9 Crucial Tips for Hiring an Expert and Improve Your Brand Reputation

Who does not want a good reputation? From a small local shop to a multinational company, a good reputation is the key to impressing and attracting repeat customers. If your brand fails to achieve that, you are far behind the competitive crowd.

Building a good reputation for your brand is necessary to thrive and stand out amongst the crowd of well-recognised companies. Millions of companies are in the same boat as you, and they are investing a good deal of money and time to build the desired reputation. With such high stakes, you must avoid making a mistake; therefore, we recommend seeking professional advice to help you walk the right path, discover the best digital strategy, and put all the positive aspects in place to enhance your brand reputation.

What is Your Brand Reputation?

Brand reputation is the perception people have of your business based on their experiences, interactions, and what they’ve heard about your products, services, or company values. It’s how your brand is perceived in the market and directly impacts customer trust, loyalty, and purchasing decisions.

Your brand identity lays the foundation for how you want to be seen, while your brand reputation reflects whether that vision aligns with public perception. A strong brand identity can influence your reputation positively, but gaps between the two can lead to distrust.

Key Takeaway:

• Brand identity = Who you say you are
• Brand reputation = Who people think you are

A strong brand reputation isn’t just about avoiding bad press—it’s about building trust, creating meaningful connections, and standing out in a crowded market. But to fully understand your brand reputation, you also need to consider your brand awareness.

The Link Between Brand Reputation and Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the extent to which people recognize and recall your brand. It’s the foundation of reputation because, without awareness, your brand won’t even enter the conversation. The more visible and recognizable your brand is, the more opportunities you have to shape how people perceive you.

For example, a company with high brand awareness but a weak reputation may be widely recognized but viewed negatively, potentially damaging its growth. On the other hand, a brand with a strong reputation but low awareness may struggle to reach a broader audience.

How to Evaluate Your Brand Reputation

1. Monitor online reviews and feedback: Check platforms like Google, Trustpilot, and social media to see what customers are saying.
2. Conduct surveys and polls: Ask customers directly how they perceive your brand.
3. Track mentions and sentiment: Use tools like Google Alerts or Brand24 to track mentions and assess whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.
4. Analyse brand awareness metrics: Evaluate metrics like website traffic, social media followers, and direct searches to gauge how well-known your brand is.

Strengthening Your Brand Reputation

• Prioritise customer experience: Happy customers lead to positive word-of-mouth.
• Build brand awareness strategically: Use consistent messaging, high-quality content, and effective marketing campaigns.
• Engage and respond: Show present and potential customers you care by responding to positive and negative feedback and addressing concerns quickly.
• Hire an expert: A branding expert or PR specialist can help craft strategies to improve your reputation and enhance visibility, ensuring your brand is seen in the best light possible.

Getting the Lowdown on What a Brand Reputation Expert Does

If you’re a brand owner trying to fix or boost your rep, it’s super important to know what a brand reputation expert actually does and how they can help you out. Here’s the scoop:

Basically, a brand reputation expert is all about making your brand look good to consumers.

They’re pros at brand reputation management. They can handle online reviews and feedback, deal with crises, keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand, manage media connections, and take care of your social media game.

Plus, they roll out content marketing strategies and team up with influencers and industry bigwigs to get your brand noticed. By listening to what customers have to say, they help make real improvements to polish your brand’s image.

Their main goal? To keep your brand shining bright and steer clear of any negativity.

9 Tips to Keep in Mind When Hiring Experts to Improve Your Brand Reputation

While hiring professionals with expertise in various areas of brand building and boosting reputation, it is crucial to consider some key factors that impact the results. A wrong decision can put your business in further trouble and ruin its reputation even more.

Here are nine tips to ensure you choose only the best:

1. Determine the Specific Needs of Your Brand 

First, you have to determine the brand’s needs before you communicate them to the team of experts you wish to hire.

Ask yourself: Is your brand struggling with negative reviews, or are you simply looking to enhance an already strong brand reputation? Working on the brand’s pain points and improving its reputation can be easy with a proper understanding of its requirements.

Start by evaluating your online reviews across platforms like Google, Yelp, Reddit forums, and Trustpilot. After all, as Chris Anderson puts it, ‘Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is.’

Assess your social media presence to see how customers engage with your posts. A brand reputation expert might conduct a social media audit to evaluate better your brand’s engagement with users on SNS platforms.

While determining the brand’s needs, deciding whether you need support from a part-time expert, a full-time consultant, or a long-term partnership with an agency is necessary. A full-time expert might be needed if your brand requires constant attention or is involved in a long-term reputation overhaul. For short-term needs or specific projects, a consultant or agency could suffice.

2. Evaluate Their Experience and Expertise

Hiring services from experts requires a significant investment of money and time, and you want them to be worth it. Expertise and years of experience are the first considerations when choosing your ideal brand reputation expert.

