6 Tips for Strengthening Brand Reputation
In the 20th century, the most valuable assets of a business organisation were its production equipment.
However, a business is often undermined because it tends to neglect the impact that intangible assets such as brand reputation can have on their firm’s value.
As per a report by Thomson Reuters and Interbrand highlighted by Forbes:
Three decades ago approximately 95 percent of the average corporation’s value consisted of tangible assets, but today 75 percent of the business’s value is intangible.
The above statistics clearly state that today, a business’s most valuable asset comprises of a good name, its brand identity and reputation.
Insights on Brand Reputation
Both “Brand” and “Reputation” is important for businesses, because of the competitive advantage they provide to any business to sustain their position in their niche market.
Interestingly enough, a reputation has existed since human interactions.
As a matter of fact, status exists even before communication actually begins.
Customers do not make buying decisions simply because of the promises that your Brand makes.
Instead, they are most likely to take some action because of what they believe about your brand or how someone speaks about their experiences with the Brand.
Putting it directly; it is your reputation that adds value to your business name and encourages them to act.
However, wait there’s more!
Believing that a strong brand reputation alone is not responsible for the success or failure of your business is a wrong notion.
Even your name, at times, can influence the company’s reputational value and plays an equally important role in making the business successful or a failure.
Wondering how?
Well, when you have just started your online business venture or are just a startup firm, you will need to build your reputation.
And, it is your brand that will help develop a reputation, by making marketing efforts.
Related Article: How do you Create Emotional Branding?
Example Demonstrating How Branding Influences Reputation
Dropbox is one of the most famous personal cloud storage companies, having 300 million users.
The irony is that when Dropbox was not made available for public use when it began.
What ignited their growth was a marketing strategy that helped them become a brand.
Wondering what?
Dropbox added a “Get free space button” on their main web page, along with an offer.
According to the offer, if a friend uses invitation of an existing Dropbox user to sign up for a Dropbox account, then that user would be rewarded a bonus of 500 megabytes of free space.
This helped in increasing the sign-ups to as much as 60%.
In a nutshell, branding can have a positive or negative impact on reputational influence.
Strengthen Your Brand to Create a Positive Reputational Influence
Of course, you will be interested in knowing ways that can help increase your brand value in the market, so as to create a positive reputational impact on your users’ mind.
Related Article: How Attractive Branding Yields Higher Revenue
6 Brand Reputation Tips for Success
1. Create a Good Product
Before investing even a dime into your marketing and branding efforts, think carefully about your product or service.
Try and analyse the value proposition of your product or service, and be sure if it is ready to go live or not.
In essence, your top priority should be to build an excellent product.
You may put a lot of your valuable time and effort into thinking of some great marketing strategies to turn your product into a brand, but if your product sucks, you will not be able to create a good reputation.
Even if, you are successful in dragging your target audience into viewing (or using) the product, they are eventually going to leave.
Bottom line: Instead of paying more attention to marketing, focus more on your product.
2. Choose a Catchy Name For Your Startup
You can easily come across several awful startup names — that are spelt poorly and capitalised in a nonsensical manner.
But, remember that your startup name is the first thing that your users will notice about you and your brand.
A catchy and bizarre (yet relevant) name will arouse curiosity among people about your business and compel them to learn more about it.
So, make sure to invest enough time into thinking a name that’s captivating and easily help in grabbing your users attention.
You should choose a name of your company that is easy to remember, doesn’t give users much trouble to spell it.
Also, avoid using a word that when Googled brings up many results, but won’t show your company’s name on the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Bottom line: Choosing the right name for your company is an important branding decision — that can in attracting the attention of potential customers towards you.
Related Article: Is Your Brand Message Losing You Customers?
3. Avoid Using Technical Lingo
As a startup founder, you might get fascinated with tech and entrepreneurial language, and may end up using it too much than required, when talking about your business.
But keep in your mind that not everyone is familiar with technical jargons like ERP, CRM, — that are used on a business website.
It is important that you can describe the functions performed by your company to anyone, without much difficulty.
However, it is easy to become overwhelmed with technical lingo that results in adding too much jargon and acronyms.
However, to effectively communicate with your users to make your brand propel forward, you must not overwhelm readers with technical prose.
Bottom line: Often businesses create presentations littered with technical lingo that reduces the capacity of readers to understand your intended brand messages.
And so, try to steer clear of using jargon.
But if you still need to use some, try to do so sparingly.
4. Create Awareness About Your Product by Telling a Story
So you have come up with a great product that you believe is brilliant.
But, is it right for your audience as well?
Well, just making anything available to your users is not enough to make people talk about it.
Your product exists and is ready, might be great news for you (and your team), but it might still get unnoticed by your target audience without creating awareness about its existence.
The best way to tell the world about your product is to tell them a compelling story.
Tell your story using visually appealing and enticing photos to let people know about its overall worth, and providing useful information that helps you establish as a niche brand in your industry.
Bottom line: Visuals are believed to have a high impact on the human brain, and thus crafting a story can help in shaping your users’ perceptions of your brand.
Related Article: Branding is an Experience: Tips to Succeed with Your Brand
5. Make Your Voice Heard Using Content Curation
Content curation is an effective content marketing tool that helps in captivating audiences and convinces them to take the desired action.
After all, it helps in presenting the most useful and relevant pieces of information that contribute to adding value to end-users.
When starting out your journey to building a brand, chances are you will not get immediate and expected attention of your audiences.
But, make sure to write original, consistent and useful content for your audience, as it will eventually help in establishing your brand and build a reputation amongst likely customers.
However, when writing content, make sure to focus on your target audience needs more than your brand.
Bottom line: Content curation can help in increasing your brand’s credibility, and helps attract a good amount of traffic.
6. Respond Appropriately to Customers
As the brand grows, managing it can be difficult and challenging.
Even a single misstep can put your brand and company in a bad light.
But, in the worst case scenario when something goes wrong, have you wondered how you can deal with it?
The best way to cope up with such a situation is to address the problem in an honest and transparent manner.
Simply put, accept your mistake and let your users know what you are doing to fit it.
But, make sure to test your product, before making it available to users, as your improved version of the brand can misfire as well.
Most importantly, remember not to take things too personally.
Most entrepreneurs get easily offended reading bad reviews or negative comments and end up taking a step that can further spoil their brand and its reputation.
Bottom line: It is imperative that you should not get so enmeshed in hearing something bad about your brand and company. Instead, sit back and think before responding to criticism personally.
Related Article: Why Invest in Branding?
Final Thoughts
It is no secret that reputation can have a significant impact on whether users will perceive your brand in a negative or positive light.
However, startups usually have to build their reputation, and rather they focus on establishing brand identity first.
A good name helps in increasing consumer awareness and make a user emotionally attached, and so forth.
Most importantly, adhering to brand’s commitment assist in creating the reputation.
So as a brand grows in popularity, the more it will contribute to earning a good brand reputation.
Here’s hoping that the key points discussed in the post will help you guide in creating a strong brand, as a part of your reputation building process.
Author Bio: With the prominent effort in the area of web design industry Jack Calder is an expert professional in Markupcloud Ltd where he has been an ultimate designer who converts psd to html files extensively with extra efforts and perfect strategies.
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