Everybody wants to go viral until they go viral for the wrong reason. In the age of social media, it only takes one misstep for a brand to go down in flames and have to spend years rebuilding their reputation.
On the other hand, a great reputation is something that all brands should aspire to. A great reputation builds your reach, pulls in more customers, increases customer loyalty, boosts your conversion rate, and generally helps you to achieve your goals.
To get the benefits of a great reputation and avoid the pitfalls of a poor one, a brand management strategy is a must. In this article, we’ll discuss best practices and how a good contact center can be central to brand management success.
But first, let’s look at what brand management is.
What is brand management?
Brand management is the practice of analyzing, monitoring, and optimizing your brand’s reputation and reach.
Branding has a significant impact on all aspects of your business, including lead generation, customer engagement, loyalty, and competitiveness. Brand management analyzes your current branding strategy and takes necessary steps to ensure your branding is clear, consistent, and constant across the business.
To build this reputation, an effective brand management strategy might include:
- Building awareness about your brand and products.
- Fostering positive relationships with your target audience.
- Analyzing market data to gain brand development insights.
- Conducting market research to find out what potential customers think about your brand.
- Creating, optimizing, and maintaining a strong visual identity.
- Implementing social listening.
- Damage limitation and management.
- Rebranding, if needed.
You’ll notice that there’s a lot of overlap here with other areas of marketing.
For example, if you’re conducting market research by running customer surveys over the phone, it’s a good idea for your brand manager to be involved.
Similarly, they should have input on things like B2B sales techniques, recruitment drives, and events to make sure there’s consistency in the way your brand is portrayed.
How does brand management work?
Brand management works differently for every business. But, in general, it requires analyzing, monitoring, and providing input on a number of departments and processes, alongside creating and curating brand assets, such as Tone Of Voice guidelines.
Some companies have a dedicated Brand Manager. They may not be part of a specific department, but their input will be vital in ensuring that all content and activities align with the company’s brand strategy.
Brand Managers are also responsible for certain aspects of PR, such as monitoring the brand’s reputation through social channels and stepping in when there’s a risk of reputation damage.
There are two broad categories for brand management: branding strategy and reputation management.
Branding strategy
A branding strategy seeks to make your brand more recognizable. It’s important to start by creating your branding so you can project your company image and create awareness.
It involves factors such as:
- Defining your brand identity, including your vision statement and target audience.
- Creating a compelling brand story.
- Designing your visual branding, including a unique color scheme, recognizable logo and branding assets.
- Compiling brand guidelines and style guides.
Reputation management
A successful brand reputation management strategy has five key steps:
- Monitor: Keep a close eye on your digital presence.
- Respond: Engage with people who engage with your brand.
- Promote: Proactively share content that will have a positive impact on your brand reputation.
- Manage: Oversee your digital presence to ensure everything is consistently in line with your marketing and branding strategies.
- Crisis Management: Step in to limit damage to your brand’s reputation in case of a crisis.
Why is a good contact center essential for proper brand management?
Fostering good customer relationships is a huge part of the brand management process. And a good contact center—along with your customer service agents, of course—is the best resource you have for building positive and long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Positive associations with your brand foster customer loyalty and provide long-term benefits for your brand reputation.
Customers build their strongest associations with your brand through interactions. Whether these interactions are with content marketing teams through social media or customer service teams through your contact center is irrelevant to the customer.
The important thing is that they have a positive experience every time.
So, a good brand management strategy should heavily incorporate your contact center and all its staff. That includes:
- Training contact center staff on customer experience best practices.
- Ensuring everyone with a customer-facing role understands the tone and values that build positive brand associations.
- Collecting and analyzing call center data for customer insights and insights about brand reputation.
- Empowering call center staff to contribute to your brand identity with their conversational and customer service styles.
- Showing staff how to dress and present themselves to give positive impressions during video calls.
All in all, as a key customer touchpoint (or touchpoints, depending on how many channels you handle), your contact center is a vital aspect of strategic brand management.
