Whether you have one location or thousands, you cannot afford to ignore brand reputation management. Reviews and ratings can give the smallest local business an advantage over a multinational enterprise. Why? Because customers want information that gives them confidence that they’re making the best decision. 

According to Birdeye studies:

  • Customers check online reviews nearly 70% of the time before working with a local business 
  • Over 90% of customers read more than two reviews, and over 50% of them read five or more reviews before deciding
  • 85% of customers avoided multi-location businesses due to recent negative reviews

These numbers highlight just how much reputation matters to consumers. Now, let’s explore strategies to boost your brand’s reputation and drive growth. 

Table of contents

What is brand reputation management?

Brand reputation management is the process of creating, monitoring, and managing the perception of your brand in the industry. This includes managing customer reviews, social media mentions, and online forums to build a positive perception and mitigate any negative impact actively. 

Why should you work on improving your online reputation?

Customers discover your brand on social media platforms, online forums, listing sites, and search engines. However, they research past performance, customer reviews, and market sentiment before engaging further. 

Online reputation management ensures potential customers see your best foot forward across channels. Some of the benefits of investing in brand reputation management are: 

  1. Enhanced visibility on listing sites, online forums, and search engines: Platforms prioritize businesses with established goodwill – showcasing reviews can help you outrank competitors. 
  2. Higher conversion rates: Reviews are one of the major deciding factors in every buyer’s journey. Stronger brand reputation management translates to a higher level of trust and, ultimately, better conversion rates. 
  3. Reduced advertising spends: Showcasing reviews on advertisements leads to higher clicks and lower overall spending. A strong reputation also means customers discover your brand on organic channels, limiting the need for aggressive paid campaigns. 
  4. A loyal community: Businesses focusing on brand reputation deliver higher customer experience standards. This builds a loyal customer base that refers to other potential customers, makes recurrent purchases, and strengthens the brand value.

How to measure brand reputation?

Accurately measuring brand reputation signals is the key to developing effective strategies. However, this is not as simple as checking reviews or tracking the average star rating for a large multi-location business. 

Brand reputation is a complex metric that measures signals from customer feedback surveys, online brand mentions, customer reviews, referral campaigns, sentiment analysis, social media engagement, and more. 

Image shows how Birdeye Score works

AI reputation management platforms like Birdeye provide unique scores that allow multi-location businesses to gauge and track their brand reputation management efforts. With Birdeye Insights AI, you can: 

  • Track customer sentiment across locations by analyzing reviews, local SEO performance, and customer feedback surveys 
  • Compare and benchmark performance against local and global competitors
  • Identify how customer experience, online discoverability, and customer feedback contribute to the overall reputation

Brand reputation management: 5 best practices to follow for accelerated growth 

Effective brand reputation management demands active involvement from your business. It’s about encouraging positive feedback, addressing concerns raised in negative reviews, steering social media conversations, and prioritizing customer experience. 

Here are some of the best practices to strengthen your brand’s reputation management efforts: 

  1. Proactive review generation and management 
  2. Social media monitoring and management 
  3. Negative feedback management across channels 
  4. Consistent review marketing 
  5. Customer experience management

Proactive review generation and management 

More reviews mean better credibility–but getting them isn’t always easy. Building a strong presence on review sites starts with a solid review generation strategy. 

Image shows how Birdeye Reviews AI works for businesses

Businesses must ensure that:

  • Every location has a strong presence on core sites like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Bing, as well as high-performing industry-specific review sites. 
  • Review generation tools integrate with CRM systems to instantly send review requests to all customers with personalized messages, periodic reminders, and follow-ups.
  • Every staff member is held accountable for review requests after in-store visits and personal interactions. 
  • Customers can quickly write reviews with one-click forms, QR codes, short review links within emails, and more.

But the buck doesn’t stop with generating customer reviews. A strong brand reputation management entails constant monitoring of review sites, instant review response, and diligent audits to spot fake/spam reviews. 

AI review management tools like Birdeye Reviews AI allow you to:

  • Generate professional and accurate review responses in seconds
  • Translate non-English reviews and respond in the native language without leaving the dashboard
  • Monitor 200+ review sites from a centralized dashboard with instant in-app alerts for every review 
  • Set up automated review response workflows to ensure no review goes missing
  • AI-driven review audits to spot potential fake and spam reviews 

Social media monitoring and management 

Your online reputation is not limited to review sites. Consumers also share experiences on social media, discussion forums, blogs, and news articles. A strong multi-location social media presence can help you keep track of conversations, engage with your audience, and build trust in your brand.

Image shows how businesses can use Social AI to monitor engagement

Here are a few tips on social media management to strengthen brand reputation: 

  • Actively monitor social media feeds for mentions, comments, and messages. A quick response can turn negative comments into positive testimonials. 
  • Work with tools that allow you to engage comprehensively via social media inbox. This will ensure that no message is missed and that customer experience stays strong. 
  • Repost customer stories to boost brand value. 

Negative feedback management across channels 

We all love positive feedback, but the key to a strong brand reputation is how well your teams handle negative feedback across review sites, online forums, customer messages, and social media. 

Image shows how businesses can manage negative feedback with Birdeye

Ensure that your team has a crisis management policy in place. Some of the best ways to manage negative feedback include: 

  • Responding to customers empathetically, showing them that you are focused on resolving their concerns. You can also offer to move the discussion to a private forum while you work on resolutions. 
  • Working with internal and external stakeholders to resolve the issue with a solid ticketing system
  • Closing the loop on the feedback with a public response on action taken on the issues. 
  • Requesting the customer to edit/remove the negative feedback if they are happy with the resolution and response. 

