Growing your business and managing your brand go hand in hand, but maintaining a positive reputation takes work. Having a positive brand reputation can play out in multiple ways. When done right, it can lead to loyalty from clients and an increase of customer confidence in your brand and product. This is the most important element when considering what drives sales and bottom-line growth. But that growth is only accumulated if your clients like what they see. Without the proper skills to maintain your brand reputation, there is a lot on the line to lose.

Today’s competitive market has made reputation management more important than ever. Anyone can look up anything through social media and search engines, so you want to make sure the first thing about you they click is a positive one.

In order to make that happen, there are some strategies you can take your reputation into your own hands. Not all of it may be necessary for your specific business, but all of the information is pertinent to form a positive reputation that clients will associate with your brand. Consider these elements that will take your personal brand management to obsolete to newly updated.

Public Relations

Public Relations, otherwise referred to as PR, is how you show your clients that you are the best. PR has grown immensely in the last couple of years thanks to the lightening like speed of search engines and others ways of how people look up information. Now more than ever before, organizations are realizing that successful consumer experience depends on good PR. Good PR creates, controls and updates your online brand. There are three ways to use PR to your advantage in order to manage your reputation.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is knowing your brand and understanding how to get future clients to notice it. Content marketing is a tactical approach focused on creating and sharing relevant content that attracts future clients and will ultimately drive profits. Content marketing is knowing your brand and understanding how to get future clients to notice it. In other words, content marketing is how you get someone to stop and notice your business.

Nobody does content better than a PR professional. PR combines usages such as researching and feeling the waters of client usage and combining the information into crafting meaningful stories that show off a brand. It is a two way conversation that meets audiences where they are at. An important element of PR is its ability to relate to consumers without sounding gimmicky. Consumers can see through wishy-washy sales pitches, and they want authentic relationships with those they are putting their trust – and more importantly their business – with. Unlike marketing and advertising, PR has always been sensitive to the fact that true communication takes place only when parties have a genuine interest in each other.

With this in mind, it is easy to see how PR is vital to honing your personal brand. Having effective PR is what will keep clients coming back and make new ones turn their heads in your direction.

Online Influence

Nowadays, anything can be looked up online. Your business is no exception. Apps created for rating business and general search engines hold vital information to showing off what you got. In order to manage your brand, you must have a tight control on your online presence. Today, there are a staggering amount of Internet users – over three billion to be exact – and odds are that someone somewhere is currently looking you up. In order to manage your reputation, you want to build an online presence that boasts what is good about your company and how it could be used by the one looking you up.

Quality is the key to making this happen. You want what your clients can look up online to be the best thing you think is out their for your brand. This obviously varies from business to business, but at the heart, quality is what will make your presence you. The Internet never sleeps, so brands must use PR tactics to update information, answer important questions, engage the user and show of a brand’s good side.

The PR profession is the best way to manage your brand’s reputation. It helps brands navigate the digital world and understand consumer influence. Even though the mediums of usage have changed over the decades, the rules of engagement are the same. PR must seek to understand a client’s viewpoints, provide feedback on conversational topics, and build trust in your brand’s image. All of these elements combines will show real value in your business.

Promoting and Protecting

Public Relations is a relationship based discipline that can only thrive is done authentically. Take Twitter for example. According to Twitter’s usage statistics, Users collectively tweet over 500 million Tweets per day. That means that not a second ticks by without a public comment on a new product, conversational subject or even a funny meme. All of these things are crucial in managing a brand’s reputation.

Keeping an active social media presence is more important than you think. It is the go to way to connect with clients and show the world why you are the best at what you do. While some media platforms may not work with your specific business (think websites like Pinterest that require a creative component that might not be included in what you do), claiming the ones that do can help you own your brand. But the medium does not matter as much as the overall idea that you MUST be present online. If there are already 500 million Tweets a day, you want at least a handful to be about your business.

Cultivating a positive brand through active media use shows your customers that you are meeting them where they are. Not only that, but as your gain traffic and interactions, it builds up a wall of protection against false claims or unfavorable information. A history of positive interactions speaks louder than one complaint from an unhappy client.

The PR discipline is the organization’s conscience. It navigates the waters to ensure it is doing the right things that build a brand, and when it is not, it making the immediate changes to protect the brand’s character that brings a business’ reputation back on track.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your website in order to bump it to a high place on the list of results returned by a search engine. If you are not present on a platform where consumers are searching, you will be left behind to competitors who are. In brand reputation management, SEO influences deliberate keywords and useful content that is intended to drive traffic to your website and grows sales.

