Brand Reputation Analysis: 4 Key Techniques for Business Success

We like to think of brand reputation analysis as the key to understanding how your customers perceive your business.

If you take it seriously, measuring brand reputation can even feel like a bit of a superpower.

Why? Because careful reputation analysis will allow you to make informed decisions that appeal directly to your target audience.

Let's start with some examples.

For a beauty brand, successful reputation analysis could lead to bringing back a previously discontinued product that is gaining unexpected praise from micro-influencers on TikTok.

For a fast food brand, it could mean spotting a brewing crisis before it goes viral on social media - and stopping it in its tracks.

The Cornerstones of Brand Reputation Analysis

In this guide, we're going to pinpoint four techniques that will help you track brand reputation and build a positive reputation that sticks.

We'll start by looking at the importance of feedback from customers. In particular, we'll look at why online reviews can be helpful in transforming reputation, regardless of whether they are good or bad.

Monitoring social media is also an important task when it comes to making sense of how your followers and customers feel about your brand.

We'll look at some brand reputation tools that could help speed up the job of brand reputation analysis - because a powerful media monitoring tool can be a game changer when it comes to successful reputation analysis.

Finally, we'll let you in on some secrets of the trade regarding competitive analysis and benchmarking, and share some pointers for holding onto a great reputation.

Understanding Brand Reputation

So, what is brand reputation and why is it important? Well, in short, it could make or break your business.

Unlike personal reputation, there's a bit of a formula to the reputation of a brand. That formula includes things like product quality, levels of customer service, and trustworthiness.

Let's look at those factors in more detail.

Essence of Brand Reputation

It sounds extreme, but it's true: The future of your business could depend on its reputation.

Bring in enough positive mentions, and you can transform levels of customer trust, loyalty, and ultimately, sales.

The reputation of a brand hinges on a few things. It's essentially made up of the perceptions, beliefs, and opinions that people hold about the company, products, and services.

Unfortunately, a good reputation is not something that can be built overnight.

Instead, it's an ongoing process that requires you to keep your promises, talk to your customers, and quickly nip any negative publicity or feedback in the bud.

Components of Brand Reputation

There are several key components that make up a strong brand reputation.

We like to think of them as magic ingredients that combine to serve up a positive brand image and a competitive advantage in your industry.

Let's look at those ingredients in a little more detail.

Quality

Offering high-quality products or services should be your top priority.

Customers are more likely to remain loyal and recommend your services to others if they truly believe they have found something that is exceptionally well-made or meets a common need.

Customer Service

Exceptional customer service is something that people will talk about to their friends.

Promptly addressing and resolving customer concerns will not only help retain current customers, but also attracts new ones through positive word-of-mouth.

Transparency

Building and maintaining customer trust is all about being honest and transparent about your business practices.

Let the customers into behind-the-scenes details by explaining some of the process and reasoning behind your decisions, and be open to receiving feedback.

Consistency

Consistency in brand image and messaging is great for a brand's reputation.

Through coherent branding and clear communication, customers will know what to expect and associate your business with a specific set of values.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Demonstrating corporate social responsibility, such as environmental sustainability or support for social causes, can help to build a positive reputation if it aligns with the values of your customers and overall societal interests.

The Impact of Customer Feedback on Brand Reputation

One of the main cornerstones of brand reputation analysis is feedback.

In order to boost a brand's reputation, you'll need to encourage some impressive positive reviews and learn how to expertly tackle any negative review that comes your way.

Learning From Feedback

A brand's reputation relies heavily on customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction leads to positive reviews, and these are a great opportunity to strengthen your brand image. That then gives you the confidence to do more with your brand and expand.

A careful reading of feedback on review sites can also give you valuable insights into the things customers love about your brand, and the areas where you probably need to do a bit of improvement.

But what if you're not getting many online reviews?

You could start by asking customers to share their experience on notable review platforms - especially if their experiences are positive.

A happy customer is often happy to let others know that they've had a great experience.

You could also publicly thank customers for their feedback to show that customer opinions are important to your company.

Don't be shy - collect customer feedback and share the best examples on your website and marketing materials so others can read it too.

Mitigating Negative Feedback

None of us are infallible, and every brand will receive customer complaints or negative reviews at one point or another.

While it can be tempting to shy away or ignore negative sentiment, tackling it head-on is much better for your brand's reputation.

Keep it simple: Acknowledge the customer's concern and offer an apology, then investigate the issue and find a possible solution.

And remember, it's not all bad. Negative customer sentiment is an opportunity to learn and implement changes that will lead to a better reputation in the future.

The Role of Social Media in Reputation Management

Social media has become an integral part of brand reputation management.

When plotting reputation analysis, you don't want to skimp on monitoring and analyzing the conversations involving your brand.

That's because millions of users are discussing brands and sharing their opinions in wide-reaching places like Instagram comments, TikTok videos, and Facebook business pages.

