A Small Business Owner’s Guide to Brand Reputation Management

A Small Business Owner’s Guide to Brand Reputation Management

Small businesses are the key to rapid socio-economic development. Many people are resigning from their jobs in order to start their  startups or concentrate fully on their small businesses. Small businesses contribute greatly to the decrease of unemployment as they provide numerous employment opportunities. However, it is very easy nowadays for any angry customer or a sneaky competitor to trash the reputation of your small business and ruin the name of your brand. With the online world becoming popular, people can comment badly or rate your business unfairly. Therefore, to succeed, a small business owner needs to know how to manage the reputation their brand effectively. It is not an easy task, and that is why we have provided some useful tips to help you through it.

• The first and most simple way to manage your brand’s reputation is by being alert and be informed. You cannot manage something if you do not remain in the know about it. Closely brand monitor the online search, your website comments, social media sites, blogs and relevant forums to see what people are mentioning about your brand. You cannot do this alone so you need your employees helping you occasionally to monitor these things and informing you of their findings. Once you know, you can be able to deal with the situation from there.

• You can come up with defense mechanisms for your business’ brands. You can pull these negative sentiments online by engaging with positive feedbacks and PR. You can also build defences on the common social media sites in order to protect your business from the failure that comes with a pathetic reputation.

• Create positive inbound marketing content about your brand/company. Share and update about your brand and get other people to comment and respond to the engaged comment promptly. Interact with your existing and would-be customers and keep them talking about your brand and how good your products are. This should help in protecting the reputation of your brand.You should be committed to your business and your brand. You should never delay in responding to any comments by customers. This will show them that you are very committed and it won’t give them lee-ways to bad-mouth your business and your brand. Manage your brand’s reputation by posting an inbound marketing content or two every now and then about your brand and encourage satisfied customers to comment on your articles and interact with each other.

• You can create and improve on your social media site pages. Make use of the social media sites  as a branding tool. This way, your business will earn a better reputation because people will like, follow or view your business brand and products. These sites will help to build goodwill for your business and your brand ,this will be able to identify with your brand and the products that you offer. The social media sites will also boost your rank in the search engine listings, as many potential clients will get to visit your site through them.

Your turn! How do you protect your brand online? How effective is your brand reputation management? Do tell!