7 Must-things to Conduct a Brand Reputation Analysis

The reputation of your brand can make or break your business. It’s what people think and feel about your company, and it has an impact on everything from customer loyalty to your profits. That’s why it’s essential to keep an eye on your brand’s health. But how do you check your brand’s health? The answer is to analyze your brand’s reputation. This will help you understand how your brand is viewed by the market and give you insights on how to make things better. Let’s explore the steps you can take to do a thorough brand reputation analysis check.

1. Set Your Objectives

You must know what you’re looking for before you begin collecting data to analyze brand reputation.

Ask yourself these questions:

What do you hope to learn from this brand reputation analysis?
Do you want to understand customer thoughts about a recent product launch?
Are you aiming to measure the overall feeling towards your brand?

Clear objectives will help you zero in on your efforts and extract the most useful insights from your analysis.

To grasp this idea better, let’s look at an example.

If your objective is to understand how people view your brand compared to your competitors, you’ll want to focus on gathering data about both your brand and your main rivals.

You’ll need to examine factors like market share, customer reviews social media mentions, and industry rankings.

These steps will give you a clear snapshot of your market position and help you spot areas to improve to gain an edge over your competition.

2. Know Your Audience

You need to grasp that your brand’s image isn’t the same for everyone. It can differ a lot between groups. This makes it crucial to pinpoint the specific crowd you want to focus on when you check your brand’s reputation.

This crowd might be people who buy from you now, those who might buy later, experts in your field, or even the folks who work for you.

Picture this: you sell sports clothes to young people. You’d want to look at how the 18-35 crowd who love staying fit and playing sports see your brand. You might check out what they’re saying on Instagram and TikTok since these are big with that age group. You could also look at what they’re writing in reviews on fitness apps or websites that sell sports gear where your target audience often shops.

3. Choose Your Data Sources

Once you’ve identified your goals and target audience, the next step is figuring out where to gather your information.

There are various places where you can gather data for analyzing your brand reputation.

Start by examining how your brand is talked about on social media – check out mentions, comments, and shares on various platforms.
Also, take a look at customer feedback on review sites such as Yelp, Google Reviews, or industry-specific review platforms.
Additionally, search for any references to your brand in online news articles.
Even, you can look for conversations about your brand on sites like Reddit or industry-specific forums.
Most importantly, conduct your own research to get direct feedback from your target audience.
Finally, analyze your sales trends to see how they align with public perception of your brand.

4. Collect and Organize Your Data

Once you have your set of data sources determined, it is time to start collecting information. This can be somewhat more time-consuming than the previous three, but tools are available that will make it much simpler.

Social media monitoring tools track mentions of your brand across various platforms. A good number of these tools also support sentiment analysis that will help you immediately decode whether mentions of your brand are positive, negative, or neutral.

In any case, other sources of data may require you to obtain this data through manual collection, which includes reading from customer reviews, and news items, or through carrying out surveys.

Arrange your data in a way that will make it easy to analyze. It could be a spreadsheet that comprises sections of the date, source, sentiment, and critical themes that come up.

5. Analyze the Sentiment

The key step in brand reputation analysis is to understand what the data means for your brand’s image.

Take a look at the overall feeling towards your brand.
Does it lean positive, negative, or neutral?
What themes pop up often in good mentions?
How about bad ones?

Let’s say you’re looking at reviews for your software. You might see that lots of good reviews talk about how easy your interface is to use and how helpful your customer support is.

However bad reviews might often bring up slow loading times or glitches in some features. This shows you where to keep doing well (user experience and support) and where to make things better (how fast and stable your product is).

6. Identify Key Influencers

Apart from analyzing your brand’s reputation, you should also work out who the big names are behind the noisy chatter about your brand. These could be experts in your field well-known bloggers, or people with lots of followers on social media.

Knowing who these people are and what they say about your brand can give you useful insights and maybe even chances to work together.

7. Draw Conclusions and Make an Action Plan

Once you’ve gone through all the data on your brand’s reputation, it’s time to make sense of it and come up with ways to make it better.

Look for patterns in what you’ve found.

What’s shaping how people see your brand?
What are you good at, and where do you need work?

With these insights, create a plan of action. You might need to:

Fix common problems that people bring up in bad reviews
Highlight the good things about your brand that people often mention
Create new products or features that customers want but don’t have
Step up your customer service game
Change your marketing to match what customers think of you