Brand Reputation

What to Do When Your Brand Reputation is On the Line

September 3, 2021 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business for a year or several decades. Inevitably something will go wrong and it will all come back to hit you like an avalanche. Whether it’s a disgruntled customer, or a media mishap, your brand reputation can sour quickly, which is why it’s so important to have a strategy in place to deal with dust-ups that can cause customers to flock to your competition.

So what can you do to not only successfully fight the flames but also prevent them? Let’s take a closer look:

Do a Deep Audit of Your Name and Your Business Name

The very first step in claiming (or reclaiming) your brand reputation is to do a deep dive on what’s out there about you and your business name. If something happened on social media years ago, don’t put it past a competitor or even the media to dredge it up and try to make an issue out of it, which can leave you scrambling.

Doing a deep audit of your name and business name can help you get a solid starting point to work from, and it’s never a bad idea to go beyond the first page of Google to see what’s being said. The last thing you want is for old comments to come back and haunt you!

Once you’ve figured out a good starting point (or even if you’re just getting started and want to avoid this kind of reputation disaster in the future, it’s time to take the next step and…

Claim Your Profiles

Claiming your profiles across all major social networks and search engines can help prevent other businesses from capitalizing on your good name or even worse, purporting to be you in an attempt to sabotage your business. Even if you’re not going to use those particular social networks or platforms at the moment, as your business starts to grow you may want to branch out and start marketing with them.

But even if you ultimately don’t, it gives your competition (or any disgruntled customers who want to sow discord and animosity) less of a chance to do so!

Avoid Emotional Responses

This can be the biggest downfall for even the calmest business owner. All it takes is one loud voice to stir up a crowd, and as a business owner who has cultivated their company starting from nothing, you likely have a great deal of emotion — both good times and bad — invested in your company.

For someone to then come around and start slinging accusations and causing a scene, it’s human nature to want to respond to them with emotion. However, your best approach is to reply with honesty and sincerity. If you truly are at fault, apologize and offer to make things right. It may not be to the customers’ liking, but trying to rectify the issue will go a long way toward helping to save your reputation and demonstrate to others that you are genuinely interested in fixing the problem.

Be Open and Transparent

Everyone makes mistakes. And if you’ve made a mistake, large or small, it’s important to be up front and honest with your customers and potential users. Word spreads faster than ever on places like social networks, so in being honest and transparent you show that you’re willing to take responsibility for the problem and work to help make it right.

Set Up Google Alerts

Since no business owner can be everywhere at once, one of the most helpful things you can do to help save and protect your brand reputation is to set up Google alerts. This will alert you whenever someone uses your name or your business name anywhere that is searched and indexed by Google. It’s a great way to find what is being said about your company even in places where you’re not directly part of the conversation.

Work with an On-Demand Team

Finally, if it’s all too much to handle, there’s no shame in reaching out to a dedicated brand reputation team. At Workdom, we’ve helped hundreds of business owners including helping to build or solidify their respective business reputations. Reach out to our experienced professionals today and let us help you safeguard what you’ve worked so hard to build!

5 Signs It’s Time for MarTech Optimization

August 6, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

If you’re not getting the results you’re expecting from your marketing campaigns, the fault may not lie with your salespeople’s ambition and determination to close the deal — it may lie in the programs you’re using to help you. Of course, just knowing that your Marketing Technology (MarTech) is a jumble of systems, platforms and programs won’t make it any easier for you to get the results you’re looking for.

But it may help you to know that you’re not alone.

According to a 2020 survey by Gartner, those surveyed are only using a little over half (58%) are using the full capabilities of their tech stack. And the problem isn’t just that there are too many programs doing the same things, it’s the fact that they don’t always work together, there’s not enough data for them to chew on, and the fact is, there’s just too many of them to deal with.

So how do you know it’s time for a MarTech optimization?

You’re not using your programs to the fullest

Just as noted in the study above, if you’re only using a little over 50% of the full capabilities of your tech stack, you’re leaving money on the table and you’re tying your own hands with regard to the scalability of your business.

Of course, it’s understood that you’re not doing this intentionally, it’s just that there isn’t enough information to make the tools work right, there are things they can’t do (or that you don’t know how to do) or you don’t have access to the right integrations to make things happen.

