What is the worth of your products and services?. You can compute its monetary and physical value, but what determines your brand’s worth is your customers’ perceptions of it. If they think you’re worth it, they will invest in your business.

Also, customer perception can produce or break your business. That is why it’s essential to strengthen your brand reputation to experience significant growth and prominence in your niche.

Below are seven tips for doing just that.

1. Synchronize your service delivery across channels.

As mentioned, your consistency drives your customers’ trust in your brand — and that also applies to your service delivery in every aspect. This includes everything, from your EPOS system and payment processing’s efficiency to various platforms you’re on.

Whether online or offline, your customers expect you to synchronize information about their orders, purchases, and requests and deliver a great personalized experience for them.

Omnichannel marketing helps you do that. It brings a unified and seamless customer experience and builds the impression that you are efficient, reliable, and on top of things.

Learning omnichannel marketing strategies may sound complicated, but it’s feasible with the help of various guides, tools, and techniques surrounding your platforms, such as email marketing, social media, and your in-person front desk. Customer data, artificial intelligence, automation, and other components are some things you can integrate to streamline your service delivery across multiple channels.

2. Explore influencer partnerships.

Influencers are online celebrities, typically on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. They have a massive following, indicating how much audiences enjoy their content and see them as dependable information sources.

Influencers can help you bolster your business’ brand image. When they mention your product’s benefits on their social media posts, their followers will also find the items worth trying because they trust these online celebrities.

Once these followers begin exploring your products, they’ll likely start going through the customer journey funnel. They can follow your brand, subscribe to your newsletters, and gradually become paying and loyal shoppers.

Search for the right influencer for your online business with tools such as Influence.co.

It lets you find influencers by location and category to ensure you’re in the same niche and target like-minded customers. The tool also enables you to apply advanced search filters such as platform type, number of followers, age, and more.

To show you an example, I chose “fashion” for the category, active on YouTube and Instagram in the USA, and a total reach of 40,000 to 50 million. Influence.co produced these results:

Influence.co presented a list of influencers with their starting rates, total social following in specific platforms, and more. You can then click on any of them to view their profiles, message or invite them to your marketing campaign.

By finding the ideal influencers to help promote your brand, you can widen your reach, improve the way consumers see your business and capture new customers who will love your brand.

3. Attach meaning to your brand.

Strengthen your brand by showcasing its value and making it more meaningful to customers. One way to do that is by connecting emotionally with your audience and driving empathy.

For example, if you’re running life coach certification programs, narrate aspiring coaches’ pain points and joys in finding the right certifying program, relate it with their personal and professional lives, and other ways of tugging at their heartstrings.

Include this strategy as you craft your social media, video, content, or email marketing plan, so you can determine ahead of time how your campaigns will go.

Another way of making your brand more meaningful is by relating charitable activities to every purchase your customers make. For example, for Diff Eyewear, every pair of glasses bought helps provide for reading glasses, medicines, eye exams and surgeries, in partnership with a charity organization.

You can also cater to specific groups of people, such as skaters, surfers, environment lovers, etc., for the cultural association.

4. Build customer loyalty with compelling content.

Creating high-quality and compelling content is one of the evergreen marketing tips to bolster your brand. It lets you provide value to your customers, present your product as solutions to their problems, and helps convince them to patronize your business among the rest. This leads to their becoming your loyal shoppers.

If you have poorly designed content, people won’t bother finishing consuming your content, much less explore what you can offer. As a result, you will struggle with gaining more followers, subscribers, and returning customers.

To engage more potential lovers of your brand:

• Create educational, practical, and attractive content.
• Entertain and visually appeal to consumers with relevant ideas related to your business that they can apply in their lives.
• Show them how your offers benefit them.
• Diversify your content into videos, photos, infographics, images, blog posts, and others — whether on your website, emails, and social media.
• Build a range of specific topics and offer value in every piece to make your followers want to hear more from you.

Doing this builds a gradual yet rewarding rapport with your customers and improves how they see your brand’s indispensability.

5. Be consistent with your branding.

Consistency is another way to amplify your online business’ brand. Even if you have eye-catching materials, you’ll only confuse your customers and make your brand less “sticky” if you use contrasting ways of designing and presenting your brand.

Whether on your email campaigns, social media posts, logo, or other digital assets, ensure you’re employing similar tones and styles so you can make your audiences feel like they’re communicating with the same brand they know and love.

If you’re struggling with keeping your designs consistent, try storing them in digital asset management software so that you can review your past creations for evaluation, reference, and comparison. This helps you track how your branding messages have remained the same (or differed) throughout a certain period and improve your presentation.

6. Exhibit your social proof.

Social proof is a psychological trigger of people becoming more likely to try your product when they see other customers enjoying and benefiting from it.

Statistics show that 97% of shoppers read reviews before buying something and that considerations influence nearly 90% of consumers’ purchase decisions.

Now the question is: how can you wield social proof and make your sceptical visitors willingly try your products?

The answer is by exhibiting positive reviews and ratings, customer testimonials, and social proof pop-ups on your online store, social networking platforms, review sites, etc.

When visitors read about other people’s excellent experiences with your store, they’ll be more easily convinced that your brand is reliable and worth trying with their hard-earned money.

To guide you on how to showcase social proof, here are some examples:

Image Source: Karmic Cold Pressed Juice.

Karmic Cold Pressed Juice displayed five-star ratings and positive user reviews on its site. You can do the same with tools such as Yotpo, TrustPilot, PowerReviews, etc.

You can also highlight customer testimonials the way California Baby did, dedicating a large, brightly-coloured area for it with plenty of negative space:

Image Source: California Baby.

Or back up your product with recommendations from trusted figures. For example, the Whole Dose presents how doctors and nutritionists loved its products:

Image Source: Wholy Dose.

On the other hand, GiveMeTap used pop-ups to show who bought its product from which location and when. This tells visitors that actual purchases are happening as proof of customer patronage.

Image Source: GiveMeTap.

Here’s another example: Glow Recipe showcased favourable product reviews by reputable media outlets such as Elle, Glamour, Forbes, and PopSugar, as seen in the image below:

Image Source: Glow Recipe.

Finally, MailChimp’s strategy is to share a video testimonial of how its email templates helped a business increase its sales, forge strong customer relationships, and create a flourishing community.

Image Source: Youtube.com.

Exhibit your social proof in many other creative platforms and formats that can best grab your visitors’ attention, strengthen your brand, and convert them.

Additional tip: Establish your brand’s credibility by improving your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Ranking and visibility through SEO strategies and optimizing for mobile-first indexing.

7. Strategize your conflict resolution efforts.

While you can have numerous customers enjoying your products, some will also claim to have a bad experience with your brand.

Realistically, you won’t get to please everybody despite your most significant efforts, as they can have different interests and preferences.

So, how do you prepare yourself when you encounter complaints and negative feedback on your emails, social media accounts, ratings and reviews, product pages, etc.?

The answer is by crafting a conflict resolution plan, with various strategies depending on the situation and its gravity.

Acknowledge the issue at hand, and try to veer the complaining person away from public discussion as courteously as possible.

You can begin with simple messages, such as, “We apologize for the negative experience you had with our product. Kindly email or send us a DM, and we’ll resolve this issue as smoothly and quickly as possible.”

From there, you can better discuss the context behind the concern and other details to settle the matter correctly and in mutually advantageous ways.

8. Strengthen your online business brand now.

Your brand’s worth boils down to what makes you stand out memorably, so customers dive into your content and offer and patronize your business.

As you keep strengthening your reputation, you’ll soon reap long-term benefits not just monetarily but also in terms of customer loyalty and brand advocacy — which are priceless.