Corporate reputation management is the practice of creating and keeping a positive image of a company. It helps businesses build a strong brand and maintain their standing within the industry.
In this guide, we’ll cover all you need to know about corporate reputation management with the help of our experts, including how to build an effective corporate reputation management strategy.
Table of Contents
- What Is Corporate Reputation Management?
- Corporate Reputation Management vs. PR: Main Differences
- The Importance of Corporate Reputation Management
- 4 Main Elements of Corporate Reputation Management
- 3 Main Factors Affecting Corporate Reputation
- Examples of Corporate Reputation Management — Positive & Negative
- How To Measure Your Corporate Reputation
- How To Protect Your Company's Reputation
- How To Build a Corporate Reputation Management Strategy in 6 Steps
- Corporate Reputation Management Checklist
- 3 Best Tools for Corporate Reputation Management
- Key Takeaways on Corporate Reputation Management
What Is Corporate Reputation Management?
Corporate reputation management involves actions designed to maintain a strong and positive image for your brand, prevent reputation damage, or repair your reputation if it has been negatively impacted.
Top corporate reputation management companies monitor every part of your corporate reputation, including your:
- Products or services
- Business operations
- Customer focus
- Brand culture
- Working environment
- Online presence
- Performance
- Leadership
- Ethical behavior
- Corporate social responsibility, including community and environmental responsibility, philanthropy, and volunteerism
Corporate reputation management is a long-term process that requires expertise, resources, and time.
For digital brands, this type of management requires online reputation management, which includes monitoring brand mentions across all digital platforms and channels. On the other hand, for brick-and-mortar brands, this includes monitoring and managing brand mentions across the press, TV, and radio.
Corporate Reputation Management vs. PR: Main Differences
Though related and could work hand in hand, corporate reputation management differs from public relations (PR).
Corporate reputation management focuses on how your brand image is reflected in print and social media, including ratings and reviews. In contrast, PR firms are more general in nature, focusing on securing publications and exposure for your brand and helping with crisis communications, when needed.
The Importance of Corporate Reputation Management
This type of management is important for brands because it:
- Enhances customer loyalty
- Increases sales
- Strengthens industry presence
- Increases company market value
- Improves employee retention
- Secures a positive partner image for suppliers and vendors
- Reveals new opportunities for strategic partnerships
4 Main Elements of Corporate Reputation Management
Every corporate reputation management strategy has the following elements:
- Customer service and feedback
- Employee care
- Social and environmental responsibility
- Social media presence and content strategy
1. Customer Service and Feedback
Customer care plays a key role in creating a positive reputation for a business. How you treat your customers and answer their problems can make or break your brand image. Hence, companies should build their business reputation management process by first listening to their target audience.
Quality customer service entails delivering on every promise about a product or service. Customer feedback can show you where you’ve gone wrong and help you learn how you can improve your business. By responding to this feedback, you can create a connection with the customer and show that you value their input, resulting in a positive reputation.
2. Employee Care
Employee care is another pillar of company reputation management. After all, building your business reputation won’t work if you’re not taking care of your employees. Having satisfied employees practically gives you free marketing. They can advocate for your business and spread a positive image about the brand.
However, to take care of your employees, you must start by improving executive leadership. These leaders set an example for the rest of the company employees so that they feel empowered to present the business in its best light.
3. Social and Environmental Responsibility
Another crucial element is the company’s social and environmental responsibility. A company can easily get a negative reputation if its practices are against environmental activities or social movements. With the rise of technology and the ability to spread the word in seconds, even one small mistake in this area can cost a business all its years of creating a good reputation.
4. Social Media Presence and Content Strategy
Media presence is a must for every business today. Corporate reputation management monitors and analyzes your social media presence and addresses pressing matters that can ruin the brand’s image. Via different social media channels, a brand can create different content that will present the business in the best light and improve its standing in the market.
This element of corporate reputation management can be combined with other elements as well, such as customer feedback and care. By using social media listening tools, you can see how customers engage with your brand online and answer their questions or solve their problems.
