How powerful is a brand? Amidst all the talk about marketing, sales and
Before I share a few tips, I believe a case study will more effectively communicate the power of good branding. So the tips in this post are inspired by Brand.com, which was recently purchased by Reputation Changer for six figures in an attempt to supercharge their brand.
The Brand.com Case Study
Formerly Reputation Changer, Brand.com is a great case study in effective brand management; with revenue growing at a massive scale and an increasing need to increase marketing spend, they needed to make a change in how they were branded and positioned. As a result, they purchased the Brand.com domain name and rebranded themselves.
There are many advantages to this but the major ones are:
- The new name communicates their purpose better.
- The rebrand resulted in quality media coverage on major sites like Techcrunch. This is expected with a six-figure purchase of a premium domain name like Brand.com
- It’s easier to position themselves as an authority. With the former name they were constantly stuck in the shadow of competitor, Reputation.com. With the rebrand, however, it became easy to position themselves as the top in their field; helping businesses effectively manage their brands
- They had more control over search rankings. This is very important, considering how much reliance people place on search engines like Google.com today. Type “brand.com reviews“ into Google to see what I mean.
5 Lessons from Brand.com on Effective Brand Management
Irrespective of the size of your business, you can borrow a few pages from Brand.com’s book. Here are some key lessons:-
# 1. Make sure your business name properly communicates your message
The first step towards customer satisfaction and effective brand management is to properly communicate your message; you can do this by ensuring your business name and domain name properly communicate your message.
In Brand.com’s case, while the initial name, Reputation Changer, to some extent communicates their message, a major challenge they had to deal with was with competing with Reputation.com; in most cases, it’s easier to confuse Reputation Changer for Reputation.com and as a result their marketing efforts was benefiting a competitor.
However, by switching to a more memorable domain name, not only did they get out of the shadow of a major competitor but they can stand out and will be the first to come to mind when people think of a solution to managing their brands.
The effectiveness of this approach is beyond doubt, with a commenter going as far to say the following on a Techcrunch article covering the rebrand: “The new domain name gives a more accurate depiction of the firm’s services. Managing a company’s online reputation takes real branding skills. This is an art and not a science. Just another example of how Reputation Changer is ahead of the curve.”
A quick search for the term “brand.com reviews” on Google shows this in action; the first few results are from Brand.com and when you dive deeper into the results, you’ll start seeing coverage from authoritative sites that cover Brand.com. Some of these results come from USAHerald, Techcrunch, Mediabistro and Technorati.
You don’t necessarily need a large budget to do this and you don’t have to get coverage on Techcrunch to be successful at it; you can start by building relationships with authoritative blogs in your niche.
Sometimes, you’ll need to pay to get coverage and sometimes you’ll get it naturally by building relationships and pitching your brand at the right time; however, the most important lesson is to ensure you’re able to control what people say about your brand online, at least to some extent.
If you don’t have profiles on social media sites, now is the time to start building up your profiles.
It’s easy to ignore Facebook and Twitter but the reality of having active profiles on these sites isn’t always about direct ROI, most of these sites have authoritative domain names that rank very easily for relevant keywords in Google.
If you have an active brand profile on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other relevant social networks, these profiles will also be displayed when people try to find you.
# 4. Contribute regularly to relevant blogs
A lot of brands are starting to realize the importance of content marketing when it comes to shaping their presence online; instead of having negative reviews about your business rank for brand terms, you can take control of your search results by becoming a regular contributor to authoritative blogs in your niche.
Gradually, you’ll start to build authoritative, content-rich profiles on these sites and your profiles will eventually start to rank for your brand-related terms; people will see this when they search for your brand and will be more likely to check out what you have to offer.
# 5. Make sure your product/service is exceptional
This is very important. While the above tactics might help your brand for awhile, if your product or service is not exceptional, the number of negative reviews about your brand will only keep increasing and it’s only a matter of time before they start outranking you for brand terms.
If you create a good experience for your customers, they’ll write about it wherever they can and this will further help your brand image.
Conclusion
It’s interesting how many lessons you can learn from one business; the above are key lessons I learned from analyzing Brand.com reviews online.
Do you know a major website you think is doing a great job of building a clean brand image? What lessons are you learning from them?
Did you like this article?
- Please share it with your network, we’d really appreciate it!
- Would you like to write for Tweak Your Biz? Or sign up for our RSS?
- An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
Connect with Tweak Your Biz on: 
Images: ” Business man holding board on the background, Brand Management / Shutterstock.com“
