All experienced marketers will tell you that managing your brand is the best way to also increase your revenue and sales. This is because having a powerful brand means that customers trust you above brands that they have never heard of. Having a strong brand, therefore, is one of your most powerful assets, as they also drive demand. Once you get to that point, you will see a decrease in the cost of running your business as well. Your brand and your reputation are essentially the same things, and you should consider enlisting the services of a reputation management firm to make sure your brand is as powerful as it can be.
Reputation Management and Online Businesses
If you own an online business, you have to find a way to attract new customers and to retain them as well. You will need specific resources to achieve this, and you have to know how to use these resources as well. Resources cost money, and you need to see a return on your investment. Managing your online brand and reputation is not something that only costs money once either. Rather, you have to continue to invest both time and other resources in it, or the competition will quickly overtake you.
Brand tracking is a marketing activity that measures the impact of brand campaigns on awareness and sales. An effective brand tracker software delivers results from a wide variety of sources such as blogs, news outlets, and social media.
You must use every avenue open to you to connect with your customers so that they become familiar with your brand. Online, this is actually quite simple, albeit time consuming. You have blogs, forums, and social networking sites like Flickr, Naymz, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, to name but a few. These pages can help you to build a wealth of links, thereby also increasing your traffic. However, it is about more than simply having an account on these sites. You have to actually use them and have fresh content in place regularly.
To manage your brand online, you also have to know what the competition is doing. Make sure that you are mentioned positively just as often, if not more often, as the brand of your competitor. This is a strong influencer, making people consider you as well for their shopping. This is part of online reputation management, which also involves pushing away any negative comments. You cannot have a business, online or offline, without attracting at least some criticism. What matters, however, is how you allow that criticism to be seen, and how you respond to it. You must work hard to make it difficult for people to find negative comments and, if they do find them, they need to see that you have responded in a professional, polite manner.
Online brand and reputation management is a reasonably new and emerging field, having been developed over the past decade or so. It is one of the strongest marketing tools available to people running a business nowadays and has flowed seamlessly through the advent and growth of the internet. Once, having a website was sufficient. Then, it had to be regularly updated. Today, it has to be fully interactive as well.