Of course, all your social media platforms should follow a good content strategy. This can help position you as an expert in the field and present how your services can solve customers’ issues. This, in turn, will build up your reputation.
3 Main Factors Affecting Corporate Reputation
The three main factors that affect a business’s reputation are:
1. Customer Satisfaction
If your customers are not satisfied, your brand’s reputation will decline, and vice versa — satisfied customers mean a better reputation.
Today, when people like your product or are satisfied with your customer care, they will let you know by leaving online reviews. These serve as a testimony and navigational pattern for your business’s customer care. Other interested parties will use it to form their opinion and decide on purchasing or hiring your company.
2. Employee Quality and Satisfaction
The quality of your employees directly affects your business reputation. Surrounding yourself with hardworking people who strive to build the business and align their values with the company goals is a surefire way to create a working ambiance that will drive them to accomplish more. Slowly, this will present the business as a flourishing environment and create a positive perception from the outside.
But, as we said, taking care of your employees is also an element of corporate reputation management. Their satisfaction influences the business reputation management strategy.
Offering regular training to improve their skills and recognizing their value through bonuses and team-building exercises creates a good working environment and boosts the brand’s image in employees’ eyes. This will inevitably lead to more satisfaction and employee retention. Doing the opposite is a recipe for disaster.
3. Quality of Products
Having excellent employees and customer care may attract buyers, but without high-quality products or services, you’re unlikely to retain customers and build a good and solid corporate reputation. Everything you offer should be at the level you’ve promised. Failing to meet your customers’ expectations will undermine all your corporate reputation management efforts.
Examples of Corporate Reputation Management — Positive & Negative
Here are two examples illustrating how brands addressed complaints from clients.
Negative: United Airlines
In 2008, Canadian musician Dave Carroll flew with United Airlines to Nebraska for a one-week music tour. Due to improper baggage handling, his $3,500 Taylor guitar was seriously damaged.
Despite Carroll’s persistent efforts over nine months to seek compensation and assistance through emails and calls, the airline — though not denying the incident was their fault — refused to compensate the musician for the damage.
Carroll decided to approach the issue in a different way, creating a song based on the story and posting it on YouTube in 2009. Within one day, the video went viral and generated 150,000 views. Within three days, the number of views was at half a million.
The result for United Airlines?
A 10% loss in market value, which cost $180 million for its shareholders.
Lesson learned: Never ignore your customers’ problems. Monitor reviews and complaints and respond to them as soon as possible.
Positive: Tesla
In 2017, a Tesla customer complained on Twitter of having “a terrible experience with a very pushy sales guy from Tesla’s Stanford shop while shopping for model X.”
Tesla’s CEO, the billionaire Elon Musk, was fast to address the frustration of this single customer personally, informing him that Tesla’s employees were promptly reminded that what really matters is for “people to look forward to their next visit.”
The result for Tesla?
An avalanche of approval for Musk’s responsiveness and hundreds of comments from customers about the positive experience they had at Tesla stores.
Lesson learned: Listen to your audience and show dedication to your work. Reply to any concerns customers might have when interacting with your brand to turn them into your brand ambassadors.
How To Measure Your Corporate Reputation
There are numerous approaches to corporate reputation measurement. The most common approaches include:
- Check your PageRank
- Research your online ratings and reviews
- Check your local search ranking
- Check your brand’s likes and followers on social media
1. Check Your PageRank
PageRank is a Google search algorithm that ranks your web pages on a search engine results page (SERP), i.e. it arranges them according to their importance. It also shows how many inbound links from authoritative and trustworthy sites lead to your content.
Positioning yourself on the PageRank scale through publishing relevant authoritative content that makes your website link-worthy, will help you improve your search engine positioning and positively affect your online reputation.
To check your PageRank, use tools such as Sitechecker or DNS’ Pagerank Checker Tool.
2. Research Your Online Ratings and Reviews
Online reviews contain key information about the experience your customers have with your brand. Online review statistics show that:
- Customers trust companies with ratings that are above 4 stars.