It takes too long to do even the simplest tasks

Legacy and spaghetti code can hobble even the simplest of tasks. Left on its own, it’s not long before simple tasks turn into convoluted tangles. Even segmenting emails, which most email marketing platforms let you do easily and efficiently, can become a confusing, cumbersome issue that takes your IT team way too long to figure out, much less get done.

And it’s not just email marketing that’s a victim of this problem. Anything that takes an abnormally long time to complete (when it shouldn’t), means it’s prime time for a MarTech overhaul.

You’ve cobbled together a temporary fix, but have found yourself relying on it more and more

Sometimes things just need to be done, so people put their heads together to figure out a solution, however temporary. The problem happens when that temporary fix suddenly becomes part of your standard operating procedure. You find yourself relying on it for larger and larger jobs, hoping that it holds together just a little longer until things calm down (but they never do, do they?)

If you’ve cobbled together a temporary fix, but have found it as tightly ingrained in your business operations as if it were as solid and reliable as your other business solutions, it’s time to start untangling your marketing technology and identifying what’s crucial to your strategy, what’s nice to have, and what’s not necessary at all.

You don’t know who’s responsible for what

Among the tangles of MarTech is also the tangle of personnel. If you’re not sure who’s in charge of what, it can be all too tempting to simply not worry about it and put it on the back burner for another day.

Except that day never comes!

Make a detailed list of who’s responsible for what and get the right people on the job. If you find that it’s no one’s job in particular but that there are rather “too many chefs in the kitchen”, your MarTech stack can likewise get complicated as everyone cobbles together some sort of plan using their preferred programs to get the job done.

And although their ambition is admirable, this type of quickly stringing together a solution isn’t sustainable over the long term. It’s time for a streamlined, seamless and more efficient optimization.

You dream of starting over from scratch

Last but certainly not least, sometimes you secretly wish that you could just shove it all off the table and start from scratch, with a clean slate. The problem is that there will always be newer, better, faster, more integrated marketing technology. Every time this technology is released or changes, you can’t just start over (as much as you might want to!)

But if you dream of just chucking it all in the trash and starting fresh, a MarTech optimization could be the perfect solution.

If you’re interested in finally getting a handle on your MarTech stack and you want a professional team to run a fine toothed comb through your processes and strategies and help you determine what’s necessary, what’s overlapping and what’s just fluff, it’s time to call Workdom and get our experts on the job.

Start making headway with your marketing technology and using it to the fullest. Contact our advertising professionals today to learn more!

Does Your Brand Reputation Match Your Customers’ Perceptions?

May 14, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

With the advent of internet reviews and social media, customers are now feeling more empowered than ever to have direct, honest and open communication with the companies they do business with. To that end, whether you’re a small startup or a company that has been in business for awhile, you’ll want to do everything you can to slowly but steadily build up your brand reputation.

Plus, one of the great things about continuing to build up your brand reputation over time is that you’ll consistently leverage benefits from it — like a ripple effect of solid customer feedback that creates a continuous cycle of improvement in your business. Here’s how to make sure that you exceed your customers’ expectations:

Master the Customer Experience

The core of a great brand reputation is built on a fantastic customer experience, so you’ll want to ensure that you have those bases covered first and foremost. That means things like:

Going through your shopping cart and checkout process as if you were a first-time customer, and making notes to fix any areas of friction on both desktop and mobile devices
Looking into ways to make it easy for customers and prospects to get in touch with you, whether it’s through social media, live chat or a combination of channels
Checking in with customers after the sale to see how satisfied they are with their purchases and if there’s anything you can do to help

Respond to Positive and Negative Comments Alike

Just as you might be highly suspicious of a brand where all of the comments (particularly on social media) are only positive, it’s important to be impartial and respond to both positive and negative comments alike. Not only is this a more accurate portrayal of your brand but it also adds authenticity to reviews. No one is 100% perfect all the time.

It’s also important to not get defensive about the comment, as well as to nudge the customer toward taking the conversation offline so that you can focus squarely on them in a more one-on-one atmosphere. Hashing out the details over social media is not the best environment.

