Written by Hannah Smith – Marketing Student at Oregon State University

As an online brand, there are a lot of components you have to manage to make sure your consumers are happy. Online, consumers are way more likely to speak their mind about your brand, good or bad. So, feedback online from your consumers tends to be the most honest feedback you’ll ever receive. In this blog, you’ll learn of a few ways you can better manage your online brand and improve your consumer’s online experience.

Social Media

The first thing you’ll want to do is create social media pages that best fit your brand. You may already have social media pages created for your online brand, but are you utilizing these tools effectively? Social media is a great way for your consumers to feel as if they have a one-on-one connection with your brand. For example, a lot of brands will utilize Twitter to reply to their consumers about concerns or even compliments. It shows the consumer with a complaint how your brand is going to fix the issue or resolve the consumer’s concern. What is important with this though, is replying in a timely manner. If you don’t respond quickly or don’t respond at all, consumers may think you don’t care what consumers have to say about your products or services.

Social Listening

Social Listening is an amazing tool that brands should always be utilizing. Social Listening is when brands monitor their own name on the internet and social media sites to better understand what consumers are saying about them. There are many social listening tools that are free to use, where you can monitor hashtags, emoji uses surrounding your brand name, and so much more. Companies that provide social listening services such as Falcon or HubSpot Social Media Management Software can be great tools to use for social listening.

Address Concerns, and Don’t Ignore or Hide Negative Content

Lastly, as an online brand, you don’t want to hide negative information surrounding your brand from the internet. Social media users are quick to find negative information, sometimes before you even know it’s out there (This is where social listening services will come in handy). Like I mentioned above in the Social Media paragraph, it’s important to reply to complaints about your brand, products or services so that consumers can see how you deal with this type of negative content. If you ignore the negative content, or simply remove it from the internet, potential consumers won’t be able to see how you’ve improved as a brand, and why you stand out among the competition. If you don’t respond to negative content, it also gives potential consumers a reason to go to your competition instead. So, I highly recommend that you manage your negative content from users by responding in a timely matter in order to uphold your brand’s online reputation.

To conclude, I believe that these three tips described in this blog post should help you, as a digital marketer, to better manage your online brand. Social media and the online market have grown fast through technological advances, and you’ve got to keep up as a brand. Your consumers want to see honest, trustworthy brands on the internet, and following these tips will help you reach your full online potential.

References

15 Best Social Listening Tools: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/social-listening-tools

HubSpot Social Media Marketing Certification Course: https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/social-media

Digital Marketing Essentials, Larson and Draper, Chapter 9: Social Media 1

Digital Marketing Essentials, Larson and Draper, Chapter 11 – Online Reputation Management (ORM)