The perception of your brand plays a crucial role in the success and growth of your business, whether it’s a small or large enterprise. Online presence can help strengthen customer loyalty, increase sales, build trust, and promote positive feedback, helping you stand out from your competitors. Therefore, the strategy for managing your online reputation becomes increasingly important. You need to establish a system that allows you to manage your brand’s perception and respond effectively to it.
Proactive reputation management includes strategies that help shape, improve, and maintain the perception of your brand.
Ideally, you can initiate these strategies from the beginning to:
- Attract more customers
- Enhance brand loyalty
- Improve online perception
- Increase conversion rates
In addition to proactive strategies, it’s also advisable to develop a reactive reputation management plan, which can be considered a crisis management plan. It helps businesses manage and respond to events that could harm the brand, such as negative posts, comments, or online reviews.
These events can arise from reasons that the brand didn’t foresee or factors beyond its control. For example, Tide couldn’t have foreseen the need for crisis management due to the Tide Pod Challenge, but they had to take action to restore their brand perception.
The reactive strategy helps in responding to negative opinions or complaints. For instance, Whole Foods promptly responds to customer issues or questions, offering empathy and solutions.
Both approaches are necessary for long-term reputation management. Proactive strategies help reduce the need for reactive solutions because the goal is to continuously shape, improve, and maintain your online perception.
However, even the most careful companies may encounter negative opinions that question their brand reputation, and in such cases, deploying reactive reputation management measures becomes necessary.
Therefore, integrating both proactive and reactive approaches into your online reputation management system allows you to effectively handle all possible situations, helping safeguard your brand’s reputation and build customer loyalty.
