
The brand values you promote (through words or actions).
How do you deal with a crisis or a mistake?
The behavior of your employees or partners.
The operating conditions of your office or production facility.
Content for your social media accounts, advertising campaigns or creative products.
In essence, every point of contact with the public, online or offline, is an opportunity for judgment.
The good news? You don’t have to sit back and accept public opinion. You can be an active participant in developing and protecting your brand.
10 Best Brand Reputation Management Strategies
1. Increase your brand awareness
Brand awareness is a concept that touches on many different key performance indicators, from traffic to share of voice on social media.
Develop your brand aesthetic and voice, follow social media best practices, and strive to be your best self as your audience grows.
2. Maintain consistency in your brand
A strong reputation is built on consistency. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with your content (wow them with a live stream, why wouldn’t you?), but rather, your audience should be able to count on you to deliver great content, products, and services without fail.
3. Create social guidelines and a crisis management plan
Preventing social media confusion starts with developing your own guidelines to follow during a crisis.
Developing a crisis management plan ensures that your brand has a set of guidelines for how to handle a worst-case scenario. Thinking ahead about how to respond to a troll or PR nightmare will help your brand appear as level-headed as possible if trouble starts to brew.
4. Contribute to your community
A better reputation isn’t just about carefully managing your tone and image — it’s about offering genuine value to your community and cultivating connections. You can increase brand awareness by making a specific contribution to your community, such as sponsoring events, offering corporate donations, or encouraging employee participation in charitable activities.
5. Approach partnerships with caution
Partnering with other brands, influencers, and ambassadors can be a fantastic opportunity to get creative and get your brand out there. But teaming up with anyone means you could be on the receiving end of any of their mistakes.
It’s always a good idea to do a little research before partnering with another organization or person. Do their past roles align with your values? Have they been the subject of any controversies or drama that might put your company on the defensive?
Just because someone has a lot of followers doesn't mean they're a good ambassador for your brand.
6. Practice social listening
You'll want to know if someone is giving you a full-blown critique or signing off on your praise. Use quick search to find trending hashtags, brands, and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper to get personalized insights about your brand.
7. Be responsive
The fastest way to a bad reputation? Bad customer service.
8. Create a social protection program
One great way to get people talking about you is to… ask them to talk about you. Social Security rewards people who sing your praises on the web. They could be your employees, your customers, or your super fans.
9. Share user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is original, brand-specific content created by customers and published on social media or other channels. UGC acts as a signal of trust, taking your brand's authenticity to the next level.
This has a huge impact on how your brand is perceived in the marketplace. People see that others like your shirts and start to believe that you are doing something special. Simply put: use peer pressure to your advantage!
10. Maintain brand safety
Brand safety means ensuring that a company's advertising is not associated with inappropriate content that could damage the brand's reputation.
This includes developing policies and measures to protect the brand from appearing alongside content that may be offensive, controversial, illegal or unethical.
Brand safety is most often discussed in the context of paid advertising. This is because social media advertising can be a major investment, but it can also pose serious risks.
Brand reputation is the widely held public opinion about your brand. What exactly do people think and write about your brand and product?
In a perfect world, your reputation is based on your overseas chinese in worldwide data past behavior or actions, but sometimes one misstep can turn the world against you. (Or worse, false rumors can spread and poison an otherwise impeccable public reputation.)
What people think of you as a person may or may not matter to you, but when it comes to your brand, your reputation is everything.
Nearly 75% of shoppers rely on word of mouth to inform them about their purchases.
92% of business-to-business decision makers rely on trusted reviews when making purchases.
Even a 5% improvement in reputation can lead to a 2.5% increase in revenue.
Your brand reputation is influenced by many different factors, such as:
The quality and relevance of your products or services.
How you interact with customers or potential customers.
The brand values you promote (through words or actions).
How do you deal with a crisis or a mistake?
The behavior of your employees or partners.
The operating conditions of your office or production facility.
Content for your social media accounts, advertising campaigns or creative products.
In essence, every point of contact with the public, online or offline, is an opportunity for judgment.
The good news? You don’t have to sit back and accept public opinion. You can be an active participant in developing and protecting your brand.
10 Best Brand Reputation Management Strategies
1. Increase your brand awareness
Brand awareness is a concept that touches on many different key performance indicators, from traffic to share of voice on social media.
Develop your brand aesthetic and voice, follow social media best practices, and strive to be your best self as your audience grows.
2. Maintain consistency in your brand
A strong reputation is built on consistency. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with your content (wow them with a live stream, why wouldn’t you?), but rather, your audience should be able to count on you to deliver great content, products, and services without fail.
3. Create social guidelines and a crisis management plan
Preventing social media confusion starts with developing your own guidelines to follow during a crisis.
Developing a crisis management plan ensures that your brand has a set of guidelines for how to handle a worst-case scenario. Thinking ahead about how to respond to a troll or PR nightmare will help your brand appear as level-headed as possible if trouble starts to brew.
4. Contribute to your community
A better reputation isn’t just about carefully managing your tone and image — it’s about offering genuine value to your community and cultivating connections. You can increase brand awareness by making a specific contribution to your community, such as sponsoring events, offering corporate donations, or encouraging employee participation in charitable activities.
5. Approach partnerships with caution
Partnering with other brands, influencers, and ambassadors can be a fantastic opportunity to get creative and get your brand out there. But teaming up with anyone means you could be on the receiving end of any of their mistakes.
It’s always a good idea to do a little research before partnering with another organization or person. Do their past roles align with your values? Have they been the subject of any controversies or drama that might put your company on the defensive?
Just because someone has a lot of followers doesn't mean they're a good ambassador for your brand.
6. Practice social listening
You'll want to know if someone is giving you a full-blown critique or signing off on your praise. Use quick search to find trending hashtags, brands, and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper to get personalized insights about your brand.
7. Be responsive
The fastest way to a bad reputation? Bad customer service.
8. Create a social protection program
One great way to get people talking about you is to… ask them to talk about you. Social Security rewards people who sing your praises on the web. They could be your employees, your customers, or your super fans.
9. Share user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is original, brand-specific content created by customers and published on social media or other channels. UGC acts as a signal of trust, taking your brand's authenticity to the next level.
This has a huge impact on how your brand is perceived in the marketplace. People see that others like your shirts and start to believe that you are doing something special. Simply put: use peer pressure to your advantage!
10. Maintain brand safety
Brand safety means ensuring that a company's advertising is not associated with inappropriate content that could damage the brand's reputation.
This includes developing policies and measures to protect the brand from appearing alongside content that may be offensive, controversial, illegal or unethical.
Brand safety is most often discussed in the context of paid advertising. This is because social media advertising can be a major investment, but it can also pose serious risks.