Whether you are a worldwide business with millions of customers or just a simple startup that is making it’s first journey into the world of the internet, how others see and feel about your brand is extremely important. This is just as important if you are making your first sale or your millionth. The product, service and experience that your brand and online identity represent will be a huge factor in the overall success of your business.
In a previous post, I talked about how a blog can help protect your brand online and also why it’s so important to build loyalty towards your brand. In this article we are going highlight some of the best resources and tools for improving how your brand looks online. This includes everything from visual branding, monitoring the search results, getting active on social media and even how to better deliver your content online.
Before jumping into our recommended tools and resources, we should first take a look some of these online reputation management stats that were recently highlighted by SEOBrand.com. The key takeaway in each of these cases is that even if you have 100 satisfied customers, just one negative complaint can ruin your online reputation.
- Local business reviews are read by 85% of consumers
- 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
- 33% of traffic from Google’s organic search results go to the 1st item listed
How your brand is seen online (search, social, review sites) can have a huge impact on whether or not someone will continue to click over to your site or utilize the services you have to offer.
However, the good news is that there are plenty of ways to improve how your brand looks online while also delivering a better customer experience and branding play in the process. What’s even more exciting is that many of these tools and resources have automated the process or at the least made it much easier than what used to take place years ago.
5 Great Resources to Help Build a Better Online Brand
Below I have highlighted five well-known and recommended tools that can help you build an established and trustworthy brand online. Each of them are unique in their own way so be sure to see what each has to offer.
- Google Alerts – As a legitimate website or brand, you should be ranking at the top of the search results for your name. However, what else might be ranking for your name as well? Knowing how to actively monitor new content as it makes its way into the search results is key for branding and reputation management purposes. Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to actively monitor any new mentions that appear within the search results.
Tool Tip: Follow all variations of your brand name and also your personal name. You can setup as many alerts as you like, as well as how often you would like to receive them. - Designhill / 99Designs – A logo is a great way to make your brand stand out from the crowd. The good news is that there is no longer a need to pay thousands of dollars for a logo design from an expensive ad agency. Through design marketplaces like Designhill and 99Designs, you can have high-quality logo concepts created from thousands of individuals designers and pay only a fraction of what an agency would cost.
Tool Tip: Design marketplaces are a great way to get initial concept designs. Go with a higher package so you can get multiple designs drafts and guarantee that you find a logo design you are happy with. - Wishpond – Delivering your message to an audience that visits to your site, follows you on social media or those who want to get updates through email newsletters is now a requirement for nearly every brand in the world today. Wishpond has created a platform of powerful tools that makes it easy for any site or brand to better control how they deliver content and generate leads online. Such tools are important when trying to improve your online reputation, as it will allow you to cater your message differently based on the media outlet being used, but also to help your audience and customers stay engaged with your brand.
Tool Tips: Two of the best tools within Wishpond are the ability to create social media contests and branded landing pages, which are both great ways to bring exposure to your brand while also giving your audience what they want. - MeetEdgar – Social media management is one of the most important areas to monitor when trying to see how others might see brand mentions online. It’s not just about knowing what’s out there, it’s also about having an active presence as well. We all know that social media management takes time, so with a tool like MeetEdgar, you can schedule in social media updates across all of the major networks. This not only saves times, but it also allows you to keep an active presence in social media without spending endless hours scheduling in new daily content and updates.
Tool Tip: Take the time to set up a monthly schedule for your social updates. Once this is in place within MeetEdgar, you can keep the same schedule month after month and save several hours per month with this automation tool. - Knowem – Having an active following on social media isn’t just about being on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn… it’s also about protecting your brand name and having a presence across all platforms. Knowem is a service and tool that will allow you to search for your brand name across all social networks and let you know where the name is already registered or if it’s currently available. This is a requirement for any brand that wants to protect who is using their name and where.
Tool Tip: Even if you are only using the most well known social networks in the world, it doesn’t mean millions of people aren’t using others. Take the time to register your brand and personal name across all social networks available.
While the idea of reputation and brand management might seem overwhelming at first, once you’ve taken the time to look through everything and implement any of the research and automation tools above, it will become a lot easier.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post — it only takes one complaint or negative review to cause a world of frustration and horror for how others might feel about your brand. These are some of the most well-known and trusted content creation and management tools being used by millions of brands in the world today. Try each of them out and see how they might work for you.
Have you tried any other solutions for online brand and reputation management? Share your favorites in the comments below.
Originally published Jan 22, 2016, updated Aug 07, 2020
