What makes a brand reputable? How can marketers improve the reputation of their brands online? And what common mistakes should they avoid in the process? These simple but striking questions will be the main concerns of our brand reputation guide.
The subject of brand reputation is not an isolated matter; it’s connected to everything in society, from widespread cultural beliefs to shocking worldwide outages. It’s an unpredictable and chaotic affair, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be improved, managed, and controlled.
If you want to master brand recognition like a king, you’ve come to the right place! Below, we will tell you everything you need to know to develop a strong brand reputation strategy, stay ahead of the competition, and leverage social listening tools.
KeyMentions, for example, is a professional brand monitoring tool for Reddit, one of the world’s most popular websites. It lets you set instant Reddit alerts based on keywords and take action in real time according to up-to-date, data-driven metrics.
What is Brand Reputation?
As the name implies, brand reputation refers to the collective perception of a brand’s worth. Coca-Cola, for instance, is simultaneously perceived as a delicious and trustworthy beverage and as a food product that can harm one’s health.
For that reason, Coca-Cola’s reputation, albeit terrific, includes both the good and bad characteristics that general consumers have learned to associate with the brand. Other popular examples include Nike and Adidas, known for their quality sportswear products but also for their unfortunate decades-long association with forced labor.
In sum, the reputation of a brand is a bit like the reputation of a person. Sometimes, brands are unfairly treated, other times they’re misunderstood, and, on other occasions, they survive based solely on their excellent reputation.
Brand reputation is key in modern society because it drives sales and customer engagement. This concept has become even more important in the 21st century due to the rise of e-commerce, in which people don’t always have the chance to test a product or service before buying it.
How To Build Brand Reputation Like a King (9 Best Tips)
- Learn more about your brand’s current reputation
- Set well-defined brand values
- Be consistent with your branding
- Invest in organic promotion
- Establish your brand as an authority
- Collaborate, but do it right!
- Improve your website’s SEO
- Build a community with email marketing and Reddit
- Treat your customers right
1. Learn More About Your Brand’s Current Reputation
All brands have a current reputation, even the brands that have just been created. If no one knows your new arts and crafts online shop yet, for example, then that means your brand’s current reputation is null.
But how can marketers and business owners make a valid and fact-based diagnostic of their brand’s current reputation when they already have some clients, online engagement, and a growing sales portfolio? Well, that’s when brand monitoring comes into play!
With KeyMentions, you can get a pretty good idea of your brand’s current reputation by analyzing brand mentions that appear in new Reddit threads and posts. You can use your findings to have a clearer idea of your brand’s overall reputation and make better-informed business decisions in the future.
For example: If your brand keeps getting mentioned as innovative on Reddit, then you know you should promote your brand’s innovativeness as a way to engage new customers. If, on the other hand, people keep complaining about your website’s loading speed, then you know it’s time to start improving your webpage.
2. Set Well-Defined Brand Values
Once upon a time, brands only needed to have services and products that worked as advertised to be successful. But nowadays, brands are also expected to have good values and promote societal causes (especially among Gen Z customers).
People make friends based on what they believe, so why should brands be treated any differently? If a customer values sustainability and green initiatives above all else, then it’s just natural that he or she will try to buy mostly from sustainable, green brands.
Values can revolutionize a brand’s reputation (and subsequent success) for the better and the worse. Dove’s iconic self-esteem project, for instance, was responsible not only for driving the brand’s sales but also for improving overall society by promoting body positivity.
On the other side of the spectrum, brand reputation can get seriously harmed (or get done for good) when people feel like their values are being attacked. Wells Fargo, for example, is still trying to win its customers’ trust back following their unfortunate fake account scandal.
So, in sum, it’s crucial to define your brand’s values clearly before engaging in any sort of marketing campaign. Whether you’re going green, supporting animal organizations, or helping charities, the crucial aspect is to let your customers know what your brand believes in—and stick to it religiously!
3. Be Consistent With Your Branding
Branding is how a brand presents itself. Just like people get to choose a style of clothes to match their personality, so do brands can choose certain fonts, colors, design styles, promotional tones, and templates to match their perceived and/or desired reputation.
Making branding decisions is seldom easy, and there are tons of important things to consider in the process. From a brand’s reputation standpoint, however, nothing is more crucial than ensuring your brand is consistent.