- Higher ratings are given to responsive industry leaders.
- Customers expect a response to negative reviews within the time range of three days to a week.
To measure your customer sentiment, use natural language processing (NLP) tools, such as IBM Watson, MonkeyLearn, or Aylien. Using artificial intelligence, NLP tools allow you to access and analyze enormous amounts of data.
3. Check Your Local Search Ranking
Your local search ranking helps you identify whether your brand appears in local search results when customers are looking for a business close to their location. Analyzing your local search ranking can help you identify opportunities to attract local traffic.
To check your local search ranking, use tools, such as Localo or the Local SERP Checker by Brightlocal.
4. Check Your Brand’s Likes and Followers on Social Media
Monitoring the number of followers and likes you have on social media provides valuable insights into how users perceive your content’s value and trustworthiness. It also indicates who is willing to engage and form a connection with your brand.
To monitor your social media performance, you can use tools such as Hootsuite.
How To Protect Your Company's Reputation
Now that you know what elements build a brand reputation and what can harm it, here are a few tips to help you protect your business reputation:
- Ensure your employees are happy
- Hold your executive leaders accountable
- Happy customers equals profit
- Monitor your online presence and analyze the stats
- Engage with customers through social media
- Reply to customer feedback and questions ASAP
- Gather customer feedback and showcase it on your website
- Make your site user-friendly
- Be transparent
- Never oversell your products — stick to what they can really do/offer
Following these tips is a good way to build and maintain a positive reputation. It’s important to always have the four elements in mind and construct your corporate reputation management strategy around them.
How To Build a Corporate Reputation Management Strategy in 6 Steps
Explore our six-step guide to building a successful corporate reputation management strategy:
- Create a reputation management team
- Audit your online presence
- Analyze your brand’s standing
- Compare your brand to the competition
- Create a reputation roadmap
- Work with a professional reputation management agency
1. Create a Reputation Management Team
Assign specific responsibilities to each team member. These responsibilities may extend to the collection and analysis of data, removal of negative digital information, social media management, review management, and public relations.
2. Audit Your Online Presence
- Review all current mentions related to your brand, whether positive, negative, or neutral to understand public perception. These can include articles, news, and social media comments.
- Monitor all online reviews of your business from both customers and employees to gauge satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
- Review your presence on both claimed and unclaimed business profiles to ensure your brand is represented accurately across platforms.
- Check how your company appears in search results using relevant keywords for your brand and industry. This will provide insights into your online visibility
3. Analyze Your Brand’s Standing
- Explore all existing threats that may negatively affect your reputation, such as customer complaints, negative reviews, or negative media mentions.
- Evaluate overall customer sentiment about your brand.
- Identify opportunities for reputation growth and improvement.
4. Compare Your Brand to the Competition
- Research how your local and national competitors perform for high-volume search phrases.
- Check the performance of your competitors on social platforms and online review sites.
- Analyze your competition’s brand messaging, brand awareness, and sentiment among key target audiences.
- Identify your weak and strong areas along with opportunities for improvement.
5. Create A Reputation Roadmap
- Use online reputation monitoring to collect customer feedback.
- Use online review management to answer positive and negative reviews.
- Implement a social media management strategy to monitor and act on comments and posts related to your brand.
- Create high-quality content, such as blogs or social media posts, to solidify your digital presence, boost your brand authority, and build trust.
- Invest in search engine optimization to make your landing pages, blogs, and social threads visible on search engines.
- Engage in corporate social responsibility initiatives, such as charity and community events or environmental campaigns.
- Foster your relationship with the media.
- Create a crisis communication plan to prevent long-term damage to your reputation, in case of an unforeseen event.
6. Work With a Professional Reputation Management Agency
- Review professional reputation management agencies on B2B marketplaces, such as DesignRush.
- Select an agency with a proven track record in managing corporate reputation.
Corporate Reputation Management Checklist
Our experts compiled a corporate reputation management checklist to help you maintain a positive image for your brand.
