The Importance of Brand Reputation Management Amid the Crisis
As governments across the globe shut down most activities and encourage people to take preventive measures to protect themselves from the COVID-19 outbreak, internet usage continues to spike.
For businesses that have an online presence, it’s the most ideal time to engage their audience.
If your restaurant, like many other businesses, has been hit by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, you can turn to digital marketing solutions to stay afloat.
Here’s how our brand/reputation management and social media marketing services and expertise can help your restaurant business survive and perhaps even thrive during the scourge.
Your restaurant needs to maintain a loyal customer base and be proactive when responding to questions and concerns raised by customers. But which areas should you prioritize when it comes to reputation management?
From our experience, we understand that negative reviews are barriers to reputation management. We can help you respond to all reviews as we leverage the content of the reviews to improve your customer service.
We’d like you to look at reputation management as an approach to monitoring or improving how consumers perceive your brand. With more emphasis on customer feedback, this is the approach your business needs to win and maintain the trust of your customers.
It’s undeniable that reputation management will be crucial over the next year (or two) as relevant specialists struggle to combat the virus. Your main concern should be how you’ll bounce back from the potential effects of the coronavirus pandemic and survive a foreseeable recession.
You shouldn’t lose customer trust at this time. Instead, invest in proactive reputation/brand management. Among the tools we can use to help you attain this goal include social media, business listings, store pages, reviews, email, and more.
Read along to find out why you should harness the power of social media to manage your brand reputation and more.
Social Media as an Effective Tool for Brand/Reputation Management
Social media is one of the communication channels that are experiencing a surge in the number of users. As people are being advised to stay or work from home, they’re relying on social networking sites to communicate with friends and family members.
What does this mean for food businesses?
An increase in social media usage means that there’s an increase in demand for content online. People are passing time and seeking information with the content posted on social networking sites.
As digital marketers, we largely rely on social media and email to help businesses like yours engage customers and attract new ones. We can help leverage the power of social networking apps from TikTok to Facebook to Snapchat to your advantage.
Why Communication Needs To Be Empathetic
There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. Since people don’t know what to expect, we believe that being empathetic to their fears and needs will make them appreciate your messages more.
We’ve heard of businesses engaging in acts of kindness. Your brand can donate to charity too. Such an approach can help show that you care for them and build goodwill and trust with the public.
Even amid these trying times, your customers are mentioning your brand online. With this type of feedback, we believe that you can get clarity on what consumers think about your services. You can also discover areas that your business needs to adjust to keep up with the customers’ needs.
Staying informed with what your customers are saying is crucial to your business. We can help create a review response strategy (if you don’t have one) to help you be transparent and calm in your responses.
Our company can also work hand-in-hand with your team to equip them with templated, corporate-approved responses they can use to maintain the reputation of your brand across all communications.
Understanding Remote Customer Service
We acknowledge the fact that some of your services may require face-to-face interaction for better delivery. Since the COVID-19 situation is making such interactions limited, we can use your social media profiles to personalize the communications and help inform your audience about the sudden change in business operations.
Our company can also leverage other mediums of communication that your business uses with customers to achieve the same goal.
Remote customer service can be part of your reputation management strategies. Allow us to help your customers enjoy a memorable experience as they interact with your brand online.
Embracing the Need to Educate Customers About the Outbreak
Besides communicating sudden changes in business operations to your customers, we can help you inform them about some of the coronavirus preventive measures they can adopt.
As we educate them, your brand will build and maintain trust with them. Spreading awareness to the public during these tough times can show that you care but also help introduce a new set of consumers to your services.
Our company can help curate simple yet informative content for the public.
We understand that people have varied questions and concerns surrounding the coronavirus disease. Your business may be receiving such questions too.
We’ll provide your customers and other members of the public with timely and accurate information to help them cope with the pandemic. We’ll also set up email alerts that customers can use to send new questions.
Marketing Your Restaurant Business During the Pandemic
Trying to sell or advertise a product or service during these trying COVID-19 times may be ideal provided that your business adds a personal feel to the language used. Tomorrow, brands are going to be judged by how they behaved through this crisis.
We’ll help you reassess the message you’re trying to send to your customers to ensure that it doesn’t sound overly-opportunistic and insensitive.
Failing to sympathize with what the public is currently facing may hurt your business in the long run. People are already under pressure and stress due to the coronavirus. The least your food business can do is to add salt to the wound.
You wouldn’t want your message to come off as a selfish tactic to drive sales revenue when people are experiencing hard times.
Let Us Help You Maintain Your Reputation and Grow Your Brand Online
Since misinformation spreads like a wildfire online, managing your online presence and defending your brand’s reputation is a crucial thing to do amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Your brand should be the source of truth for members of the public including concerned customers.
We believe that every strategy you implement towards brand/reputation management could be detrimental or good to your brand. That’s why we’re here to help you educate your customers, share factual information, and show that you genuinely care about your customers.
Feel free to contact us for expert help with your restaurant’s reputation management and social media marketing needs.