We associate red with Coca-Cola and blue with Facebook not just by accident, but because of their branding consistency. When your brand’s branding is cohesive, people recognize your products and services instantly. When it’s not, dispersion and confusion can easily drive potential customers away.
4. Invest in Organic Promotion
In online marketing, organic traffic refers to the number of people reaching your brand’s web pages from unpaid sources. Investing in organic promotion is better than paying for ads because it’s virtually free, but it takes a lot more imagination and hard work.
Let’s look, purely for illustrative reasons, at organic vs. paid Reddit marketing. Paying for ads on Reddit costs money, but it’s as easy as setting a target audience and making it rain. In simple terms, it’s about taking ad money and converting it into traffic and, hopefully, sales. You can learn more about it in our comprehensive guide for selling on Reddit.
Organic Reddit marketing, on the other hand, is a time-consuming task that requires identifying viral relevant posts, making convinceable, “non-promotional” posts and comments, and being as creative as possible to attract traffic to a given landing page.
Thanks to tools such as KeyMentions, marketers and business owners can make better decisions regarding their organic Reddit marketing efforts by focusing only on threads that hit a minimum amount of upvotes and comments (i.e., threads that matter).
Investing in organic promotion, however, doesn’t mean you need to snub ad marketing, as the two make for a powerful combination. We recommend that you do whatever it takes to build your brand reputation online, including using KeyMentions and other tools for delivering organic campaigns that actually work.
5. Establish Your Brand as an Authority
Did you know that the word authority derives from the Latin word for author (auctor)? That makes a lot of sense even today, especially considering that authoring quality content is probably the best method for increasing your brand’s authority online.
Imagine that you’re running a business of shampoos for men with alopecia; how do you establish your brand as an authority in its field? The key is to create valuable educational content relating to the needs of your target audience! In this case, men struggling with hair loss…
Such valuable content can include anything from comprehensive blog articles on all topics related to hair loss, instructional videos showing how your product can help balding men, and interviews with medical experts in the field of alopecia.
It’s simple: If people are reading about hair loss on your well-written blog, then there’s a greater chance they will buy your shampoo. If not, they should at least recognize that they value your brand as a reputable source for hair loss information, which is almost as great.
6. Collaborate, But Do It Right!
There’s a big reason you see the American-Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds on TV ads more frequently than the controversial American actor/director Mel Gibson: The first has a stellar reputation, and the latter doesn’t.
Collaborating with other brands, artists, influencers, and anything in between is a great method for building a brand’s reputation. However, not all collaborations are fruitful, and some can be downright damaging.
The secret to great collaborations is thus to identify the right collaboration opportunities. Consider the following:
- Is there a valid connection between my brand and the collaborator?
- Is the collaborator well-liked by my target audience?
- Has the collaborator ever done anything that could damage my brand’s reputation?
- Will the collaborator do anything that can damage my brand’s reputation in the future?
The questions listed above are useful guidelines for making decisions regarding collaborative campaigns, but they’re far from being the only ones.
7. Improve Your Website’s SEO
SEO means Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the art of making sure your website appears as soon as possible on search engine result pages. If people search “dog food” on Google and your online pet store shows up on the first page, then you’re doing things right!
SEO can make or break e-business sales, and it can do the same for a brand’s reputation. Whether we like it or not, Google (the favorite search engine of 92% of the Internet) doesn’t just list brands at random; it also organizes them according to their reputation.
When people want to buy shoes online, they will be more comfortable using a popular website that appears on the front page of Google than a little-known website that pops up on SERP 12, right? Well, this means that Google doesn’t just list brands by reputation; it also influences their reputations by listing them higher or lower.
Naming all the little things you can do to improve your website’s SEO would take another whole guide. However, the crucial message here is that the position of your website on Google has a direct connection with the reputation of your brand.
Since most people believe brands that rank higher on Google are more reputable (which, honestly, can often be the case), climbing the Google SERP ladder can be a great shortcut for enhancing brand reputation.
8. Build a Community With Email Marketing & Reddit
Communities are reputation-makers, and that’s something you can use to your benefit. By either creating or investing in online communities relating to your brand, you can truly build your brand reputation like a king: in mass!
There’s strength in numbers. So, why keep on promoting your brand to one person at a time when you can reach whole groups of people? Fostering online communities that are in one way or another relevant to your brand can be the game-changer you’ve been looking for!
