Brand reputation is vital for every company to thrive and win customers. That’s why reputation research is necessary for businesses. However, building a good reputation has always been challenging and time-consuming.
Before attempting reputation research, you need to understand your brand from the audience’s point of view. Markedly, you can do social monitoring and look for customer reviews to discover your brand reputation.
? Read Brand Reputation 101: Monitoring, Analysis, and Management Tools
If you’re about to research reputation, let’s uncover the basics first. Keep reading to learn the importance and benefits of reputation research. Also, get to know some reputation management tools to aid your effort!
What is Reputation Research?
Reputation research attempts to understand your company’s reputation from customers’ perspectives. It is the study of your brand image, public perception, and company performance in the marketplace.
You can start reputation research by collecting data through surveys, focus groups, and social monitoring. Then, you will gather and analyze the data to identify patterns and trends that show how people perceive your company.
When doing reputation resources, your main subjects are customers, employees, and investors. You can also look for additional information from the mainstream audiences that may have or haven’t heard about your business.
There are many ways to elevate your brand reputation, including improving products, user experience, and service quality. You can also provide valuable content to nurture audiences.
One of the content ideas to boost your brand reputation is video. You can provide explainer videos to promote your brand and products. If you’re incapable of creating one, hiring an explainer video company is an option to take.
Read 5 Key Steps in Brand Reputation Measurement
The Importance of Reputation Research
The ICCO World PR Report reveals that CEOs consider the corporate reputation the most valuable asset. The report surveyed 3,000 PR agency heads worldwide and found the three most significant issues.
The primary concerns of big companies include corporate reputation (41%), sustainability and climate change (60%), and diversity and social inclusion (55%). Here is why reputation research is essential.
#1. Discover Public Perceptions
Whether or not your company sells well, discovering public perceptions remains necessary. You can reveal aspects that make your business gain trust and win customers. Also, you can notice if people misinterpret your brand messaging, preventing you from generating sales.
As the marketing efforts have gone digital, your job will circle around social media and online platforms. You can look into your marketing channels to find ratings, reviews, and consumer inputs to improve your brand later.
Read Reputation Management: 10 Best Practices
#2. Identify Trends and Patterns
You can uncover key themes in stakeholder perceptions through data analysis of surveys, social media, and other sources. As a result, you get to identify the most common themes or topics in discussions about your company.
Reputation research can also reveal trends and patterns. Undeniably, you can track social channels and see your brand reputation changes over time.
Compare data from different periods to identify factors that may have contributed to these changes. This information helps you to adjust strategies and messaging to improve the brand reputation.
#3. Find Holes in Your Marketing Strategy
Finding gaps in your marketing strategy is crucial to help you readjust new and more suitable practices. For instance, you hardly make sales because your content may be unrelated to the target audience, or your brand message needs to be more casual for them.
You can also discover other trivia problems such as wrong timing for posting content, too long emails, and not optimizing social media posts. You can establish a more accurate marketing strategy if you find these problems earlier.
#4. Make Informed and Accurate Decisions
If you’ve been in marketing for a while, you know how valuable reputation research is in helping you make accurate decisions. You can delve deeper to evaluate public perceptions and how to improve them.
On top of that, you can identify opportunities and risks of incorporating specific trends in your marketing. So the overall marketing strategy aligns with your target audience and business goals.
Furthermore, social media metrics and customer surveys are vital to providing insightful data. From there, you can create more personalized branding to improve your reputation.
#5. Determine Future Opportunities
Marketing trends will constantly change over time according to people’s behavior. That’s why reputation research is vital to help your business stay relevant to the target audience’s preference.
Capture more opportunities in the future by staying ahead of the curve. You can stay alert to the current trends by studying your competitors and performing social listening to build a positive brand reputation.
The Main Benefits of Reputation Research
Performing reputation research may take a while, but the efforts will always be worth it. Here are some benefits you can reap from developing comprehensive reputation research.
#1. Increase Sales and Revenues
As you improve your marketing strategy, you can accurately choose marketing channels and create content that resonates with your target customers. This way, you have a higher chance of generating more sales and revenues.