The worst thing to do in this case is to simply give a generic “we appreciate your response” type of reply. This tells customers and prospects alike that “you are not important to us” and can turn other potential customers away from doing business with you.

Highlight Testimonials and Success Stories

Much of the “heavy lifting” of building your business reputation will revolve around what other people say about your company, rather than what you yourself have to say about it. To that end, make sure to highlight testimonials and success stories regularly. Create content that can serve as a case study, showing the kinds of results you were able to achieve.

There’s no stronger testament to the quality of a business than the things people are saying when they talk about it. But it’s also understandable that sometimes things go wrong and through no fault of your own, your reputation can suffer. Even if you did nothing wrong, from a customers’ point of view, if they’ve somehow felt wrong, the problem falls on your shoulders to make it right.

That’s where Workdom can help.

Reach Out if You Need Help

Maintaining a reliable, solid brand reputation is not something you can create overnight. Even a bad review, however warranted, can take time to fall off and be replaced by good ones. Sure, every bad review is a twinge of regret that your customer service wasn’t up to its regular standards, but it can be hard to manage customer expectations and ensure a flawless experience.

If you feel like you’re falling behind with your brand management and reputation, why not reach out to the advertising professionals and experts at Workdom? Our friendly, helpful marketing professionals will work with you to determine how we can best help build or improve your reputation, and our chat-based, on-demand marketing services make it easy to detail what you need and by when. This lets our team spring into action, crafting a growth strategy, generating impactful results, and taking every step to keep you informed along the way. Contact us today to learn more!

What are Message Alignment and Brand Presence?

April 30, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

And Why Are They Important for Your Business?

With more ways than ever to engage with your target audience, it seems like it would be easy to keep your messaging on point and your brand presence front-of-mind with your customers, right?

Well, with more ways than ever to communicate, and more competition than ever, both message alignment and brand presence can be muddied and disjointed over time, which can, in turn, have major repercussions for your brand. Here’s why they matter, and how to make sure they’re in perfect alignment no matter what channels you choose to promote on.

Living Your Brand Values with Consistency and Relevancy

Many companies claim to be “living their brand values” each and every day, but oftentimes they’re doing anything but. For example, a company that prides itself on fast, thorough customer service, yet takes days to answer customers and brushes off their concerns is an extreme but very real depiction of this, and sadly it’s not just customer service that’s affected.

This is why it’s so important to craft a deep, meaningful USP (Universal Selling Proposition) — something that is hard for others to duplicate but an easy niche for your company to capitalize on and thrive. Other fast food companies may claim great delivery, but Domino’s owns “30 minutes or it’s free” even though it has been decades since they used that USP.

In order to properly “live” your brand values as a company, they must be woven into the fabric of your brand in such a way that it’s hard to dislodge the brand from the value. Just as it’s hard to dislodge Dominos from being the king of fast pizza delivery, your USP should be so integrated into what you do, that it ripples out to affect every promotional channel you use.

The reason why this is so important is that when you do this, it becomes almost second nature to live your business culture in a way that reinforces your brand. And that makes your presence and messaging even more easy to align across all your marketing touch-points.

Analyze Your Funnel Messaging as Part of the Buyer’s Journey

Now that you better understand the importance of maintaining consistency across all of your brand channels, the next step is to do a deep dive into your funnel messaging.

Contrary to popular belief, buyers usually don’t flock to your site specifically to buy. Rather, it depends on which stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in, namely:

Awareness – They’ve just learned that your brand exists
Consideration – They’re deciding between your brand and a competitor, or looking for more reasons why they should buy from you (as opposed to a competitor or simply not buying at all)
Decision – They’re looking to decide or have made a decision and want to be sure it’s the right one.

How well does your messaging align with these different stages? Take the time to do a deep dive, building up a style and tone guide as you go along. As new social and media channels open up, you can refer to this guide often to make sure that your messaging is always in line with your brand, voice, and style.

And remember, there is no “one size fits all” approach for your messages at different stages in the funnel. For example, if your coffee shop offers the best-tasting coffee from around the world, your message for awareness might be something like “don’t just drink coffee, change lives”, while your message for consideration might be actually showing the lives that can be improved by buying coffee from different countries versus your local big brand coffee house.

