These days, many inspirational and helpful resources and case studies on marketing tactics and strategies are available easily. Often you get so wrapped up in what others do that you lose sight of what is most important for your business. Or, more importantly, you forget about your conversations and relationships that you have been working hard to build.

Not to worry, we're here to help. We've made a complete list of all the necessary steps you need to take to make the most of every plausible touchpoint with the people who matter most to your brand.

Do you want tips for managing your brand's reputation? Given below is an online reputation management checklist that will help you build and nurture your brand.

Understand your vision

First things first. To build and sustain an online reputation, you should know who your brand is. By this point, you already have all the essentials such as a name, a logo, a website, and most importantly, a vision and mission.

It's time to decide what you envision your brand view to be. What do you want your potential customers to feel when they see your name, logo, or anything you publish or post? Therefore, it is crucial to understand your vision and map out your brand journey.

Create stakeholder personas

Before you become a genuine brand, you probably had a clear idea of who your customers are. Many brands are built from a specific need you are trying to fill or a problem you wish to solve.

Now that you have established a stronger brand, identify who your target audience is, go beyond your potential customers to include other stakeholders, such as potential brand partners, content partners, employees, members of the media, and so on.

You need to understand these stakeholders. What are their problems? What are their interests, needs, and goals?

Understand what you need to know about your stakeholders, starting with basic demographics, role, industry, Company type (startup, corporate, agency).

Let's dig even more profound: What are their interests? Where are they getting all their news and other information? How do they prefer information delivered and presented to them? What information allows you to better communicate with them?

Gather all the data: There are many ways to collect this in-depth data.

Here are a few tips to help you:

1. For potential customers, your onboarding process is the best way to collect as much information as possible. Ensure this data is being collected in an area that's easy to gather and manage their information.
   
2. Surveys are practically an excellent way to gather extensive qualitative data from your audience, but they can be challenging to encourage participation. Try to offer an incentive, such as a discount or a giveaway.
   
3. In-app surveys (pop-ups) are an excellent way for capturing qualitative data such as one question at a time.
4. Use your tracking device to collect data on your customers. If you have vertical success stories or blog posts, you will tell which one your customers are visiting, identifying them as a persona.
5. A media monitoring tool will always enable you to discover new conversations around your brand and related terms, as well as where these conversations are taking place. Try to listen in to learn more about your target audience.
   
   

Define your brand voice

Now that you know your vision and have a much better idea of who your stakeholders are, it's time to understand your brand voice.

Depending on what it is you offer, your overall tone may be evident. For example, someone marketing treatment for a skin issue will speak in a much different manner than someone offering a content management tool.

Please speak to your audience in their voice. Understand how your stakeholders are talking to each other and other brands, then adapt a voice that aligns with their communication style.

Some examples of brand voice descriptions are:

• Witty and intelligent
• Compassionate and nurturing
• Excited and enthusiastic
• Empathetic and caring
• Fun and lighthearted

Set branding guidelines

Depending on the customer's relationship with your brand, you may have different versions of your guidelines document, some with more information than others. Still, each one should cover the same information around brand messaging, tone, voice, etc.

Guidelines should be shared with team members, employees, contributors, etc., and should include crucial elements such as:

• Brand & content goals
• Target group
• Focused topics
• Brand voice & tone
• Sample topic ideas or headlines
• Same social messaging
• Protocols for post-publication

Brand guidelines help you create consistency in how your brand is perceived and help to avoid any potential PR disasters that cause a lack of information or miscommunications.

Identify where you want to go

As mentioned, listening with the help of a media monitoring tool is an easy and fast way to learn where your audience is discovering and sharing information online. Any other additional information can be found while creating your buyer personas.

Always ensure to make a list of all places you want to have a brand presence on or actively contributing to, including your social media platforms, forums, news sites, and blogs.

Establish media relationships

An efficient media monitoring tool will quickly pick up any mention of your brand name across online news outlets, blogs, forums, and social media. With this, you can create valuable relationships and secure future coverage with members of the media who are already interested in you.

Suppose you're not quite interested in a media monitoring tool. In that case, you can also set up an Advanced Twitter Search with concrete vital terms to identify journalists' queries and related stories shared on Twitter.

Check what people are saying

Let's remember that the most critical part of managing a brand reputation is always to know what people are talking about you.

It is essential to know how your brand is being perceived and what proactive actions you should take to align what's being said with your target brand image. This is where the media monitoring tool comes in handy again. Try to be proactive in monitoring brand mentions and responding with valuable information in a friendly, non-intrusive manner.

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Keep your competitors in check

By keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing, you can gain valuable insights into their strength, weakness, opportunities and threat analysis. This information can help you to identify gaps in your own approach, discover new opportunities, and stay ahead of the curve in your industry.  There are various ways through which you can stay informed about your competitors you can have a competitive edge, enabling you to make more informed decisions and achieve greater success in your online endeavors.

Wrapping it up

Now that you know how you want your brand to be presented and perceived by others, and whether or not your stakeholders' perception aligns with your goals, you can easily get to work on a strong, actionable communications strategy that will have you ace the game like a pro. with the help of the above online reputation management checklist; you will be able to create a distinct sport for your brand.

Freshreview allows you to build and sustain your brand reputation in the right manner. It helps you to nurture strong relationships with your clientele and allows you to manage the online reputation of your brand.

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