Corporate Reputation Management: What Business Owners Need to Know
Online reviews influence the purchase decisions of at least 93% of consumers. It’s therefore not surprising that negative reviews have an even greater impact. Ninety-four percent of consumers refuse to buy products or services from these businesses.
These are concerning statistics that can adversely affect your bottom line. Your business should have a comprehensive public relations strategy. But is this enough? You might be wondering what more you can do to protect your company’s online reputation.
Thankfully, there’s a lot you can do. It starts with implementing a corporate reputation management strategy. This should be a part of your overall business strategy. It will allow you to have more control over your reputation. Read on to find out where you can start.
What Is Corporate Reputation Management?
Corporate reputation management involves the implementation of several strategies. These positively influence consumers’ perceptions of your brand. It often focuses on public relations efforts. A corporate reputation management strategy is important when building your brands image, and having a good strategy can create a positive view of your company, products, and services. These can include the distribution of press releases as well as media relations. Some other important elements of reputation management include:
Reputation Marketing
This tries to create a positive perception of your company and your brand. What is reputation management? It focuses on turning potential customers into buyers. It promotes the positive qualities of your products and services. This, by extension, improves your brand identity.
Employer Reputation Management
A company’s employees have a great impact on the reputation of a business. It starts with attracting and retaining the right talent for your business. Then, it continues with ensuring you provide a positive working environment. It should be conducive to growth and development. This goes a long way to make your employees your greatest brand advocates.
Customer Experience Marketing
These are marketing efforts your company can use to improve your customers’ experience. It includes their interaction with your company, products, and services. If your customers enjoy your product or service, they’ll recommend it to others. This creates brand loyalty and long-lasting customer relationships which result in increased revenue.
Local Search Engine Optimization
Local search engine optimization (SEO) uses several methods. These improve your company’s local online presence. It will improve your company’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). It also creates more online exposure for your business. This can attract new customers and increase sales.
Community Management
This involves controlling your company’s narrative on social media. It provides an opportunity to create a positive, engaging customer experience. It involves open communication about your products and services. What’s more: it also allows customers to relate to the experiences they’ve had with your brand
The Importance of Corporate Reputation Management
A corporate reputation management strategy is important when building your brand’s image. It helps create a positive view of your company, products, and services. Some other benefits of managing your company’s reputation are:
- Customers start to trust your brand
- They’ll share their positive experiences with others
- It helps to create and maintain a good image for your company
- It improves sales leading to greater profits
- You’ll have better SERP rankings
- It allows you to immediately address misleading information or rumors
It’s easy to focus on developing and promoting your products and services. However, bad reviews or attacks on your company’s reputation will make these efforts insignificant. An effective reputation management strategy can help you avoid this. It’s important enough to consider hiring reputation managers as part of your team. If this isn’t feasible, hire a reputation management agency. You can also consider a company that provides reputation management services. There are many benefits to engaging in reputation management services.
Nowadays, corporate reputation management is centered around monitoring and protecting your brand’s online reputation in online reviews, social media accounts, and Google.
If you have questions about how to improve and maintain a positive corporate reputation for your company, Internet Reputation can help. Click here to get a FREE online consultation today!
Ways You Can Manage Your Company’s Reputation
Whether you use internal or external resources, you should have an idea of what the strategy entails. This will ensure you know it’s being developed and implemented effectively.
Review Customer Feedback
This includes all stakeholders that impact your business – customers, employees, and local communities. It’s not enough to just compile the data. Managing corporate reputation implies listening to the audience and monitoring customer feedback.
You must truly listen to what these groups are saying about your company. Looking at online reviews and conducting surveys can help you to improve each customer’s experience.
Improve Customer Experience
This is the reason for listening to customer feedback. Once you know how your customers feel, and you have a good idea of their pain points, you can work on improving their experience. Always aim to exceed expectations. This will result in satisfied customers that will leave positive online reviews, post on social media, and tell others about your products and services.
In digital marketing, if you want to understand your audience and seek real opinions, companies invest in qualitative measures and start questioning or performing focus groups and lots of other strategies to measure people’s opinions and find out their reasons to buy or not buy the products and/or services. A good corporate reputation can also help with investor relations and the financial performance of the business.
Focus on Building Your Brand Internally
Remember your employees are your greatest brand advocates. But you first have to hire the right candidates and find ways to retain them. This includes competitive remuneration packages, training and development, health and wellness, and other incentives.
Senior executives and company leaders can encourage employees with a work culture that is aligned with their positive reputation and brand image. By doing so, it will attract the top talent and improve the market value of the company and set a precedent for future behavior in the office.
Click here to learn more about the importance of reputation management for a CEO.
Serve Your Communities
Corporate social responsibility is an important part of showing you’re an organization that cares. Charity events, campaigns, and other initiatives show that you care about more than just the bottom line. Community outreach also helps to build trust.
Prepare for the Worst
Being proactive is the best way to deal with a crisis. This ensures that if a crisis does occur you:
- Have measures in place to mitigate it
- Resolve customer issues quickly especially critical ones
- Have a strategy in place to deal with negative reviews
- Build relationships with the media
- Have your legal and PR experts review any external communication before dissemination
Having these in place can make a huge difference. It can assist if you find yourself dealing with a disgruntled former employee’s social media rants or a negative review due to a bad experience.
The best way to prevent a negative reputation strategy is to start managing your reputation strategy before it turns south. Corporate reputation can be effective by so many factors. Especially as society becomes more progressive and there is an increase in social responsibility, managing corporate reputation becomes even more important for business leaders.
Building a Reputation That Lasts
Today’s businesses have to consider digital trends and advancements in every aspect of their business. Corporate reputation management is no exception.
Social media and other online platforms make news instantaneous and far-reaching. When it comes to your business, ensure this news is always positive. You may not have full control, but you can definitely put measures in place to effectively manage your company’s reputation.
Effective corporate reputation management is much more than media relations and press release distribution. It fuses search engine optimization, social media management, brand management, reputation marketing, content creation, and public relations into a single service.
More questions about corporate reputation, or what can be done to make sure your company a positive reputation?
InternetReputation.com can help you with this.
Our reputation management services include executive monitoring, content control, suppression, and more. Let us help you maintain the reputation you worked hard to build. Get a FREE online consultation today!