Consistent review marketing 

Happy customer voices make for the most powerful advertisement because they are unbiased, authentic, and descriptive. Take advantage of the rich content provided to you by your customers: promote great customer feedback on your company website, social channels, and any other company-owned pages. Birdeye lets you promote your best reviews in a real-time feed on your company website, share them as posts to your social channels, and display them as star ratings beside your business in search results — automatically.

Image shows how Birdeye Reviews AI boosts brand trust and visibility with review summaries

Customer experience management 

While generating reviews and addressing negative feedback is essential, it is still a reactive strategy. Businesses with a strong online reputation focus  on proactive measures, starting with enhancing the customer experience. 

You must enable easier communication with omnichannel marketing, offer convenience features like easy appointment booking, and integrated payment systems, and consistently dive into insights from feedback to improve internal processes. 

Step-by-step guide to creating effective brand reputation management strategy

Here is how you can develop a comprehensive brand reputation management strategy for your business: 

Assess your existing online reputation

Before you do anything else, start by measuring your existing brand reputation. This involves analyzing:

  • Listing performance: Verify accuracy, completeness, and performance on local search engines for targeted keywords.
  • Customer sentiment: Scan across customer reviews and internal feedback to identify strengths and weaknesses, promoters and detractors, and location-wise performance. 
  • Review performance: Analyze the growth of review volume, average star rating, and prevailing sentiment across multiple review sites and locations. 

Analyze competitor performance 

Auditing your reputation shows you where you stand, and assessing competitor performance tells you what to aim for and how to grow.

AI reputation management tools like Birdeye help you analyze:

  • Competitor performance across review and listing sites at the local and global level 
  • Benchmark industry standards to compete and rise effectively 
  • Analyze local-level performance to identify strengths, opportunities for improvement, and areas to focus on
Image shows how Birdeye Competitors AI

Identify critical channels

A brand and competitor audit shows you the platforms you must focus on. Combine this with the existing data on the target audience, including demographics, preferred channels, and website traffic referrals. 

This way, you can identify the critical review sites, listing platforms, and social media channels on which to build a presence. Now, you can commence review generation and outreach programs to boost your brand reputation on these platforms. 

Develop a crisis management plan 

Negative feedback is highly time-sensitive and requires expert-led actions instantly to prevent them from hampering brand reputation. That is why your team needs a comprehensive crisis management plan that tells them how to handle:

  • Negative feedback 
  • Unhappy customers
  • Abrasive social media comments, and more 

Audit data to derive insights 

Businesses that leverage their data to improve performance succeed faster. For multi-location businesses handling hundreds of customers across locations, tools like Birdeye Insights AI can offer instant GenAI-powered analysis and smart recommendations to safeguard reputation. 

Image shows how Insights AI worked

AI-powered insights help you understand:

  • Customer behavior and trends
  • Overall sentiment trends
  • Critical areas to focus on and improve brand reputation, and much more 

Conclusion

The best way to ensure a positive reputation is to consistently surprise and delight your customers with great experiences, both online and offline. Your customers should know what to expect whether they visit your London location or your Denver location, and they should leave feeling satisfied and appreciated, regardless of any issues that may have occurred during the experience.

The takeaway: Great customer experience drives positive word-of-mouth, and positive word-of-mouth drives customer acquisition. Implement a comprehensive reputation management strategy to make this process constant and seamless, and before you know it, your customers will be doing your marketing for you.

Frequently asked questions on brand reputation management

What are the three pillars of brand reputation management? 

The three pillars of brand reputation management are social listening, competitor performance monitoring, and customer feedback management. 

How do you build a brand reputation?

You can build a brand reputation by consistently generating customer reviews, boosting your presence on social media and listing platforms, and investing in customer experience enhancements. 

What is the difference between brand management and reputation management? 

Brand management is the process of creating a brand’s identity, value system, and reputation. Reputation management, on the other hand, is the process of constantly monitoring an online reputation and making efforts to strengthen it over time. 

How to leverage brand reputation? 

Businesses can leverage their strong brand reputation by showcasing positive testimonials on marketing materials, adding a review widget on their website, and encouraging the happy customer base to refer their peers and family members. 

Level up brand reputation management with Birdeye’s GenAI product suite 

Brand reputation management can be challenging, especially for growing multi-location businesses. With  a large customer base and and countless interactions, it can quickly become time-consuming, unless you have the right tool to streamline the process.

With Birdeye’s suite of GenAI products, you only have to set up the system once and let the magic unfold. With Birdeye, businesses can:

  • Work with the Reviews AI tool to auto-generate reviews, draft professional review responses, showcase positive reviews on websites with a handy AI-generated summary, and get a snapshot of customer sentiment. 
  • Strengthen local presence, outshine competitors, and ensure the accuracy of every local listing with Listings AI.
  • Manage multi-location social media via Social AI from a centralized dashboard with GenAI aiding in content creation, refinement, and analytics. 
  • Keep track of your online reputation with a universal metric (Birdeye Score) that shows how you fare across customer surveys, reviews, and local SEO performances. 

Step into the future of reputation management with Birdeye today. Watch the free demo to learn more. 

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This blog post is part of our Online Reputation Management Guide:




        

Online Reputation Management