Brand reputation management best practices
1. Monitor your digital presence
Monitoring your digital presence is about more than checking in on your social media channels periodically. It means monitoring your entire digital footprint, including mentions outside your own channels and platforms.
Social listening tools will help you gather and analyze brand mentions (and other relevant keywords). Good social listening tools can even cross-reference your social listening analytics with conversational analytics from your virtual call center.
If you take an omnichannel approach, this is particularly beneficial. You’ll gain a nuanced picture of what people think about your brand, common issues they experience, and so on.
Look for social listening tools that alert you to threats and opportunities in real time. This will help you to be proactive and respond to things that need your attention immediately.
2. Be responsive
If customers have a good relationship with your brand, brand management becomes significantly easier. Customers who like you will write reviews and spread positive word-of-mouth, increasing your visibility and reputation while giving you free publicity.
But to build those positive relationships, you have to be responsive to customers. Reply to their queries and comments as quickly as you can, whether it’s a social media message or email.
This is where a VoIP phone system really comes into its own. Those with additional features such as a virtual receptionist and integrated app mean you can more efficiently manage and respond to interactions.
The quicker you can do this, the better—and this applies to negative comments and reviews, too. Liaise with your brand manager to ensure responses are professional and align with the company’s tone and values.
3. Promote positive content
If someone raves about your customer service team or leaves enthusiastic comments on your content, don’t be shy about it.
Share reviews and testimonials on your social channels and website. You could also incorporate positive feedback into marketing campaigns.
Using positive reviews in this way showcases your brand’s trust and authenticity, which goes a long way in building a positive reputation.
4. Manage your social media carefully
Social media moves extremely quickly So, it’s essential that you are consistent, proactive, and continuous with social media monitoring.
But brand management is about more than monitoring what’s happening outside of your company. You should also ensure anything you post, share, or engage with aligns with your strategy:
- Are you posting on the correct platforms for your target audience?
- Do your images and videos align with your branding guidelines?
- Does your content correctly reflect your brand values?
- Do all of your partners, influencers, and ambassadors positively reflect your brand?
- Does your paid content come across as spam or genuinely informative?
5. Crisis management if things go wrong
Crisis management and brand management go hand-in-hand.
Even if you never have to deal with a reputational crisis, it’s worth having a plan in place.
Start by identifying the different things that could negatively impact your reputation. Work out the forms the damage could take—for example, loss of followers or legal implications— and the impact the damage could have.
Then, determine how you would mitigate, limit, or even prevent these types of damage from happening.
For example, an environmentally conscious brand’s reputation would be damaged if they were found to be using unsustainable palm oil in their products. A good way to prevent this damage would be to be transparent about what ingredients or materials you are working to find ethical alternatives to.
Other crisis management techniques include quickly responding to poor reviews, issuing public apologies where necessary, actively and visibly listening to customer concerns, and producing reputation-boosting campaigns to combat bad press.
Effective brand management can fuel your business’ growth
An effective brand management strategy ensures a company-wide commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience and positively reflecting your brand’s values. That applies whether customers are interacting with you through your contact center or viewing social media ads.
So, remember these key components of brand management:
- Develop clear brand guidelines and share them with all departments.
- Ensure contact center teams are trained to deliver a positive experience that reflects your brand.
- Actively listen to customers and respond quickly to their comments.
- Share positive reviews and feedback to increase brand visibility.
- Leverage advanced tools to monitor your reputation in real-time.
Brand management success can fuel your company’s growth, fostering brand loyalty, bringing in more customers, and driving sales.
Frequently asked questions
What is meant by brand management?
Brand management involves boosting, monitoring, and safeguarding a brand’s image and reputation. An effective strategy aims to ensure clarity, consistency, and constancy in all of its messaging to spread brand awareness, foster customer relationships, and stand out from competitors in the market.
What are the main principles of brand management?
Brand management aims to promote brand loyalty and brand recognition through consistent branding. Ultimately, good branding brought about by good brand management helps a company to gain and maintain equity with audiences.
Originally published Sep 02, 2024
