49% of consumers trust online reviews more than recommendations from family members. Treatment of employees is one of the biggest causes of consumers criticizing businesses online. Not too far below, sustainability concerns drive consumers from less to more sustainable companies.
What this means is that corporate reputation management is crucial.
How your business is perceived by customers, employees, and others affects potential customers’ purchase decisions. It also affects employee morale. Good corporate reputations lead to more sales and insulation against PR crises.
So, let’s review what exactly corporate reputation management is and the most effective ways to start improving it.
What is Corporate Reputation Management?
Corporate reputation management is the crafting and maintenance of a company’s public image. It’s the management of the sum of all beliefs held about your company by employees, customers, and others. Modern businesses rely on carefully maintained reputations to maintain their markets and respond to potential risks.
Customer sentiments, press coverage, and online search results can be used to measure the state of your corporate reputation. Quality and quantity both play a part in measuring corporate reputations. The outcomes of a good corporate reputation include:
- Better performance in target markets.
- A better ability to withstand bad PR events.
- Smoother B2B sales and contracts.
The importance of your corporate reputation never decreases. There are several reasons why corporate reputation management is more important now than ever.
Why Corporate Reputation Management Matters
In the age of instant messaging over the Internet, corporate reputation management is more difficult. Companies need more thorough strategies to be dynamic and respond to changes.
Incidents, news, memes, and everything else spread like wildfire, having strong and instantaneous effects on companies.
For many consumers and B2B peers, a company’s reputation is more important than the prices it charges. Corporate reputations carry at least vaguely measurable values measured by consumers’ buying decisions. Business customers calculate the implications of doing business with a company based on its reputation.
Aspects of an Excellent Corporate Reputation
A good corporate reputation results from strong moral leadership and carefully managed channels. To understand corporate reputation management, we need to break down its components.
Leadership Reputation
Leaders need to be looked up to as good examples for employees. If executive leadership has a good reputation among employees, it’s possible to create a better workplace culture and implement better practices, including public-facing interactions.
A corporation with poorly regarded leadership may demoralize employees and make reputation management difficult. Rumours or bad press can cause irreparable damage.
A corporate reputation normally flows from the top down. While “organizational culture” can be hard to quantify and track, we now understand very well that leaders set trends and expectations in business.
Workplace Culture
The workplace culture is the day-to-day productive and emotional machinery of a workspace. If cynicism or other negative attributes come to define a workplace, a damaged reputation is inevitable. However, if professionalism and friendliness are the accepted norms, productivity and PR will likely trend more positively.
A good workplace culture is something that should be fostered continuously over time. Think of all the extreme news stories regarding employees’ behaviour, both great and horrible. Poor workplace culture is usually the culprit behind customers’ horror stories. But great customer service stories are often the result of a good workplace culture.
Online Reputation
The online aspect of a corporate reputation has become the primary aspect. Online reputation management is a more complex and dynamic facet of corporate reputation management. However, with the right approach, online reputation gains can be the most impactful at a relatively low cost.
Your online corporate reputation is the general perception that internet users get. It’s the sum total of a few moving parts.
First, there is your search engine reputation. When someone looks up your brand name on Google, what do they see? Or if they’re looking for products you offer, how is your brand presented to them?
Second, online reviews are ubiquitous now. Google reviews are the most common and important, but there are many online review platforms that potential customers can see. The reviews that customers leave for your business will be the main factor in the decisions of 54% of customers.
Third, reputation metrics and KPIs give you a strong idea of how your brand is perceived. Online reputation metrics and KPIs include:
- Review ratings.
- Online sentiment analysis.
- Brand mentions or share of voice.
- Crisis preparedness (auditable).
- Influencer engagement.
- Social media engagement and sentiment analysis.
- Website traffic.
- Competitor benchmarks.
Other situational metrics are also used by companies engaged in certain online marketing efforts. Online marketing tools employ their own metrics for aspects of online marketing relevant to them. For example, domain authority scores with SEO software are aggregated scores covering all your online marketing indicators relevant to SEO.
Surveys & Other Measurements of Your Corporate Reputation
Digital marketing and reputation management tools automate a great deal of data collection. However, marketing teams can still largely rely on surveys for actionable information.
Deploying customer surveys is one way to probe into the values of your average customer. You can directly survey online customers to find out where they heard about your brand and why they support it.
Corporate reputations aren’t built solely by outsiders, however. Surveying employees, especially HR, and stakeholders provides a more complete image of how insiders and outsiders perceive the corporate reputation.
Corporate Reputation Management vs Brand Crisis Management
A good corporate reputation reduces the risk of a crisis. But sometimes, something happens that a good reputation alone can’t cover.
A strong crisis response is much easier when your corporate reputation is strong. However, to craft a worthwhile crisis management strategy, you will need to examine brand crisis management on its own.