Keep Your USP in Sight As You Adjust and Refine Your Message

It’s likely that no brand will hit it out of the park on the first try. Rather, if you find that your brand messaging and alignment have drifted off course, take steps to refine it and get it back to where it should be, rather than taking up the time and expense of a complete branding overhaul.

It’s also important to remember that your different buyer personas are going to value different things, but that all of those things form a multi-pronged solution that only your brand is capable of delivering. Don’t hesitate to flesh out these values by using language that your target audience would use, in order to better make sure that your brand resonates well with them on the level where they are (versus where you want them to be).

Don’t Hesitate to Ask for Help When You Need It!

And last but not least, it’s one thing to veer off course or muddy your messaging, and another thing to simply ignore it because you just don’t have time. Fortunately, Workdom is here to give you on-demand help with branding and messaging alignment when and where you need it!

Whether you’re overwhelmed with the ins and outs of social media or you’re trying to clarify what your brand really stands for, and why customers should seek you out, our diligent and dedicated branding team has the marketing experience and know-how to help you shape your vision into something that customers are drawn to and want more of.

Reach out to our senior marketing professionals today to learn more about how we can help you!

How to Cultivate Trust in Your Strategic Partnerships

March 12, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

Picture this: business is booming. Your customers love what you have to offer and profits are at an all-time high. But you feel as if you’ve hit a plateau. There are only so many hours in a day and it feels like your business as a whole has reached its limit. You want to expand, but you’re not sure where to look or how to go about the process of finding partners you can trust.

Trust in strategic partnerships is one of those things you can’t see, but you’ll definitely know whether it’s there or not. When discussing a strategic partnership between your brand and another brand that offers complementary products or services that don’t directly compete with your own, a strategic partnership can be a great way to help you both grow.

But just like with any business relationship: trust is a must.

Of course, on the surface, it’s easy to assume that the trust will simply “be there”. After all, this relationship benefits both of you, and you understandably want the very best that your organization has to offer to be at the forefront of this collaboration, not to mention the ongoing goodwill that both groups will build up between each other.

Trust that Stands the Test of Time

At some point during your strategic partnership, suspicions will arise that perhaps the other side is gaining more from this than you are, not to mention the issues that inadvertently crop up between the two companies because of misunderstandings, a different work culture, or simply different priorities.

For example, if one company has a payment term of 30 days and another has a payment term of 90 days, it may seem like one is pressuring the other to keep the cash flowing, while the other, longer-term company is wondering what the rush is all about and can find their accounting department scrambling at the last minute. Situations like these generally happen without one side or the other intending to disrupt the balance of the strategic partnership.

But there are also those who see that the doors between both companies are wide open and ripe for exploitation owing to their vulnerability. It’s entirely possible that one party discovers a problem and, rather than discuss it openly, does everything they can to milk the value out of the partnership before their activities are uncovered. When this kind of behavior is seen at the senior level, don’t be surprised if other employees start to emulate what they see.

How to Create and Maintain Trust Over Time

To that end, it’s more important than ever to create and maintain trust between both companies in a way that not only reflects their most cherished values, but also gives the other company every reason to confide in them and trust that they’re delivering their absolute best. It’s easy to tell companies that they should cultivate trust, but few will ever go the extra mile and tell them how.

Fortunately, Workdom has you covered. Here’s how to make your strategic partnerships ironclad, with a foundation built on trust and mutual reciprocity.

Be Authentic

It’s not vulnerability, it’s a refreshing openness that demonstrates your goodwill and your good intentions with regard to the partnership. Some might see authenticity as “showing all your cards”. But you are still very much in charge of your business.

Go the extra mile to live the values, mission, and philosophy that you have highlighted on your website. Clear up anything that isn’t clear. Define expectations and leave no room for doubt, error, or misunderstanding. Authenticity goes an incredibly long way in cultivating honesty, and honesty goes a long way in building and cementing trust in a strategic partnership.

Be Honest

A lot of companies say that they’re honest, but when push comes to shove, they’ll do whatever they can to save face or simply ignore the situation until it becomes too big to ignore. Be unapologetically honest.

This may involve having to root out some bad apples, reshuffle some structures or simply lay out what’s happening even if it’s uncomfortable. The other side will appreciate your candor and by bringing up issues before they are exacerbated and morph into considerable problems, you can help avert a crisis before it happens.

