Your brand’s reputation is your customers’ perception of your brand. It is the way your customers perceive your images, copy, videos, social media, and more. Many brands don’t have a clear insight into how their (potential) customers view their brand and what their general reputation is. In this blog post, we discuss the importance of a brand reputation audit and how you can set this up. Let’s start!
How to measure your brand reputation through web and social media
It is becoming increasingly important to know how your brand is coming across to your customers, especially online. In the online world, things are changing rapidly. The Metaverse is around the corner and the digital world is expected to become even more important to our businesses, to an extent that we can not even grasp yet.
Chris Lawson, Content and Marketing Director at GNM, explains the importance of a brand reputation in an article he wrote for campaignlive:: ’’Reputation matters because it represents your point of view on the world and values. It’s why people come to trust you and it gives your media channel or brand credibility. In today’s digital world, if you break that trust your legitimacy crumbles, more swiftly than ever. Whereas if you nurture your reputation, your influence will grow and so will engagement and reach’’. But how do you measure your brand’s reputation online? We will dive into this and discuss the best practices below.
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Brand reputation analysis and audit: best practices
Whilst the word ‘audit’ might sound like a huge investigation, in theory, it is a process in which you will get more helpful insights on your customers, brand reputation, and the way you profile your brand. The audit will show you how you perform on social media, how you can improve your communication style, and how your (potential) customers perceive you. You might come across interesting new findings that can help you further grow your business.
Let’s look into 5 ways to conduct a brand reputation audit!
Tip 1: Brand Reputation Metrics
Before starting the research it is best to look into brand reputation metrics. These are the metrics you can use that will help you analyze the way that people perceive your brand. They are very important because, in the end, how are you going to make sure that you are spending your time and money on the right things if you don’t analyze them? You need to know how your target market responds to what you do; setting up these metrics is the first thing to do to get more information.
What kind of metrics are there?
There are many metrics that you can set up to analyze. We will mention three metrics that can help you start to set up your brand reputation audit. We will discuss sentiment analysis, Share of Voice (SOV), and key messages. There are, of course, many more metrics that you can investigate; let’s start with these three!
Sentiment Analysis: This analysis helps you to gain more information on the ‘sentiment’ that people have around your brand. Sentiment is a feeling and you want to know if the perception and feeling of your customers on your brand is negative or positive. You do this by analyzing comments that have been placed on your website, social media accounts, or feedback that you’ve received.
Share of Voice: Share of Voice shows you how much of a conversation around a certain topic is going on about your brand or your competitors. This shows you your brands’ popularity in your market. This also helps indicate who your main competitors are. How can you get the conversation to revolve around your brand and not theirs?
Key messages: What key messages are you sending out? What are your core principles and what do you want to be known for? If you know what this is, then you can start investigating to see if your customers are aligned with your key messages. Are you associated with what you want to be associated with? This research will help you show exactly that.
Tip 2: Social media analysis
Since a lot of brands have an online presence, social media accounts are also a good place to conduct a reputation analysis. There is so much going on on social media that there’s probably a vast amount of information for you to analyze. How do you go about this? We will discuss two ways to start with.
Brand mention sources: When you’re analyzing the mentions, sentiment, likes, reach, and more on social media you also want to look at the sources these comments are coming from. Maybe there is a platform or a Facebook group with people that talk negatively about you. By identifying this group you can start to create a change within this group, or if that’s not possible, be aware of what is being said in this group.
Identifying persona’s: Imagine that there is an influencer with a huge following that says something bad (or good) about your brand. This will have an impact on how people think of you. Word of mouth is one of the strongest drivers for people to change their perception of your brand. It is good to know which influencers are talking positively or negatively about your brand. Only with this knowledge can you take the appropriate action.
Tip 3: Keep a time-line in mind
Your brand reputation audit is not going to be covering years of your brand’s existence. You want to keep a certain time frame in mind. For example, choose a time frame in which you have promoted a certain campaign or other interesting matter. Keep in mind that after a rebranding period or when you’ve merged two companies together you have to be extra careful with what you measure. You want to only pick out relevant content.
Tip 4: Conduct a full website audit
There are many audits you can conduct to get more information. We have written an article about website audits before in which we discuss the importance of it. Conducting different audits at the same time can be complimentary, it will give you information from different angles that you can start to implement. In a website audit, you pay attention to SEO, UX, content, and security measures.
Tip 5: Use a tool or an agency
A brand reputation audit might take a lot of time. Especially if this is the first time conducting such research. In that case, you might consider using a tool (such as Awario, Brandwatch, or Mention). You might also consider working together with an external agency that has done this analysis over and over again. On top of that, an external team will also not be biased and bring in results that are not based on any of their own assumptions or thoughts/feelings about the brand.
Do you want to know more about conducting a reputation audit?
Let’s talk about your brand’s reputation and how you can get to know your customer better! Reach out and get in touch today and book a call with us. We’ll be happy to assist you in further growing your business.
