Having a good web reputation is the key to success for companies that want to maintain a high standard in the digital landscape.
Today, the tools with which a company can be mentioned online are many: from reviews to blog posts, from social posts to journalistic articles, from videos and photos of influencers, to podcasts.
The web reputation passes through all these communication gimmicks, which represent brand marketing.
Web reputation, also called corporate web reputation or e-reputation, depends on the strategies that the brand implements to be present on the web, including affiliate marketing and digital storytelling.
Affiliate marketing uses websites and blogs to promote brands that sell products, services, or content, through links that refer the user to the company website.
Digital storytelling, on the other hand, is the promotion of the brand by telling a story through different communication channels: web, TV, press, merchandising, brand journalism.
When the story of a brand is told and adapted on different media, it is called crossmedia storytelling. While when the story of a brand is completed through the narration on different media, it is referred to as transmedia storytelling.
These two types of digital storytelling represent a great opportunity for companies, because they can increase brand awareness, involve different targets, thus maximizing investments and reducing production risks.
To improve your web reputation, well-structured strategies and the professional use of appropriate software are essential. Only in this way can negative comments on social networks, Google and platforms be prevented.
Content Marketing as the main strategy of Web Reputation
Content marketing is the first strategy for corporate web reputation. Online content is a key factor in bringing potential customers closer, because communicating in the right way to the right people is a winning move for sales and customer loyalty.
Content marketing for web reputation includes these types of content:
- Persuasive copywriting for the website
- Content Writing for the blog
- Viral content or viral marketing for social networks
- Video marketing with training videos, webinars and other types of non-advertising videos.
To write content online it is necessary to resort to the logic of SEO (Search Engine Optimitation), responding to the searches of users who type their keywords on Google.
This is only the first step to be visible to the desired target and to start shaping your web reputation. We remind you that you can write from an SEO perspective only after having done a thorough keyword research, that is, a search for the keywords that users type on Google to search for the topic they are interested in.
Therefore, for each business sector, targeted research must be carried out to adequately respond to the requests of its target.
Website and corporate blog are the first part of the work, which is then followed by work on social networks and platforms dedicated to videos such as youtube.
Social media represent a precious business resource for companies, because from the official pages of a brand you can get a lot of traffic on the site of the same.
On the social pages you can post blog articles or directly links to land on the shopping cart pages of the site of the company that sells products or services. But each link must be published only with the writing of a good social post (short or long) that can be useful information for their needs in the eyes of users, and not a simple promotional message.
The role of viral content and the value proposition
To illustrate how a good web reputation can be obtained, it is also useful to talk about viral contents (which characterize viral marketing).
Viral contents are all those contents such as photos or videos that, due to their eccentricity, are shared by users in a few minutes, generating millions of views and thus increasing the awareness of the brand. Viral content must generate immediate emotions.
But the brand awareness is not the brand reputation, which is improved over time by all these contents, only if they convey important meanings.
A brand must always stand out from the competition, communicating its value proposition through all the types of content described above: a proposition that convinces the target to join the world of the brand, becoming not only a customer but also a real fan and promoter because he should find a congenial philosophy in it.
You know you have to pay close attention to building the brand image, because sometimes you may find results that are very different from expectations!
Building the brand image is followed by posting the right content with the right tone of voice, through right multiple channels.
The omnichannel customer experience (the customer experience during his relationship with the company) is in fact a very important concept for the reputation of the brand. This customer experience must be satisfactory from the point of view of online security, trust in the e-commerce service and the quality of what is purchased.
Examples of web reputation: the disaster case “Abercrombie & Ficht” and the success case “Ferrero”
A case of awful reputation useful to remember to prevent any risks, is that of Abercrombie & Ficht, a clothing brand that has based its image on the exclusivity of the target. With its marketing campaigns, the brand targeted potential customers who were exclusively beautiful, with a well-groomed body and without imperfections. Over time, the company has been perceived as an example of great prejudice against people who are not perfect. So the brand did not meet the trends of contemporary society, in particular it did not meet a current phenomenon such as body positivity.
On the contrary, Ferrero is very close to social needs, which, as can be seen on the Global RepTrak® 100 website, has reached nineteenth place in the ranking, thanks to its improved web reputation thanks to its attention to environmental sustainability.
How to improve Web Reputation and how to monitor it: the tools
So making a summary, how can you improve your web reputation? Here are the essential tips:
- Monitoring of online conversations about the brand
- Web Community Management with editing, publishing and content management
- Internal policy for company employees and different tasks for the company mission
- Internal policy for the management of critical issues
Among the most used tools for web reputation we remember:
- Reputology: is able to group user feedback online
- Rankur: Analyzes millions of posts, reviews and messages on social networks
- Social Mention: it is able to return the so-called brand sentiment in real time
But what exactly is brand sentiment? It is a concept that translates as the approval rating expressed by potential customers towards the brand, and is characterized by online feedback that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of a brand.
The analysis of brand sentiment is very important because it serves to have an understanding of what may be the trends of the future.
Contact us and find out what we can do for your brand!
