Brand identity, image, and reputation play a crucial role in the success of your business. While they remain important, confusing one for the other could harm your overall brand strategy. Brand identity, image, and reputation require unique tactical management; each deserves your undivided attention. Let’s quickly examine how your brand’s reputation and credibility can be impacted.
Ignoring Negative Feedback:
As a business owner, you always hope to receive positive feedback and avoid negative reviews as much as possible. However, every business gets negative feedback. With the option to provide feedback anonymously, customers can easily share flaws in your system, which, if fixed, can contribute to the business’s overall success.
When you receive negative feedback, do not ignore or delete it. While a specific comment might get you boiling, deleting a comment might suggest that you have something to hide. On the other hand, missing a comment might indicate that you don’t care. Every criticism is a chance for you to learn, identify your mistakes, and grow from them. If you consciously ignore your customer complaints, your company might not improve.
To counter negative feedback:
- Don’t let any negative comments linger.
- Respond quickly, within an hour or two.
- Take a minute to prepare a response full of kindness, as a poor response might result in a viral mess. When handling negative feedback, remembering an apology goes a long way.
Inconsistent Information:
Brand consistency builds affinity that leads to long-lasting trust. Inconsistent information can damage the trust between you and your customers. It might also confuse their understanding of what your brand stands for and negatively affect your profits. Even if you have multiple content contributors, always ensure that you find a way to control the consistency of your brand identity, image, and reputation.
To attain consistency, you must convey a clear message of your core values and provide all valuable information to your customers. Consistency is critical whether you use a single channel or multiple channels. Have clear brand guidelines and standards for your visual and written communications, use a marketing calendar to plan, organize your marketing assets, and, if possible, repurpose your content.
Little or No Social Media Presence:
Undoubtedly, businesses that have adopted social media to their marketing strategy are now reaping the benefits. The powerful effects of social media on business cannot be ignored as customers increasingly rely on what is done and said on social media. For instance, customers are likely to be convinced by testimonials from their trusted circles and public opinion.
If customers cannot find your brand on social media, the conversations about your brand drop drastically. Your business needs to be where customers are. Therefore, ensure that you are not only getting your brand onto social media but also that you understand the parameters of social media usage and how social media affects the customer’s buying process. Focus on a social selling strategy that advertises your products and services in a hospitable, humanized, and relatable manner.
Poorly Designed Website:
One of the most crucial reasons for having a website is that it helps your business generate more leads and increase sales. A website also gives customers an excellent first impression and gives them comfort that your business is real. The likelihood of an internet user converting into a paying customer is therefore influenced by their experience on the website.
The truth is, there is no strict formula that you should follow when designing a website. However, what stands out as a poorly designed website includes websites full of clutter, dead links, unclear call to action, incompatibility with multiple devices, and outdated content. A poorly designed website will not attract clients. It will cost you money and still ruin your credibility.
Your website is more than just an online business card. It is an opportunity to grow your business; therefore, you should take advantage of it. Use reputable custom web design services in NYC \to help you with the website design and polishing other marketing strategies to shape how customers view your brand.
Low-Quality Content:
Low-quality content is harmful to your brand. It is not suitable for the search engine optimization
of your website, as it severely harms your site’s search rankings. Low-quality content also
hampers brand promotion; hence you need to stick to offering high-quality content as it helps
you attract the right audience and help improve conversions.
Guard Your Brand Reputation:
Your brand is who you are in the eyes of customers. Your brand is the biggest asset you could ever have; hence you need to guard it at all costs. If you don’t protect your brand image, reputation, and identity, your social proof, marketplace capital, and influence will suffer. Therefore, proactive interactions safeguard your online space and, if possible, hire professional reputation managers to help monitor your brand presence.
Nirmal Sarkar is a Biotechnologist from the city of Joy, Kolkata. He is the founder of this blog and covers a wide range of topics from Gadgets to Software to Latest Offers. You can get in touch with him via nirmal@hitricks.com