Be Responsible

At the core of your strategic partnership, be responsible. You are still the captain of your own ship and you have quite a degree of autonomy to make your own decisions with regard to how your organization will come out of this partnership. You want to trust in your partner to perform to the best of their ability, and you want to lend whatever help you can to see that through to fruition.

At the same time, you’re not responsible for the whole partnership. When you act in the best interests of both rather than solely what is best for your company to the exclusion of everything else, it gives the impression that you’re not as invested in the partnership as the other side, and this can lead to disagreements and distrust.

As you can see, cultivating trust in a strategic partnership is easier said than done. However, with the right team on your side, you can not only locate potential partners or distributors, but also foster relationships between them that are fully built on trust and mutual cooperation.

How Can Workdom Help with your Strategic Partnerships?

Contact our senior advertising professionals at Workdom today and let’s take a deep dive into where your business is and how you’d like it to grow, using our cutting-edge and proven advertising and marketing techniques.

How Can Strategic Partnerships Help You Grow Your Business?

January 22, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

Strategic partnerships offer numerous benefits for your business, as well as the business(es) you choose to partner with. Together, complementary, non-competitive companies can help each other in ways that neither of them could have likely accomplished on their own. So what are some of the benefits of forming such a strategic partnership? Let’s take a closer look:

You Can Tap Into New Markets

Strategic partnerships allow you to tap into markets that you may otherwise have not considered, known about, or even tried to crack yourself but just couldn’t get the response you were hoping for.

Your partnership aligns you with another brand that has established itself well in that space, and as is often the case, their clout and presence in that market will reflect well on you, giving both of you new advantages in markets that need what you have to offer, but also have a foundation upon which to build a business relationship with you.

You Can Reach New Customers

In addition to allowing you to establish a recognizable presence in new markets, a strategic partnership done at an opportune time, allows you to reach new customers. These customers may have heard of your brand, or this may be the first time they’ve ever had the experience of knowing who you are, but your alignment with the more well-known or well-established company in that sphere already gives you a leg up over those who are still trying to wriggle into that market and find their place.

You Grow Your Brand Awareness

Although you’re allied with another company in this partnership, your company also gains the benefit of added brand awareness. People come to associate your brands with each other, not in a merger-type way, but more as a complementary way.

For example, McDonald’s only serves Coca-Cola products because of a strategic partnership between the two. No one believes that Coca-Cola is going to go into the fast food franchising business, nor is McDonald’s going to come up with a line of icy cold soft drinks any time soon.

This kind of strategic partnership allows both companies to concentrate on what they’re best at, without looking at their strategic partner as a competitor. Both companies gain from the partnership and are able to do more business working together than separately in their own “brand silos”(no matter how well-known or big those silos may be!)

Customers Enjoy Added Value from Their Purchase

Going back to our McDonalds example, it’s rare that a customer will order a burger and fries, but not a soft drink with their meal. Partnerships like this add more than just vague “value”. They add convenience, savings, entertainment, or other benefits to the consumer, and when the consumer has a good experience, again and again, they remember it and look to repeat it.

Strategic Partnerships Build Trust in Both Companies

Finally, one of the biggest unseen advantages of strategic partnerships is that over time, they help build trust in both companies. Such partnerships help create a strong foundation as they branch out into new markets as well as solidify their hold in existing markets.

But identifying whether or not a partnership would be beneficial to both companies can be difficult. How do you find complementary products or services that aren’t competitive? How can you be sure the mission statement and philosophy of the business you’re looking to partner with aligns with yours? Finding companies worth forming strategic partnerships with can be a challenge, but these unicorns do exist!

Fortunately, help is here! At Workdom, we’re always looking for companies that would be the perfect strategic fit for each other. We can help you grow your business by finding like-minded, forward-thinking companies who complement what you have to offer without being competitive so that you can both grow and expand your respective visions together.

Contact us today to learn more about what opportunistic partnerships might await you and how to get started with the right kind of outreach that generates the responses you’re looking for. Our senior advertising executives are standing by and ready to help as we work together to navigate the new normal and help ensure that the bonds of business remain strong and firm in any situation.