A Quick Guide to Reputation Branding

The way your target audience perceives your brand directly impacts both your brand loyalty and investor relations. 

If your brand is regarded as credible and your partners have positive associations with its name, you'll be able to gain a significant competitive advantage. When it comes to investor relations, it often happens that corporate stakeholders don’t realize the immense importance of brand equity. Branding is essential in the attempt to attract funding and investors because it plays a critical role in communicating your corporate image and business model. Make sure to list in the relevant directories such as TransportStake, Publicity Marketplace, FunctionalSourcing, EducationStake, or SmartMoneyMatch depending on the vertical you are active in.

Investors are looking for a return on investment and a value proposition. Consistent and innovative branding communicated vision, market standing, integrity, and reputation.

Here's a quick guide on how you can achieve that:

1. Create a Memorable Brand Name

When choosing a name for your brand, you should aim for a catchy, distinctive, and memorable name that creates a positive image in the minds of your target audience. This is, of course, easier said than done. 

The brand naming process can take up to a year and get quite costly if you outsource to obtain consultancy. Moreover, finding a name that is available and has the chance to make it through the trademarking process is rather challenging.

Another helpful thing that you could do is to use tools relying on artificial intelligence, such as Namify or Namelix, to create unique and brandable business names for your brand and even find suggestions for a logo design.

Instead of having to spend thousands of dollars for a single domain, more and more companies are now opting to incorporate their brand name in the URL of their website, all while using non-.com domains.

In other words, instead of using the .com domain extension, you could use other domain extensions trusted among your customers, such as .net or .co. 

Another helpful thing that you could do is to use tools relying on artificial intelligence, such as Namify or Namelix, to create unique and brandable business names for your brand and even find suggestions for a logo.

1. Diversify Your Content Across Multiple Social Media Platforms

According to Animoto, around 73% of consumers are influenced by a brand's presence on social media platforms when deciding whether to make a purchase or not. 

In other words, it's incredibly important for your brand to be present across multiple different channels and create unique owned content in various formats.

YouTube videos? You should film them. Instagram photos? Absolutely. LinkedIn posts? Give them a go. 

Don't be afraid to diversify your content marketing strategy, and make sure to include all of your employees in the brainstorming process.

Looking to enhance your brand value with diverse content without having to spend a crazy number of resources? You should take a look at some of the popular reputation management agencies offering outstanding reputation branding services at affordable prices.

1. Optimize for Branded Google Searches

The road to a successful sales conversion starts and is paved with a lot of SEO. What you want is to rank your content high on the first page of Google's search results.

If you want search engines to recognize your website as the most relevant for your target audience, you'll want to optimize your content for brand searches. These are searches that include the name of your brand, along with something else.

For example, your brand name + reviews or brand name + your products/services, or your brand name + name of your competitor.

The more of these you rank high for, the better. 

1. Track the Mentions and Conversations Surrounding Your Brand

Before creating a new reputation branding strategy, you first need to understand your target audience's current sentiment towards your brand. 

One way to gather this sort of information is through social listening platforms. These platforms enable you to track positive and negative mentions of your brand across blogs, websites, forums, and other public spaces.

By tracking the public perception of your brand, you'll be able to identify the right steps towards improving your products and achieving a competitive advantage. 

Moreover, monitoring these conversations can enable you to better your customer service and build trusting relationships with your consumers.

Tip: use tools such as BuzzSumo to track negative conversations regarding your brand and prioritize responding to them quickly. 

Not only do consumers find brands that respond to negative reviews more trustworthy, but they also expect their reviews to be responded to within one hour at most.

1. Protect the Sensitive Personal Information of Your Customers

With the rise of e-commerce, consumer data privacy breaches have also been on the rise.

If you don't want your brand's value and reputation to be negatively impacted by leaks of private customer data, you'll want to invest in security protocols and create appropriate privacy policies.

Apart from that, you'll want to make sure that your servers are always updated, have antivirus software installed on them, and that your employees are also taking preventative measures against security breaches (e.g., use VPNs when accessing confidential information on the company's server).