Say you’re hiring an administrative assistant. Candidate A submits an eye-popping résumé and claims to be the most organized, efficient, and creative human on the planet. Candidate B is less flashy, but their references are stellar, and previous employers praise their organization, responsibility, and kindness. Who will you hire? Why?
Hiring managers know to take self-promotion with a grain of salt, and may trust the opinions of others more than the claims of candidates. The same is true of consumers: One 2024 study found 72% of consumers trust third-party content about a company more than brand messaging.
If your customers love and trust you—and you’ve provided them avenues to share their feedback—you can use reputation marketing to amplify these endorsements. Here’s how reputation marketing works and how to build a reputation marketing strategy in six steps.
What is reputation marketing?
Reputation marketing involves collecting positive customer feedback and using it to promote your brand. It’s built on positive feedback cycles in which you use content created by satisfied customers to attract new ones. This harnesses your business’s positive reputation to improve its image.
You can use reputation marketing to increase web traffic, boost sales, and improve your brand’s online presence. Campaign materials can include customer reviews, online forum posts, social media comments, testimonials, product or service ratings, and other user-generated content (UGC). Feature UGC on your website, paid ads, email newsletters, or even product packaging.
Reputation marketing vs. reputation management
Although closely related, reputation marketing and reputation management aren’t the same:
-
Reputation management. The goal of reputation management is to protect a company’s track record by encouraging positive brand coverage and mitigating bad press. It involves monitoring conversations about a brand to solve customer concerns and prevent negative feedback from harming a company’s image.
-
Reputation marketing. The goal of reputation marketing is to promote a company by showcasing its positive reputation. Common strategies include amplifying positive brand content like customer reviews, social media comments, testimonials, and product or service ratings.
Reputation marketing and reputation management are most effective when used in tandem. Reputation management generates assets for reputation marketing campaigns, and reputation marketing boosts reputation management’s return on investment (ROI). As long as you’re investing time and money in creating a strong brand reputation, you might as well use that reputation for marketing purposes.
Why should ecommerce brands use reputation marketing?
Reputation marketing can build trust in your brand and help you increase revenue. Here are three reasons reputation marketing matters:
1. Reputation marketing can increase sales. Positive reviews encourage purchases. A 2023 survey found 91% of customers consult online reviews and ratings when browsing products. It also found 94% of consumers say ratings and reviews affect their purchasing decisions—more than the product price, free shipping, or return and exchange policies.
2. Reputation marketing can help you attract and convert new customers. Research shows nearly three-quarters of consumers rely on brand content to discover new products, making reputation marketing an effective customer acquisition strategy. It can also increase trust in your brand, encouraging new visitors to convert: 50% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from a friend or family member.
3. Reputation marketing can support your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Reputation marketing can improve your performance in search results because it increases mentions of your business online, communicating to search engines that your brand is reputable. It also increases the ratio of positive to negative content about your company, raising the likelihood that search engines will show users flattering coverage.
6 steps for building your reputation marketing strategy
- Evaluate your current state
- Set goals and select distribution channels
- Identify any reputation management needs
- Identify reputation marketing needs
- Launch your campaign
- Monitor performance
Reputation marketing involves developing a positive online reputation and amplifying it by sharing user-generated content. Here’s how to create a reputation marketing strategy for your business in six steps:
1. Evaluate your current state
Take stock of your company’s reputation and access to user-generated assets. Here are five questions to answer:
1. Where do customers currently review or rate your business, and what percentage of customer reviews are positive?
2. How often is your company mentioned on social media platforms, and what percentage of social media comments are positive?
3. Is your business earning media mentions? If so, how often—and what is the tenor of press coverage?
4. What themes emerge from positive content about your company? What about negative content?
5. Does your marketing team have access to a library of user-generated marketing assets? If so, how many, and in which formats?
You can use reputation marketing software like social listening,brand monitoring, and sentiment analysis tools to identify online mentions of your brand, categorize them, and extract themes. Sentiment analysis tools, for example, can automatically distinguish between positive reviews and negative reviews and isolate thematic trends.
2. Set goals and select distribution channels
Next, set goals for your reputation marketing efforts that ladder up to your larger business and marketing goals. For example, a haircare company aiming to increase sales of boar bristle hair brushes might set the reputation marketing goal of increasing web traffic to pages associated with this product category by 30% in Q1.
Then select the best distribution channels for your strategy. The hair care company might decide to publish reputation marketing content on social media channels and target current customers by featuring positive reviews in its newsletter.
3. Identify any reputation management needs
An effective reputation marketing strategy requires a positive reputation, so determine if your brand’s reputation can support your campaign goals. If coverage skews negative or neutral, devote some time to reputation management upfront. Here are three strategies to consider:
1. Start a customer feedback program. Some customers leave negative reviews because they don’t know how to contact a company with a complaint or because they feel companies aren’t hearing their concerns. Actively solicit feedback and provide prompt, personal responses to customer problems to avoid negative reviews, inspire customer loyalty, and encourage audiences to create positive content about your brand.
