Corporate Reputation Management

 

Corporate Reputation: How Does Your Company Measure Up?

That’s a pretty open-ended question. Particularly if you haven’t taken a serious look at your company reputation and the perception you’re creating within your office and throughout the public sphere. Below, we look into what reputation really means for your business, why your corporate image is so important, and how to build the corporate reputation management strategy your brand needs to thrive in today’s fast-paced climate. If you are interested in improving your corporate reputation contact NetReputation.com today. 

What Is Corporate Reputation?

Corporate reputation is best defined as the overall quality of your brand’s footprint across every communication channel and each segment of your target audience. 

Cultivated over time, your company’s reputation is the sum of how internal and external stakeholders think and feel about your brand. Ultimately, reputation is what shapes how people interact with your business now and in the future. 

Some of the biggest influences on your company’s reputation include:

Ethical Behavior

How well your company adheres to basic ethical standards during day-to-day operations.

Workplace Culture

Your commitment to employees and maintaining a fair, transparent work environment.

Customer Focus

The value you place on customers, their business, and providing a satisfying customer experience

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Social Responsibility

Your organization’s level of engagement in socially responsible business practices.

Service Quality

The consistency and quality of services you provide your customers

Executive Leadership

How well senior leadership represents and promotes your brand and its position in your industry 

Online Presence

The sum of each review, article, and comment about your brand for crucial industry search terms

These factors not only affect your brand image but also how your customers, employees, vendors, investors, competitors, and leaders perceive and engage with your business.

If you aren’t actively working to measure, manage and restore your corporate reputation, you’ll likely strain the relationships you need to remain strong and competitive.

Why Is Corporate Reputation ManagementImportant?

Your corporate reputation is what consumers and organizations know and feel about your company. It’s what drives brand interaction and determines your position in your industry and the market. 

Stakeholders use your reputation to gauge your strengths, scrutinize your weaknesses, and decide where and how far they should go with your business.

Without a positive company reputation, it becomes that much harder to attract new customers, build customer loyalty, or find the talent you need to innovate and manage an effective operation.

A robust corporate reputation:

• Embodies integrity and generates trustamong consumers
• Strengthens your presence in your industry and online
• Appeals to high-quality job candidatesand improves employee retainment
• Protects your brand during times of crisis and attack
• Fortifies an image vendors, suppliers, and partners want to do business with

In short, a good company image is priceless to securing the customers, employees, and executive leaders that will make your organization grow. 

But when bad online reviews, discussion boards, news articles, and social feeds rear their ugly heads, positive brand perception can quickly turn into a public relations nightmare, damaging your brand’s integrity and forcing you to pick up the pieces. 

When that happens, it may be time for a serious assessment of your corporate reputation management approach.

What Is Corporate Reputation Management?

Corporate reputation management is any action your company takes to repair reputation damage and build a strong, positive, and more profitable online presence. 

In a competitive digital environment, an effective corporate reputation management strategy is integral to improving and growing your company’s online presence in search, establishing brand authority, strengthening customer sentiment, and standing out in your industry. 

Elements of a comprehensive and effective brand reputation management include:

• Identifying every mention of your business across the web
• Performing a thorough analysis of your digital footprint
• Singling out threats and removing harmful information
• Optimizing positive assets already online
• Creating and curating content that promotes your brand and values
• Ongoing monitoring and maintenance of your business presence in search

Corporate reputation management isn’t something that happens overnight or that you can do just once before tackling that next agenda item. 

Business reputation repair and restoration is an ongoing behavior, a process requiring a significant commitment of time, resources, and expertise to ensure you’re delivering a message of impact and authority to your audience every day.

How To Measure And Manage Your Company Reputation

Building an effective corporate reputation management strategy is fundamental to maximizing opportunity and avoiding online catastrophe.

To measure and manage your business reputation, take steps to:

1. Assemble a Good Team 

Managing your company reputation isn’t merely about responding to a bad review or marketing your brand on social media. It’s about building brand resiliency, visibility, and impact across each facet of your online presence. And doing so in a way that guarantees your voice and integrity are maintained and reinforced along the way. 

Such an effort is not only time-consuming but often requires the work of multiple professionals in wide-ranging disciplines, including:

• Online data collection and analysis
• Digital information removal
• Review management
• Content marketing
• Social media management
• Public relations and brand management
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Digital marketing 
• …and more

While you may be tempted to go it alone, building a more positive business reputation across each layer of your digital presence is best done as a team. Without the right level of expertise and personnel guiding your corporate reputation management strategy, you’ll likely miss valuable opportunities and leave your business vulnerable to attack, creating problems that become even more costly over time.

2. Audit Your Online Presence

Do you know the full extent and reach of your corporate reputation online? 

Chances are, your online footprint is bigger than you think. By performing a comprehensive audit of your online presence, your team will have a much better idea of your brand’s size and reach on the web. Plus, they’ll also get a more detailed picture of every article, review, and social mention impacting the quality of your reputation.

When done correctly, an exhaustive digital audit will reveal: 

• All positive, negative, and neutral mentions of your business and related brands
• Every customer and employee review of your business currently on the web
• News items, blogs, and comment sections mentioning your corporate brand online. 
• Your presence across all claimed and unclaimed business profiles
• How your company appears for important industry and brand-related search phrases

Once you’ve collected the data and identified each element comprising your online brand, the next step in your corporate reputation management strategy should be to:

3. Conduct In-Depth Research On Your Brand

Information is great. But without an in-depth examination and analysis of your brand’s online data, your team won’t have a solid foundation for building a sustainable or effective corporate reputation managementstrategy—or to build the positive business reputation needed to achieve more profitable outcomes.