First, we'll look at how you can monitor all those brand mentions, then we'll look at how to track customer sentiment at scale.

Monitoring Brand Mentions

To keep tabs on the reputation of your brand, you need to be aware of what people are saying about it on social media.

By monitoring your brand mentions, you can gain real time insights into how your brand is viewed by its target audience and spot potential issues before they get worse.

So, how do you track brand mentions?

First, you could set up alerts and notifications that give you updates when your brand is mentioned.

You could also use social media monitoring tools to automate the process and conduct sentiment analysis. We'll talk more about that in the next section.

Don't forget to monitor relevant hashtags and keywords, as the conversations surrounding these will give you an idea of the general temperature of customer sentiment around your brand. Tweetdeck, for example, allows you to follow numerous hashtags and stay on top of the game.

Finally, stay engaged and make sure you're tracking social media conversations on all social media platforms - not just those where you have a presence.

Analyzing Social Media Sentiments

Understanding the sentiment behind all the conversations on social platforms is a vital part of managing your brand's reputation.

Social media sentiment analysis will give you a much better picture of the ideas and thoughts that people hold about your brand.

To crack open the tricky task of sentiment analysis, start by categorizing mentions into positive, negative, and neutral, to gauge the overall feeling surrounding your brand.

Obviously, if you find more examples of positive sentiment than negative, your brand's reputation is probably in pretty good shape.

It's also a great idea to monitor sentiment trends and recurring patterns over time. That way you'll be best placed to spot red flags and take appropriate action.

The sentiment analysis process can be automated with machine learning and natural language processing techniques, but you'll need some software to help.

Analytical Tools for Reputation Analysis

Tracking each and every individual mention of your brand online can be challenging - especially if you're conducting reputation analysis for a large company.

Thankfully, there are some handy tools that can help with brand reputation analysis.

Social Listening Tools

Social media is probably the busiest conversation hub in the world.

A huge amount of conversations are taking place 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - and if even a small percentage of those conversations are about brands and their products, that's still a lot.

It would be almost impossible to track those conversations - and brand mentions - without social listening tools.

For many social media teams, social listening tools are an essential part of maintaining a positive brand reputation.

Notable social listening tools include those like Cision Social Listening (powered by Brandwatch) and Sprout Social - all of which will allow you to monitor social media mentions and engage with your audience.

With one of these trusty tools in your back pocket, you can track your brand's mentions, measure sentiment, and identify influencers that could boost your brand's reputation.

Media Monitoring Techniques

Media monitoring is another crucial aspect of your brand reputation analysis.

Whenever your brand gets media coverage, the tone of that mention could directly impact your brand's image.

Similarly to social listening tools, a media monitoring tool could help you stay ahead of the curve.

CisionOne is a great all-in-one option, tracking all mentions across news outlets and social media platforms in one place, and also providing extensive analytics.

Evaluating Competitive Brand Positioning

Another important part of brand reputation analysis is knowing how you measure up against your competitors.

Here's how to conduct careful competitor analysis that will specifically measure brand reputation, and benchmark against industry standards.

Conducting Competitor Analysis

If you want to know more about your brand's competitive positioning, you'll need to get used to doing some competitor analysis.

This process involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors, analyzing their strategies, and understanding their strengths and weaknesses.

By doing so, you can gain insights into their brand perception - and hopefully use the results to get a competitive edge for your brand.

Simply start by making a list of your main competitors - these might be established or emerging brands.

Analyze their marketing strategies using publicly available data, or get a deeper understanding by using a competitive intelligence tool to scour your rivals.

Consider their pricing strategy, promotional activities, and distribution channels. Don't forget to take note of any trends or patterns in the industry.

Next up you want to take a really close look at their online presence. Look into specifics like the comments on their Instagram posts and their Google reviews. This will give you an overview of their brand perception and customer engagement.

Finally, evaluate their product or service offerings. Think about things like features, quality, pricing, and market segments.

Benchmarking Against Industry Standards

You can also use benchmarking to see how your brand's reputation measures up against industry standards.

Consider factors like brand awareness and market share, and pay attention to your competitor's strategies for boosting their own reputation.

Focus closely on brand perception - analyze customers' opinions and feelings towards your brand and compare them to your competitors. You can gather this information through customer reviews, surveys, and social media listening.

How to Maintain a Great Reputation

Hopefully you're on your way to building a great reputation - and now you want to make sure you can hold onto it with both hands.

Once you have some strategies in place for reputation analysis, keep doing what you're doing.

Watch those online reviews like a hawk. Bookmark relevant review sites and visit them daily, or use brand reputation tools to automate some online review analysis.

Use a social listening tool to help with the process of tracking online conversations. Keep an eye out for mentions of your brand in the media, and watch how they impact your brand.

Finally, compare your efforts to your competitors' strategies with some comprehensive analysis. Hopefully, you're leading the pack.

Brand Reputation Analysis: 4 Essential Techniques for Business Success