Products and Services
- Optimize price and quality ratio.
- Add value for your customers.
- Make sure your products or services are safe.
- Speak confidently of your products and services.
- Improve your customer service.
- Highlight employee expertise.
Financial Performance
- Improve your standing against your competitors.
- Mitigate risk.
- Develop growth strategies.
- Expand globally.
Work Environment
- Make sure employee working conditions are safe and productive.
- Monitor and address toxic behaviors, such as hostility or aggression.
- Promote diversity.
- Provide regular training and support.
- Offer fair compensation and benefits.
- Foster a supportive culture.
Emotional Appeal
- Speak directly to your target audience group.
- Emphasize honesty and transparency.
- Create an inspiring brand story or narrative.
- Develop and maintain a strong corporate identity based on key values.
- Respect both customer and employee privacy.
Corporate Social Responsibility
- Support social and community causes.
- Innovate to reduce environmental impact.
Online Reputation Management
- Create positive content.
- Improve your visibility through SEO.
- Optimize your accounts across all social media platforms.
- Build brand trust and loyalty.
- Maintain a strong online presence.
- Encourage positive reviews.
- Monitor and respond to online mentions.
- Acknowledge and address negative reviews and comments transparently.
- Counteract false negative content.
3 Best Tools for Corporate Reputation Management
If you want to automate your business reputation management tasks, here are three tools that can help:
1. Reputation
Reputation is a tool that can help you track reviews about your business on hundreds of sites. Through the Reviews & Review Booster, you can easily track, manage, and respond to online reviews.
Other services also include a centralized inbox where you can gather all messages and mentions of your brand and a social suite feature that allows you to directly share feedback on your social media platforms.
Businesses can also conduct competitive analysis of their ratings and reviews and assess how to use their corporate reputation management strategy to their advantage.
Price: Given upon request for a demo
Pros:
- All-in-one company reputation management tool
- 30-day free trial
Cons:
- Prices can only be accessed after you get a demo
2. Podium
Podium is an AI-powered tool that helps you grow and improve your Google and Facebook reviews with AI responses. It can also gather feedback and engage your customers via text, contact forms on your website, or connect with leads from your social media channels.
Podium offers an interesting feature that can help you respond to questions faster than your competitors. By gathering all your customer communication from various sites and platforms into a single inbox, you can keep all leads in one place and never miss a customer issue. Automated responses will be sent out the second someone reports an issue that your business can help solve.
Price:
- Core: $399 per month
- Pro: $599 per month
- Signature: Custom pricing
Pros:
- Automated responses that don’t require any input from your side
- Easy to use
- Has a mobile app
Cons:
- Expensive for small businesses
- The more useful AI features are not part of the Core plan
3. Grade.us
Grade.us is a great corporate reputation management tool for agencies and businesses. It allows you to monitor and collect online reviews on the market to effectively improve customer experience (CX). Businesses can then select and share these reviews on their social media channels or create reports to see the improvement of their reputation.
Additionally, this tool can help you generate reviews by automating the feedback request process. Grade.us automatically gives customers your preferred review sites so they can leave a review with just one click.
Price:
- Solo: $110 per seat, per month
- Professional: $60 per seat, per month (3 seats is the minimum)
- Agency: $40 per seat, per month (10 seats is the minimum)
- Partner: $25 per seat, per month (100 seats is the minimum)
Pros:
- 14-day free trial
- Mobile-friendly
- Agency-tailored features
Cons:
- Exporting reports can be slow
- The platform is reported to occasionally crash, but the issue gets resolved fast
Key Takeaways on Corporate Reputation Management
Corporate reputation management includes activities to improve the public opinion of your brand.
To measure your corporate reputation:
- Check your PageRank
- Research your online ratings and reviews
- Check your local search rank
- Check your brand likes and followers on social media
To build a corporate reputation management strategy:
- Create a reputation management team
- Audit your online presence
- Analyze your brand standing
- Compare your brand to the competition
- Create a reputation roadmap
- Work with a professional reputation management agency