A complete quantitative and qualitative analysis of your company’s unique online data helps provide key insight into:

• Existing threats to your brand reputation and integrity. This includes the impact of bad customer reviews, consumer complaints, negative news articles, and social media.
• The consistency of your brand and business online, such as how well you’re conveying your message and adding value to key demographics.
• Brand awareness and impact across local, regional, and national segments of the population.
• Your full online review profile. From your aggregate review rating to review interaction and frequency; to the total impact each review has during searches of your business.
• Overall customer sentiment regarding your business and related brands within the corporate umbrella.
• Opportunities for outreach, improvement, and growth that can help restore your company’s reputationfor important industry search phrases.

All in all, with a thorough, stand-alone evaluation of your business presence online, your corporate reputation managementteam is better equipped to take the next step:

4.  Perform a Competitive Analysis

Knowing how you measure up against competitors isn’t just good business practice. It’s also an integral component of corporate reputation management, providing a crucial perspective that can highlight brand strengths, weaknesses, and online opportunities you may have missed otherwise. 

A competitive reputation analysis examines not only how top competitors are performing for high-volume search terms. But, also, how they look across online review sites and popular social platforms. It can also deliver important, actionable data on the consistency of your competitor’s brand messaging, current levels of brand awareness, and the quality of sentiment they’re generating among vital segments of your audience.

With KPIs and insights into competitor performance and reputation, you can more accurately size up how your business is faring against local and national competitors on major search engines. 

This will help you identify areas in which your brand is doing well and where you may be falling behind. And once you know how your brand is stacking up, you can use that info to develop a more informed and impactful ORM strategy that sharpens your edge on the web.

5. Build Your Reputation Roadmap

Now that your team has gathered data, researched your presence, and vetted your competitors, it’s time to map out a solid plan of action. This roadmap will not only enable and enhance brand impact but will provide the building blocks for creating an impenetrable, yet adaptable, firewall around your corporate reputation. 

Based on what you’ve uncovered during the data collection and analysis process, your corporate reputation management strategywill likely include such critical elements as:

Negative Information Removal

Removing or suppressing harmful news items, blogs, and complaints from search results is crucial for building a more positive company reputation. Removal strategies depend heavily on the traffic, authority, and relevance of each unique link. Sometimes it can take months, 1-2 years, or more to push content out of search. 

So, your team must incorporate a detailed plan for mitigating such threats and restoring a positive search presence.

Review Management

Online reviews are often the biggest offenders when it comes to smearing your company’s reputation and impacting your bottom line. 

A strong review management solution is not only recommended but essential for reducing the impact of bad reviews and optimizing your overall review presence. 

Be sure your reputation repair efforts prioritize review management and best practices for responding to customer reviews online.

Content Marketing

Quality content development and marketing is a critical piece of the corporate reputation management puzzle. 

Creating and curating content across the web helps bulk up your digital presence and solidify brand authority and relevance in your industry. In turn, this reinforces your position as a company both consumers and stakeholders can trust and want to do business with.

Social Media Management

Issues on social platforms can quickly spiral out of control. If your CRM plan doesn’t include a social presence managing strategy, your reputation might face potential crises, creating damage that can sometimes take years and thousands of dollars to repair.

A proactive, ongoing social management strategy allows you to control the brand conversation while leveraging this powerful way to market, grow, and strengthen your corporate rep. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is what drives performance and position in search. It’s how your blogs, articles, social threads, and landing pages achieve ranking and visibility for high-volume search terms—and the key to building an online brand reputation that compels customers to action. 

Whether your focus is to rebuild and restore your reputation, increase industry authority or simply improve your conversion rate, well-researched SEO techniques are what make it possible. 

Brand Monitoring And Maintenance

As we stated earlier, good corporate reputation management isn’t something you can do once and simply forget. It’s a constant, long-term plan for ensuring your business reputation and integrity remain intact, and for giving your company the tools to protect itself and pivot whenever new challenges arise.

Vigilant brand monitoring is an essential part of your brand reputation management approach. Not only does active monitoring help ensure your team is aware of new brand mentions when and where they happen. It also lets you react and adapt to new threats quickly, keeping your business reputation on course.

With active, ongoing reputation maintenance, your business ORM team has the framework needed to keep your image fresh and aligned with an ever-changing business climate, where organizations must constantly seek innovative ways to maintain meaningful connections with consumers.

6. Carefully Execute Your Strategy 

Corporate reputation can be shaped, influenced, and even destroyed by several factors, including a poorly executed reputation management strategy. 

Rolling out your plan too quickly, too slow, or even in the wrong sequence can be counterproductive and costly, sometimes causing damage that can take years and resources to revert. 

Careful, coordinated implementation of your business reputation campaign is the best way to avoid errors and ensure each element works to improve your search presence.

The temptation to rush reputation repair by, say, flooding the web with content, pressuring a third-party removal, or neglecting social marketing opportunities may seem cost-effective in the short term. However, these can have expensive, even devastating long-term consequences from which it may be impossible to recover. 

The design of an effective corporate reputation management plan is integral to protecting your brand now and in the future. But without the right approach to execution, you’re likely putting your strategy and your image at serious risk.

7. Partner With an Expert

Measuring and managing your corporate image is a worthy endeavor. But it can also take a significant amount of time, resources, and expertise to get the job done right, and to ensure your reputation is truly helping your business realize its full potential.

At Reputation Sciences™, we specialize in custom, comprehensive corporate reputation management solutions backed by technology and fueled by expertise. To learn more about CEO Reputation Management 

Our goal is to provide the complete Audit, Reputation, and Monitoring needed to manage online crises more effectively, plus guarantee you’re reaching more customers and outperforming the competition across the web.