#2. Boost Marketing Efforts
Marketing is everything for every business. Your brand reputation is vital to boost your marketing efforts. You can maintain positive branding by providing valuable content and optimizing it to grow brand awareness.
#3. Gather Loyal Customers
Loyal customers are precious assets for your company. You can gather more loyal customers by understanding their perspectives. Discover why they choose your brand as a solution and find better strategies to maintain and improve your brand values.
#4. Optimize Ranking on Search Engines
SEO is a part of building an online brand reputation. Your effort to optimize a website and social media content plays a significant role in defining your visibility on search engines.
Focus on providing valuable content to gain audience trust. Gaining customer trust means you’ve developed good relationships with your audiences, resulting in a positive brand reputation.
#5. Gain Competitive Advantage
Reputations will define how you compete with competitors. You can overcome competitors and garner more customers with a good brand reputation. Producing informative content, offering deals, and enhancing user experience are strategies to execute for building a positive reputation.
Best Tools to Support Reputation Research
As technology advances, you can leverage online reputation management tools to assist your reputation research. We’ve picked six of the best tools to help you be more efficient.
#1. Determ
Determ is a fantastic tool for monitoring your brand reputation. It has automated monitoring, measurement, and reporting features to gather insights and stay on top.
Better still, it goes above and beyond by allowing you to connect the dots between media coverage, public sentiment, and competitor strategies.
With access to over 100 million sources and collecting over a billion articles and posts monthly, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn more about your brand.
It also provides in-depth reports and valuable insights to help you make informed decisions and stay ahead of the curve. In addition, with its option to receive smart and spike alerts, it gives you the opportunity to stay updated with everything going on with your brand real-time and react immediately if necessary.
#2. Podium
Podium is another option if you want more features to monitor your brand in cyberspace. One of its winning qualities is collecting real-time reviews through conversational chatbots.
Podium also allows you to receive alerts about comments made on external review portals and to encourage audience participation through its invitation manager. You can gather valuable feedback and insights to improve your brand reputation.
#3. SentiOne
SentiOne uses Artificial Intelligence in its various functions, allowing you to monitor and analyze customer mentions across the internet. It offers a social listening module. This feature is ideal for collecting and monitoring comments on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
You can also generate reports with all the collected data, gain valuable insights into customer perceptions, and effectively manage your brand reputation.
#4. Trustpilot
Trustpilot is more than just a consumer review portal – it’s an essential tool for managing online reputation. You can use this platform to encourage users to share their experiences and opinions about their services.
Trustpilot has also developed functions to control false reviews and the ability to report fake comments, making it one of the most reliable review platforms in the market.
You can improve your brand reputation by showcasing positive reviews from satisfied customers while addressing negative feedback to improve your services.
#5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a popular tool for content creation and monitoring among marketing specialists and professionals. It allows you to explore your brand reputation and identify areas of opportunity.
You can easily find and monitor mentions of your brand on the internet and respond to them promptly. Moreover, the Topics Explorer function helps you stay ahead of the curve by identifying news related to your industry.
On top of that, the Competitors Tracker allows you to monitor your main competitors and generate competitive advantages. Buzzsumo is a paid platform, but the service will always be worth the price.
#6. Birdeye
Birdeye is a monitoring platform suitable for local businesses and big enterprises. You can monitor online reputation, connect with prospects, and gain customer experience directly on its platform.
Customer reviews collected on Birdeye enable you to improve Google Seller Ratings and optimize Google Ads. You can improve your ad campaign’s click-through rate (CTR) and increase the likelihood of prospects landing on your website.
Takeaway
Whether you’ve been running a business for years or are about to enter the market, reputation research is fundamental. It lets you gather information and develop the right marketing strategy to boost sales.
Thanks to technology, performing reputation research has now become more manageable. You can leverage AI-driven social monitoring tools to check your brand online reputation. This way, you can work more efficiently and stay competitive in the industry.
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video production company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
