What is Reputation Marketing and How Can You Protect Your Brand Online?

Before you start trying to standardise your brand or invest in marketing efforts to increase your brand recognition, take the time to learn about reputation marketing. After all, there’s no value in building a brand if you don’t know how to protect it from potential threats. We’ll explain what reputation marketing is, the threats to your brand’s reputation, and how you can protect your brand online.

What Is Reputation Marketing?

Reputation marketing is when marketing efforts enhance your brand’s reputation. Reputation marketing can amplify the reach of marketing content, such as when an influencer shares one of your pieces of content. Reputation marketing includes positive reviews and testimonials. Note that reputation marketing may not have any impact on your search engine optimisation.

The Relationship between Online Reputation Management and Reputation Marketing

The term online reputation management, or ORM, may be used interchangeably with reputation marketing, but there are differences. For example, your online reputation is damaged by negative reviews, but you’re not seeking negative reviews like this. Your brand suffers when scammers set up fake websites that look like yours and steal people’s credit card numbers, but that has nothing to do with your marketing efforts.

However, this explains why your reputation management strategy must include monitoring for fraudulent use of your brand, counterfeit products, and fake websites luring your customers. One solution to this is to use online brand protection services for businesses. Anti-phishing services can ensure that your customers’ information isn’t lost to ‘man in the middle’ attacks, indirectly hurting your reputation.

What Can You Do to Protect Your Brand’s Reputation?

One way to achieve this is to deal with negative customer feedback as soon as possible, seeking to resolve the problem before they post an online rant that goes viral. Monitor social media, reviews, comments on your websites and complaints received by customer service so you can resolve problems when they materialise.

Give your clients multiple channels for reaching customer support and tech support so they don’t have to post angry comments on your corporate social media profile. Do send out surveys to gather customer opinions, but recognise that not everyone who is upset will respond to a survey and it won’t matter if you don’t act on the negative survey results. You might need to create content to answer questions they have or send out a press release on a problem that’s come to light.

Monitor social media for fake accounts pretending to be your company and shut them down. At the same time, you should consolidate your brand image so that all of your online profiles have the same colour scheme, branding, and SEO. Then there is less opportunity for others to pretend to be you. This has the side benefit of creating a consistent image that builds trust.

The best way to enhance your reputation is to meet and exceed customer expectations. Train customer support staff to treat everyone with respect and give them the tools to resolve customer issues immediately.

Companies spend a lot of time trying to brand their business and market their services. This effort must include reputation marketing and online reputation management unless you want negative online comments overshadowing your digital marketing efforts.

Category: Online Marketing Topics