There are many ways to shape the conversation around your brand, but keep in mind that no combination of actions is foolproof. Anyone who tries to understand the nature of reputation will quickly realize that it depends on perceptions, and no one can completely control that.
1. Define your brand values
The first step to effective brand protection is to have a clear idea of what you stand for. While some traits are shared between brands, think about what makes you unique, as well as what or who you represent.
This helps clarify where you need to market your brand and to whom. This information should be used with a keyword research guide and other digital marketing resources to develop an advertising strategy from this link: https://edana.ch .
For example, if your brand sells men’s clothing, you don’t want to advertise on a women’s website. It is not that the latter is reprehensible; it’s just not relevant to what you’re doing. Similarly, a luxury chocolate brand won’t want to advertise on a blog promoting healthy eating. Neither the brand nor the blog are immoral, but their values are incompatible and their proximity risks tarnishing the reputation of each brand.
By making sure your values or business goals match (or don’t actively contradict) where they appear, you’re more likely to inspire positive feelings in potential customers.
2. Use negative targeting
By necessity, defining what you do stand for (by pinpointing your values and through methods such as SEO report competitor analysis) helps you establish what you do stand for too. It’s a good idea to formalize the latter using a process called negative targeting.
Negative targeting is a list of keywords, topics, and posts that you explicitly don’t want to be associated with. You may wish to avoid these due to lack of relevance, a mismatch in the target audience, or a poor reputation on the part of the publication.
Some websites allow you to run negative targeting from ad campaigns. Even if they don’t, it’s a good idea to have a separate list of things you don’t want your brand associated with.
Share it widely among colleagues who need to see it. In the same way that automating processes through robotics provides a more streamlined and precise workflow, ad targeting consensus makes your team’s job easier.
3. Choose the right platforms
Negative targeting is key when deciding where ads are shown. This is especially true when it comes to choosing an advertising platform.
Today’s Internet offers many different platforms for business. While it’s tempting to cast as wide a network as possible, ubiquity doesn’t make for successful advertising; targeting the right audience does.
When choosing an ad platform, consider how much control it gives you. Can you target a specific audience? Do you know where your ads will appear or what they will be associated with? Can you ensure your ad appears above specific types of content?
While you might not get everything you want from a specific platform, asking these kinds of questions helps you make a more informed decision. It also gives you a more comprehensive toolkit to protect your brand identity.
If you’re torn between two or more ad platforms, using them as the basis for A/B test cases can help narrow things down.
4. Keep an eye on user-generated content
User-generated content is a gift to many businesses. It’s an easy way to create content for Twitter feeds and other channels, as well as a way to build customer trust in your brand. This is especially useful if you are still working on establishing yourself.
By its nature, however, user-generated content is unpredictable, and that unpredictability is a double-edged sword. This can cause you to lose some control over the conversation around your brand as it becomes more explicitly tied to content that you can’t handle.
You can solve this problem by thinking about how you inspire content from your customers. If you invite content creation, what do those prompts look like? Is there room for disreputable interpretation in them? If someone tries to use this content to harm your brand, what procedures (if any) should you follow?
These types of questions also apply to influencer marketing. Influencers generally enjoy a low level of oversight from the companies they work with. However, you should always discuss the general direction of their marketing messages to make sure they don’t misrepresent what you’re doing.
You may find user-generated content too risky for your brand perception and take steps to reduce your reliance on it. However, if user-generated content is a good fit for your brand and you think you can balance the risks with the rewards, it’s worth pursuing.
Metrics like sentiment analysis can help you get a sense of what people think of you and help you react accordingly.
Apart from this, if you are interested to know about Digital Marketing Strategies for Success then visit our Digital Marketing category.