Anyone can create an impressive resume using resume builders. Thus, assessing a potential brand reputation expert’s skills in critical areas like PR strategies, SEO, and crisis management, as well as the depth of their practical experience within your industry or a similar sector is crucial. When evaluating professionals or agencies, you can ask for client testimonials and case studies to understand their past successes in helping individuals and companies make sound judgments.

Also, you must focus on tangible results and metrics while making a hiring decision, such as increased customer satisfaction scores and improved online ratings.

3. Consider Their Digital Marketing Skills

Your brand’s reputation is directly linked to its digital presence, and any efforts to enhance the reputation must start with improving the digital marketing strategies employed. You must ensure that your chosen expert has deep expertise in all the core areas of digital marketing, including social media, SEO for reputation, PPC, content marketing, and email marketing, thus successfully attracting your target audience and establishing credibility and trust within your industry.

Your chosen brand reputation expert should also know how to integrate traditional PR strategies like media outreach and partnerships with modern digital marketing techniques to achieve the best possible outcomes.

4. Hiring CRM Experts to Enhance Your Brand Reputation

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plays a pivotal role in shaping your brand reputation. A well-managed CRM system ensures every customer interaction is seamless, personalised, and efficient—key elements for building trust and loyalty. Hiring CRM experts can significantly boost your brand’s reputation by helping you manage customer relationships more effectively, enhance communication and interactions, and provide a personalised experience, leading to better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

 For example, by leveraging data, Salesforce experts help you understand customer needs and address issues proactively, which is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image. If you use Salesforce then integrating this expertise into your business operations can ensure a more customer-centric approach, ultimately enhancing your reputation in a competitive market.

5. Check Their Network and Industry Connections

Choosing an expert with solid connections within the industry and an equally impressive media network that can boost your brand’s reputation is essential. A strong relationship with the media can help your expert ensure that your brand is portrayed positively and even prevent a PR disaster from escalating. Hosting events can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility, and selecting suitable event spaces is crucial for making these events impactful.

A well-connected reputation expert will help connect your brand with the best influencers, media outlets, and industry leaders to give you access to a broader audience. They will also help you build lasting relationships with stakeholders and pave the way for growth opportunities.

For instance, a brand reputation expert can manage the reputation of an IT staffing solution services company by securing media mentions, organising fireside chats, or publishing guest blog posts to help the brand gain credibility and recognition in the tech and staffing industry.

6. Pay Attention to Transparency Reporting

With your investment of time and money, your brand reputation expert must prioritise clear communication and practice transparent reporting that keeps you in the loop. Ensure that they provide regular progress reports and metrics to track brand perception and update you on the improvements in review ratings, media mentions, and overall social media sentiment.

You might also want to be attentive to your chosen brand reputation expert’s reporting tools, including Google Alerts, sentiment analysis software, and other social media monitoring tools to track public opinion and identify emerging issues before they escalate.

7. Budget Considerations

Not all service providers you come across online can be counted on to help raise your brand’s reputation. Hiring a reputation expert can cost $1,000 to $15,000 monthly, based on their experience, industry complexity, and the scope of your reputation change needs. Specific requirements may incur additional costs.

However, hiring an expert for reputation management is a long-term commitment, and a higher price doesn’t always mean better quality. As such, always ask for a detailed quote to avoid unclear pricing structure and hidden charges with the provider.

Set clear expectations for results like a stronger online presence or even more positive reviews. In the end, the experts will explain how they would manage your costs and balance them with your brand’s goals for reputation building.

8. Long-Term Strategy vs. Quick Fix

Being a reliable service provider means looking at the big picture, and that means helping your brand grow and succeed in the long haul. On the other hand, some experts might suggest quick fixes. These reputation repair tactics promise instant results but may not last.

You can should to hire professionals who take the long road over those who suggest a quick fix with overnight results. However tempting these quick fixes may be, it’s best to focus on long-term strategies by experts that aim for sustainable reputation building.

9. Cultural Fit and Alignment with Brand Values

As important as finding someone reliable is, choosing an expert who knows and understands your company’s values and mission can ensure they can authentically represent your brand during public communication. The expert should reflect your brand’s voice and culture, thus sticking to communication methods and strategies that are in line with your brand’s identity.  

Final Thoughts 

The crowd of brand reputation experts is enormous, but it is in your hands to make the right decision and choose the one willing to protect and grow your brand’s reputation. If your goal is long-term reputation management, you must invest in an expert or an agency willing to put all that effort into helping you make informed decisions and letting your brand establish itself in the competitive market.

Our team of digital strategists have had their fair share of experience when it comes to dealing with business reputation. Even though we don’t call ourselves ‘brand reputation experts‘, it’s something we deal with every day. Contact us for help.

Article by

Tess O'Bamber

Tess entered the world of marketing as a content manager, focusing on social and blog content. She now has over four years of experience writing on-brand copy for websites, emails, whitepapers and more. Tess has a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia – she takes a creative approach to copywriting, whatever that looks like for each unique client. You'll still find her working on her first novel at the weekends, between DIY sessions and long walks.