Effective communication and fast responses are everything during a reputational crisis. There are certain prerequisites you need to meet to respond well to a brand crisis:
- Trained response: The response must be not only timely but professional and calm.
- A statement: As soon as a crisis hits, it is crucial to take control of the situation. That means addressing the issue and outlining the response. When done well, this protects your corporate reputation and keeps the narrative from spinning out of control.
- Designated spokespersons: During a crisis, you need to provide consistent messaging that aligns with your real plans and actions. So, designated spokespersons should be the only ones representing the company to the public. Caution is particularly important when it comes to media interactions.
- Ongoing monitoring: Monitor coverage of the PR crisis to guide your next steps.
How to Protect Your Corporate Reputation
Protecting your corporate reputation is all about proactivity. Every company cares about its brand image, but companies often fail to react meaningfully until it’s too late. If a company has already firmly established a poor reputation or has dived into a PR crisis, its options are limited.
Before getting to that stage, let’s review some practices that proactively protect a corporate reputation.
Monitor Online Mentions
First, it’s important to:
- Get an idea of how your business is perceived by customers and potential customers online.
- Continuously monitor changes, so you know when customers start loving or hating some part of your products, services, or customer service.
A good reputation is more difficult to build than a bad one; gaining a great corporate reputation can take years of diligence. But one mismanaged issue or ongoing laziness with customer interactions can take a toll on your business quickly. So, how do you see when a problem is arising?
Use Online Reputation Monitoring Tools
Manually searching the web for all coverage of your brand isn’t useful, even when it’s feasible. Using online reputation management software, you can:
- Automate your reputation monitoring.
- Start generating new reviews.
- Get notifications of new reviews.
- Get alerted if significant negative coverage of your brand emerges.
Software solutions dedicated to online reputation monitoring provide assurance and efficiency that you can’t get from alternatives. They centralize every aspect of your online reputation management so that you can regain control over how your brand is perceived online.
The solution is to track your performance with a dedicated online reputation management tool. Reviewshake’s Review Analytics features include alerts, reports, and competitor analysis. It tracks current and emerging trends in your reviews across all online platforms. This enables you to take control, make choices based on customer feedback and then see the results of your changes!
Corporate Reputation Management Examples
Even with the best corporate reputation management strategy, PR problems can arise. All it takes is one mistake from any one employee to potentially spiral out of control. But that’s only if your business is caught sitting on its hands…
Despite the negativity of many online spaces, PR crisis management plans can save the day, when planned and executed well. Many of the largest businesses in the world have experienced PR nightmares, but then fully recovered from them. KFC’s chicken shortage crisis or the Gucci sweater crisis offer two great examples. But keep in mind, in both cases, the companies were well-prepared for PR crises of all kinds.
These may be bizarre examples. But the thing about PR crises is that they can come from anywhere, are usually unexpected, and are often bizarre.
You can’t prepare for every single plausible PR crisis, but you can come up with a good response that includes:
- An amenable template response letter.
- Preparedness for transparency and proactivity.
- Taking responsibility for outcomes.
- Designations for public spokespersons who are best able to be the head of the crisis response.
- Social media response strategy.
- Guidelines for communicating with the public to avoid making the situation worse.
All of the worst examples of PR crises gone wrong normally included apathy or an inability to respond on the part of a company. Being fast to respond, calm, and open to accountability can do a lot of good.
PR Repair Campaigns
Assuming you’re in a PR crisis, it’s time to put your crisis management strategy to work.
If you are completely unprepared for a major blow to your company’s reputation, you have a lot of work ahead of you. You will essentially be required to start from scratch, making many major changes to your business.
You will essentially be redirected to the step of “preparing” a crisis management plan. The only difference is that it will be far more rushed, and there are more chances for things to go wrong. Preparation is everything!
Take Control of Your Corporate Reputation
Corporate reputation management isn’t something that fixes itself, unfortunately. It’s an ongoing effort centered around a good corporate culture and excellent customer service. But most of the other factors that go into it can be managed with some diligence and the right tools.
Online reputation management is increasingly important for businesses. Most customers’ journeys start with online searches, with a focus on online reviews. The right effort can ensure that you get more positive reviews and that you are ready to respond to any negative reviews or other online coverage of your brand.
Build a Better Corporate Reputation With Reviewshake
Corporate reputation management is a multifaceted and continuous process. But with a plan including strategies and the right list of tools to use, it becomes easier and offers your company greater potential.
One of the most impactful steps you can take right now is taking your online corporate reputation into your own hands. With Reviewshake, you can do all the things you need to foster an impactful online approach:
A well-managed corporate reputation enhances your company’s competitive advantage. A better reputation also means increased customer loyalty, investor confidence, and overall market success.
By prioritizing reputation management, you can foster a resilient and trustworthy corporate image that attracts and retains stakeholders. Reviewshake is here to help you drive long-term growth and sustainability. Click here to learn more.