2. Respond to negative reviews. Negative reviews happen, but they don’t have to sink your reputation. Reputation management involves mitigating negative feedback by responding to criticism constructively in a public forum. A brief, polite response that expresses your desire to solve a problem can turn a negative review into a chance to demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction.
3. Use monitoring software. Use brand monitoring software tools to track mentions of your company online, including mentions on third-party review sites, social media platforms, and online forums. Use these tools to thank customers for creating positive content about your brand and resolve issues with unhappy customers quickly. You can also track themes and use this information to improve your customer experience: If customers complain about a slow customer service response time, for example, you might expand your customer service team or look into artificial intelligence (AI) tools with customer service applications.
4. Identify reputation marketing needs
Once you’ve confirmed that your brand’s online presence can support your reputation marketing efforts, identify what you need to run a campaign. If you have access to a library of relevant brand assets, ask yourself if you have enough high-quality positive brand content for a reputation marketing strategy and if the content you have supports your campaign goals. No amount of praise for your company’s leave-in conditioner will help you move boar bristle hair brushes, for example.
List the content types you need to gather and determine how you’ll collect them. You can use reputation marketing software features like social media management and customer feedback tools to solicit and collect feedback. More recent assets are particularly valuable. Future campaigns may require feedback on new product offerings, so you may benefit from developing an ongoing asset collection strategy even if you already have sufficient content for your first campaign.
You can also think outside the box about content types and collection strategies. Beauty brand Fluff, for example, uses reputation marketing to build community. It invites customers to submit photos, articles, and self-reflection pieces to its editorial platform, Fluff Issues, which boosts engagement with the brand and encourages audiences to create unique, high-value brand content.
It also differentiates Fluff in the competitive beauty space. “Whereas most beauty brands might have typical beauty articles or features like top shelves or ‘what’s in your beauty bag’ or ‘the five latest beauty trends,’ our issues are all about people’s concerns or feelings toward the beauty industry or about themselves and their identity,” says Fluff founder Erika Geraerts on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “This strategy really allows us to focus on messaging we really care about that isn’t product related, that helps build our brand and helps build our community.”
Fluff’s reputation marketing strategy also includes the Pretty Hard podcast, which uses guest appearances to extend the brand’s reach. “Our podcast is very much our influencer program in itself,” Erika says, “because the people that we talk to generally repost that content themselves, and that gives us access to their audiences and communities.”
5. Launch your campaign
Launch your campaign by promoting content on your selected channels. Credit content creators by tagging them when possible and actively engaging with people who interact with your content.
Answer questions, thank customers for positive reviews, respond constructively to negative ones, and invite users to weigh in with opinions or experiences. Establishing a dialogue encourages audiences to provide you with more material for your reputation marketing campaigns.
Reposting user-generated content can also boost engagement. Jewelry brand Pura Vida invites customers to share product photos under the hashtag #puravidabracelets and shares top posts from its brand account. This encourages fans to share positive brand content on social platforms and gives prospective customers a glimpse into what products look like in the real world.
6. Monitor performance and adjust strategy
Use reputation marketing software, social media analytics tools, your email marketing platform, and website analytics tools to monitor campaign performance. Your specific tools and metrics will depend on your campaign goals and distribution channels.
A hair care company might use Google Analytics to track traffic to relevant pages and analyze sources. It can then use this information to improve campaign performance. If reviews with photos have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than those without, it might adjust its asset collection strategy to source more of this type of content.
Reputation marketing FAQ
What does reputation mean in marketing?
Your business reputation is how current and potential customers, employees, and peers perceive your brand. Online reputation marketing involves promoting positive customer reviews, testimonials, press coverage, social media comments, and ratings to improve your brand’s image in online spaces.
What are the disadvantages of reputation marketing?
Online reputation marketing can be an effective way to reinforce a positive brand image, but it can only amplify perceptions already present in your customer base—you can’t use it to introduce new ways to think about a product or company. Although you can influence the rate at which customers leave positive reviews, you can’t control it. If your audiences stop creating content about your brand, you’ll run out of marketing materials.
What is an example of reputation marketing?
Soliciting customer reviews and posting them to a brand’s social media accounts is one example of a reputation strategy. Brands can also share social media comments from satisfied customers and scrape positive customer reviews from online review sites.
Is reputation marketing the same as brand marketing?
No. Brand marketing and reputation marketing differ. Brand marketing promotes your brand values using marketing materials you create, and reputation marketing involves distributing user-generated content to build trust among your prospective target customers.