When employees tell you to trust them, do you believe them outright? Does it take time for you to trust employees? How about your suppliers? If you tell them to deliver the supplies because you’ll have to pay them in a week or two, do they believe you? People accept and analyze your words and actions based on your reputation. It is the same with businesses. Your clients, suppliers, and target market are all going to trust you if you built a good reputation over the years.
In business, reputation is a precious commodity. It can make or break a business. When nurtured and sustained, a good reputation ensures your success. What happens when a business falls into hard times such as a pandemic? A good reputation can help you build it back up again.
The question now is: does your reputation precede you in business? Do people assume the best or worst in you? Because if they think the worst of you, you need to work with a brand reputation company. Reputation is the cornerstone of one’s power. Your audience is going to rely on your reputation whenever they do business with you. Whether they spend a dollar or hundreds of dollars on your products, that’s because they believed in your business. They believe that you have their best interest at heart.
What Is Your Reputation?
Finding out what others say about you is easier now than ever before. A peek into social media platforms will tell you all you need to know. Called social media listening, it’s a method marketers use to figure out how their market sees them. Do they believe your advertisements? Are they raving about your products, or are they complaining about them? Are they recommending your brand to their network?
You have to figure out what people are saying about you because marketing and advertising strategies will depend on these. How will you know that your strategies are working if you don’t know the kind of reputation you are building in the market? The fact that social listening is a surefire way to know how others see you is a solid reason why businesses have no excuse for not knowing what kind of reputation they have.
Losing Reputation
If it is hard to build a business reputation, losing it is the opposite. One wrong move can potentially end your business’ chances. That’s how fickle your reputation is. A customer who felt they were wronged will take the matter to social media to complain about the bad service they experienced with your store. That one complaint will snowball, and eventually, people will take the side of the complainant. It doesn’t matter if you’ve built a business reputation for decades; social media users are now so easily triggered. They’ll pounce on organizations they think aren’t giving them their due.
The problem with losing the reputation you’ve built so long is that it will precede your business. People will conclude their perceptions of your brand based on what they hear on the Internet about you. Will you have the time and chance to defend your business? Hardly. Once your reputation suffers, it will take a long time for you to regain the trust of your customers. Many of them will not give you a second glance.
Addressing Reputation Problems
Of course, there is always a way to reverse a bad reputation. It’s not easy, but it is plausible. The first thing you need to know about addressing reputation problems is to get to the root cause of the issues. What are the complaints about, and how can you compensate your consumers? Who is at fault? Even if your business is not at fault, how can you rectify the situation?
Reaching out to the aggrieved parties is the first step you have to take. Once the aggrieved party knows that you’re on top of things, most will not bring the matter to social media anymore. No one wants to air their grievances on social media even if they felt wronged by organizations. If you can resolve the issue privately, which you must, this is the easiest way to regain your customers’ trust.
Your target market is going to read about your brand before they make a purchase. That is the nature of the business today. What they find about you on the Internet will affect whether or not they want to continue their purchase. So go and check what others find out about your business when they search for you on the Internet. Find a way to address any potential problem you notice.
