The reputation of your brand will have a direct impact on your sales. Analyzing what people think about your brand is very important.
If people are talking negative things about your brand or even worse, not even talking about it then you are in serious trouble.
Your brand name should generate excitement or a sense of trust in the minds of people.
Taking feedback, improving your brand presence on the internet and building long-term relationships with your customers are important aspects of any business.
A reputation audit of your brand will help you to grow your business.
Don’t know how to do the audit? Keep reading this article and I will guide you through all the steps.
What is a Reputation Audit?
Why is Reputation Audit Important?
Know your Target Audience
Steps to Conduct a Reputation Audit
What is a Reputation Audit?
A reputation audit will help you in understanding what people think about your brand.
It will give you an in-depth review of where your brand is positioned in the market.
You will understand the strengths, threats, and weaknesses of your brand.
You will also get an idea of who your competitors are and how you are performing against them.
Why is Reputation Audit Important?
If you do a reputation audit you will understand how your brand is communicating with your target audience.
Gone are the days when marketing was a one-way route. Nowadays, people share their experiences on social media. If you don’t answer their grievances and treat them well your business won’t grow and eventually fall.
If you understand the relationship between your brand and the audience, you can understand flaws and work on them.
You can find out why your sales are not going up. You can make effective strategies to skyrocket your sales and improve your company’s presence.
If your online visibility is low and your reviews online are not good, your company will face a dull future.
Know your Target Audience
You should know who your target audience is before making the reputation audit. You can look at Google Analytics and other tools to know who your target audience is.
You should know what your customers want and how you are fulfilling their wants.
To make things easier for you answer the below questions to know your target audience:
- My products are made for which age group? OR Who can use my products or services?
- What is causing my audience to demand those products or services?
- How is my product helping them?
- What actions do I expect my audience to take?
- What audience my competitors are targeting?
Once you found out who your target audience is ask these questions to niche down:
- What are the demographics of my audience?
- What are their interests?
- Where do they hang out online?
- Who is the decision maker?
- What are their income and expenditure?
If you already have customers to whom you are selling your products you can create survey forms.
In this way, you will get a better understanding of what your customers want and how you can help them in an efficient way
Steps to Conduct a Reputation Audit:
1)Brainstorm Words Related to Your Business:
Think of words that people might use when they talk about your brand. Do a brainstorming session with your employees and then select 15-20 words that are closely related to your brand.
2)Time to Use Those Words:
Search those words on Google and check if your business website or your business name is appearing in the search results or not.
Check the first 3 pages. Review what people are saying about your products or services.
Also, keep an eye on how many times your website is appearing in the search results.
Then check out of all those visitors how many people actually click on your Website’s link. You can use Google Analytics for this purpose.
3)Check Review Sites:
Hop over to review sites where customers leave reviews about your product and service. Web Pages that appear on page one of Google for your company name or product keywords are very important.
Check if there are any negative reviews about your products. Understand what is lacking in your product or service.
Reply to those negative reviews politely. Tell them that you will improve things or explain why that particular thing went wrong.
Offer them a good reason to try your product or service again. If you have a lot of negative reviews then it is a big problem.
Understand what are the majority of complaints about (poor customer service, bad product quality, shipping delays, rude staff) and improve those things immediately.
If there are any negative reviews on an influencer’s website then contact them and thank them for their honesty. Ask them to try the improved version of the product.
Make sure this time you make them happy and provide them with a memorable experience.
If they are happy they might write another article praising your products.
If you find negative reviews in magazines then it is very tough to make magazines change their mind. In this case, make sure other magazines are praising your products.
4)Use Your Loyal or Satisfied Customers:
Make sure your loyal or satisfied customers leave a positive review. These reviews should be on Google and various other social media handles. Remember lots of positive reviews will have a positive impact on your brand.
5)Review Your Social Media Handles:
Search what people are saying about your brand on various social media handles.
Nowadays, people tag brands whenever they mention them so it would be easy for you to collect the data.
Understand for what product or service they are mentioning your brand and how many people engage on your social media handle.
Read the comments present in your posts. This will help you to get a better understanding of whether people are liking things that your brand is doing or not.
Check how many times your content has been shared on social media. You can use Instagram Analytics, Facebook Tools, or LinkedIn Automation Tools to get all the necessary data.
If you have a YouTube Channel check how many views are there on your videos.
Understand which videos are getting the most views. You can use YouTube Analytics to review these things.
6)Review Your Collected Data:
Now, it’s time to review the data that you have collected till now. You remember why we have collected this data right? To understand what people think about your brand across the web.
After collecting this data you will find yourself in these 4 situations:
No Web Presence – There is very little information about your brand on the web. People don’t know about your brand.
In this scenario, your main focus is to create a web presence and interact with customers online.
Less Web Presence – You do have information about your brand but it is from your website itself. This usually happens when you have recently started to create a presence online.
You need to make sure customers talk about your brand on various websites and on social media.
Negative Perception – There is a lot of information about your brand on the internet, but people don’t like your brand. You have tons of negative reviews on various platforms.
Don’t get shocked or sad. Relax and understand what things people don’t like about your products or services.
Improve your product and services and you will soon get positive reviews.
Positive Perception – People are impressed with your services. Everything is positive but don’t get too excited. You need to keep growing.
Add more features to your existing products. Remember if you are careless, a positive web presence will soon turn into a negative one.
Conclusion
As you can see online reputation audit can be very helpful for your business. Most importantly, you can do the audit yourself.
Remember analyzing your reputation online is as important as other things.
If people are not talking about your brand online then your business will soon come to an end.
The market has become very competitive and that’s why you need to be alert all the time. You need to constantly monitor and work on improving things.
FAQ
Why is a reputation audit important for my brand?
A reputation audit will tell you what your target audience thinks about your brand.
You will understand if your audience has a positive perception of your brand or negative perception. You will also understand where your brand stands in the market.
Which are the best reputation audit tools?
Some of the best reputation audit tools are Google Alerts, SEMrush, RankRanger, Social Mention, and SentiOne.
What is the meaning of reputation audit in simple words?
In simple words, a reputation audit is a way to understand what people think about your brand.
Can I do a reputation audit myself?
Yes, you can easily do a reputation audit by yourself. You don’t need to hire someone as the process is quite simple.