Successful SEO helps boost your brand by:

• Optimizing content to gain traffic
• Improving social network performance
• Building client engagement
• Refining your brand’s networking abilities

Search engine optimization is accomplished through creating keyword phrases that link back to your business. The more these keywords are used and interacted with, the better your ranking will become.

Storytelling:

Expanding upon creating keywords for SEO, storytelling is a unique way to cultivate a memorable brand. We relate to stories because, as humans, are wired to listen to other’s accounts. We like to hear about how people out there are just like us or are doing what we want to do. That’s why brand stories are a powerful means of Internet marketing for your business. If you can cultivate your brand story well, you will be able to engage your client’s and potential client’s mind in order to raise brand awareness.

Laura Busche, author of “Lean Branding and Powering Content,” had this to say about using brand stories.

“In essence, a brand is nothing more than a story users recall when they think of you, because this story is made up by every single touch point of our user’s experience…”

Not only are brand stories an excellent way to mange your reputation, but it is also a great way for you to tell your clients a little bit about you. A brand’s story doesn’t have to be fancy. The more authentic, the better. Show your clients how your brand got to where it is and where it is going from here. Whether catering to a large list of clientele or small, a positive brand reputation has the crucial ability to showcase positive brand stories.

Website Development:

A strong website with easy to navigate features and an enjoyable user experience is certain to improve your brand reputation management efforts. Focusing on customers and making it simple for them to find the information will keep your users clicking. With a strong website, brand loyalty will improve and site abandonment will be reduced.

There are five elements to consider when using website development to increase your brand reputation:

     1. Design and Development

A single focused company that clearly marks their specialized field does better in the industry rather than those full service ones without specific information. With specialization comes better understanding of the content. Delivering quality projects helps to increase brand awareness and keeps clients coming back. The core of web development business plan is the content posted on the website. What is shown must be shown off. You’ve got it, now flaunt it. Information to display is credible services of the company and ways to contact. Users want to know that they will actually be receiving what they are seeing. The credibility of the brand should be highlighted through website design and development of content.

    2. Reliability

To emphasize the reliability of the brand, the association of it with any standout information gives your brand a personality. Emphasizing the differences in your business when compared to its competition is a way for clients to remember you when they think of what you do. Addressing how your business is unique is a great way to show clients that you take what you do seriously. For example, If you are a small-scale company, boast that your employees have the ability to meet with clients one-on-one In turn, cultivating a brand that is confident in its abilities will boost your reputation. 3

     3. Consistency

Consistency is the key to being remembered by those visiting your website. You want your clients to recognize your brand. Reusing codes and visuals are a great way for your clients to remember you. You want your client to know who you are, and you want to tell them again. By the time one has gone through your social media platform or official website, your clients should be able to pinpoint what makes your brand you, whether that is through specific color schemes or well thought-out charts.

    4. Accommodating

To build up your brand, the website should be accommodating to all. A design that focuses on transparency must be chosen over more complicated ones. A well-chosen layout can keep prospective clients interested and assure them that they are at the right place to meet their desires. Keeping in mind that these are websites for business, the creator has to abide by a style of information giving that is informative and polite. You do not want to promise what you know you cannot provide. Be truthful about the information you provide. People want to know that you will meet them where they are.

    5. Quality

Possibly the most important element is quality. To increase brand awareness from web development, the design of the brand page must show off your brand’s uniqueness, how you stack up against competitors, and any attributed awards or praise within your field. You are the best that is out there in a sea of competitors a client can choose from. Make sure what you are displaying visually shows your worth. Simple navigation, staff photos, customer testimonies, and easy to read fonts are all equally important if you want your website to be the one someone remembers.

Overall:

In the hustle and bustle of normal business operations, it can be easy to lose sight of the importance of brand reputation management and its influence on sales growth. But lack of brand reputation management can significantly and negatively impact your business’ overall success, and that is not worth the risk. Through the consistent use of Public Relations, Search Engine Optimization, storytelling and web development, you can rest assured that your reputation has created a brand special to you and your business. Cultivating a positive brand takes a lot of work. It is not something that will happen overnight. A positive reputation is bound to build memorable brand, and that fact will be worth the work and wait.