In the age of technology, building a positive reputation for your brand begins online and is imperative to your success. Your brand image is highly dependent on its social presence and your online reviews. It’s all about how the consumer sees your business. This is highly influential on whether the consumer decides to purchase your product or service.

So, monitoring and managing your online reputation is vital in sending out a positive image and creating trust between the consumer and your business. To do this, you need a reputation management plan which takes strategic action in protecting your brand’s online reputation in reviews, social media, and Google. Fortunately, this can be done in just four easy steps. Keep reading to find out how you can implement the reputation management plan!

The Reputation Management Plan

      1. Research, Research, Research

The first place to go to start your reputation management plan is by doing research on your own business. This is as simple as a quick Google search. After searching up your business, you’ll find relevant hits where you can read all about what the talk is about your brand. You can read reviews and find out what people are saying, what they love, hate, and everything in between. This type of feedback holds the key to understanding how consumers see your brand. It also has the key to adjusting your processes to improve your reputation if a complaint is discovered. Besides Google, you can consult other search engines, your business social media page and review sites. In 2021, if your consumer has an opinion, you can be assured that they have expressed it somewhere. 

      2. Take Action on the Feedback

Once you have finished with your research, you’ll have a clear understanding of what your brand’s image is and what areas of your business can use some improvement. For example, if you read reviews complaining about the packaging of your product, you would need to revise the packaging to fix the issues that your consumers are having. This is an effective method in improving your customer’s experience and keeping them coming back as you are giving your customers what they are asking for. The negative feedback should be viewed as an opportunity to locate the weak points of your business that need your attention. Taking action on the reviews and feedback will manage your reputation and ensure that you are constantly upholding a positive imagine.

      3. Create a Management Strategy

When creating your management strategy, you should ensure that it addresses the following questions:

• Who will be monitoring the online conversation? Typically, you should aim to have a designated person in your business in charge of researching and monitoring the chatter around your business. Customer service or marketing employees would be best suited for this task as they need to have experience with handling customers.
• Which feedback and reviews need to receive your full attention? Sadly, some trolls will attempt to tarnish your business’s reputation for no legitimate reason. Most of the reviews that you receive are based on consumers real experiences with your business. Customers who leave positive reviews often get excited to hear back from you and become bigger fans of your brand. Negative reviews should also be addressed as the customer wants to hear that you care about their opinions and are ready to resolve their issue. Oh, and your prospective customers are judging you on all of this too!
• What tone do you want your business to adopt and project? You need consistency in your tone of voice when you respond to comments. When replying, developing a standard tone is optimal as customers will spot the difference if you respond harshly to criticism and positively to praise. To protect your reputation, a standard tone will help you avoid situations where a customer can be offended by your response as well as build a personality to your prospect who is reading the reviews.

      4. Consistent Implementation of the Plan

It is important to remember that this process is continuous. You must aim to be consistent with the management of the plan to ensure continued results. After discovering one issue, you must remember that another one could pop up at any time.
To stay ahead of the game, you need to continuously research and monitor the talk around your business to get ahead of any conversation that can hurt your business’s reputation. Following the steps of your plan can ensure that your brand’s reputation is managed effectively. 

Having a positive reputation has a significant impact on your customer loyalty and organic sales growth. Conversely, a negative reputation can be disastrous for customer retention and new business acquisition, but through rebranding and adjustments, your business can be turned around. So follow the four easy steps mentioned above to create a strong brand image in 2021!

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