To do it, we recommend:
- Email marketing: The idea of email marketing can sound outdated to some, but it continues to work in today’s business environment. More than an effective way of communicating a message, email marketing is also a smart vector for building communities. By promoting exclusive promotions, events, or even products on subscription newsletters, you can foster a sense of exclusivity that makes people feel like they belong to something. (I guess that’s why we keep seeing the word family in email newsletters).
- Reddit communities: With KeyMentions, you can find Reddit threads relating to your brand instantly by monitoring keywords. These keywords are the little gold nuggets that allow you to identify active and viral Reddit discussions while they’re still happening! This means that you can influence the development of Reddit communities directly, nurturing a special sense of togetherness (and liking for your brand) in the meantime. You can read more about it on How To Create & Build a Reddit Community.
For inspiration, try to learn more about popular brand communities and see how the likes of Apple, LEGO, or Harley-Davidson turned their customers into close-knit families.
9. Treat Your Customers Right
You know how at the end of every movie the secret was love all along? The same Hollywoodesque logic applies to building a brand’s reputation. The secret sauce is not so secret after all: just treat your customers right by showing them love and respect!
According to Forbes, more than 80% of customers prefer to have a personalized experience. That speaks volumes of the importance of treating customers right, whether it’s in a physical or online environment.
If you’re marketing your business online, offering a personalized experience can be as simple as treating customers as friends, replying religiously to their messages (even when they’re annoying), and keeping in mind that they are unique individuals.
Calling customers by their first name, sending them a birthday message, or landing a tasteful joke are all simple and easy ways to make someone feel special. When people feel happy about a brand, they will be more incentivized to buy and speak positively about it to their friends and family.
Using KeyMentions for Brand Reputation
I have mentioned briefly how KeyMentions can do wonders for your brand’s reputation, but here’s a more complete rundown:
- With KeyMentions, you can learn about your brand’s current reputation by monitoring Reddit and seeing what people have been saying about it. You can use specific keywords too, as in best CBD shop or cheap credit loans (whatever relates to your business).
- You can use the same method for analyzing the reputation of your competitors and identifying crucial strengths and weaknesses.
- You get to intervene directly in active discussions by setting alerts. This way, you can police your brand reputation on Reddit in real-time. If someone’s talking poorly about your business online, KeyMentions lets you defend yourself while the debate is still happening, not months from now.
- You can filter away Reddit threads that do talk about your brand but don’t have any kind of valuable engagement. This is possible because KeyMentions’ email alerts can be set to a minimum number of upvotes and/or comments.
For more information on how to dominate Reddit by using KeyMentions, check out our guide on how to use Reddit properly.
Brand Reputation Do’s & Don’ts
Do’s:
- Engage with your audience in a friendly manner
- Stay true to your brand’s values in every communication
- Have a consistent tone and posture
- Monitor your online presence
- Be wary of potentially damaging collaborations
- Make the most of viral topics
- Use social listening tools like KeyMentions
Don’ts:
- Be in any way disrespectful
- Snub SEO as a non-priority
- Ignore negative feedback
- Act too much like a salesman
- Promise on things you cannot deliver
- Ignore trends
- Invest in paid ads only
Summary
At a time when everyone is connected, and communication is faster than ever, brand reputation is adamant. In the age of the Internet, one bad review can be enough to ruin a brand’s good name, while one viral post can be all it takes for it to go straight to the top.
To build your brand’s reputation like a king, make sure to take good care of your kingdom: your customers are people just like you, and data shows they prefer to be treated accordingly. The Beatles said it better in their goodbye song: The love you take is equal to the love you make!
Love is the secret ingredient of a good brand’s reputation, but there’s more. Vigilant online brand monitoring, creative collaborative efforts, excellent SEO, email and Reddit marketing, and organic promotion strategies can all also play a defining role.
How To Build Brand Reputation (FAQ)
Brand reputation refers to the collective perception of your brand’s worth.
You can use content to increase your brand’s reputation by establishing your brand as an authority in its field. For example: If you’re running a business for moms, create a blog specializing in high-quality baby articles.
Email and Reddit marketing are but two great tried-and-tested methods for building online communities.
Organic marketing is the way to go if your priority is saving money on ads. Invest in marketing strategies that don’t include paid ads and aim to drive organic traffic to your web pages.
KeyMentions is a great tool for building a brand’s reputation because of its ability to monitor brand mentions and keywords on Reddit threads while they are still active.
