Your brand is your reputation. From global corporations to small, local businesses, your success hinges on how others perceive your brand. With 17% of customers willing to walk away from a brand after just one bad experience, the role of reputation measurement cannot be overstated — your business depends on it.
Your brand isn’t just a logo or a tagline; it’s a living, breathing representation of your values, promises, and identity. It's the sum total of every interaction and experience people have with your business. And people are more willing to share their experiences than you might realize — even if they’re not sharing their feedback with you.
Here’s the scoop on brand reputation measurement and how you can start tracking it for better brand perceptions.
Table of Contents:
What Is Brand Reputation Measurement?
Why Is Brand Reputation Measurement Important?
What Are Reputation Measurement Models?
9 Top Corporate Reputation Measurement Tools
How to Track Reputation Metrics with Meltwater
What Is Brand Reputation Measurement?
Definition of Brand Reputation Measurement: The proactive process of evaluating how a brand is perceived by customers, employees, stakeholders, and the general public.
Reputation measurement tracks various metrics, including:
- Customer satisfaction
- Consumer sentiment
- Online reviews
- Brand mentions
- Overall engagement
Collectively, these insights can gauge a brand’s reputation. They also provide insight into where a brand may need improvements and can help assess the impact of marketing strategies on a brand’s reputation.
Why Is Brand Reputation Measurement Important?
People already have an opinion of your brand, even if they don’t share that opinion with you. Brand reputation measurement allows you to play an active role in shaping those opinions to create favorable outcomes.
But you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you don’t know what those opinions are, you’re in the dark about what to do next. You don’t know what you’re doing well or where you might be struggling.
Reputation measurement gives you a predictable, systematic way of evaluating your reputation which is essential for effective reputation management. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of how others perceive you in the market so you can make strategic adjustments to improve your image.
Having a process for online reputation measurement is critical at a time when a single review or Tweet can make or break a brand. Companies can stay ahead of potential crises by spotting emerging issues early on. With continuous reputation monitoring and brand monitoring and analysis, companies can mitigate reputational damage by stopping issues before they go viral.
Tip: Read our blog about crisis communications, learn how to manage a PR crisis, and take a look at tips for writing a crisis statement.
What Are Reputation Measurement Models?
Brand reputation measurement has many moving parts and metrics, and no single metric will deliver the comprehensive understanding you need. That’s why companies turn to models that combine these insights to evaluate your reputation holistically.
Reputation measurement models use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to assess a brand’s trust, credibility, and reliability. Examples include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty by asking one simple question: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? The goal is to gain insights into brand advocacy and customer satisfaction.
- Reputation Quotient Model: Developed by the Harris Poll, this model combines six key dimensions — social responsibility, emotional appeal, financial performance, products and services, vision and leadership, and workplace environment — to provide a complete understanding of a brand’s public perceptions.
- Consumer Sentiment Analysis: This sentiment analysis method captures and analyzes the opinions, emotions, and attitudes of consumers.
These models use scientific approaches to assess and measure a brand’s reputation. By using reputation measurement models, brands can strengthen relationships with stakeholders and ultimately create greater success.
9 Top Corporate Reputation Measurement Tools
Brands have options when it comes to measuring their reputations. Let’s explore eight of the top corporate reputation measurement tools and how they contribute to a better brand:
1. Radarly
2. Jotform
3. Qualtrics
4. Keyhole
5. Google Alerts
6. Google Analytics
7. SOCi
8. Trustpilot
9. Reputology
1. Radarly
Radarly is Meltwater's AI-powered consumer insights technology that provides comprehensive insights into customer behaviors and perceptions. It's a great corporate reputation measurement tool because it takes into account social media, news, blogs, forums, and other sources to help you learn more about your audience’s preferences and opinions.
What makes Radarly unique is its ability to not only collect insights but also tell you what they mean. Rather than simply tracking brand mentions or behaviors, Radarly can connect the dots to show you why the data matters.
Radarly monitors brand mentions and analyzes sentiments across different markets, regions, and countries. Brands can gain valuable cross-country consumer insights into how others perceive their products or services in different markets, which can help you improve localization strategies.
2. Jotform
For quick, one-off insights, Jotform is a great brand reputation measurement tool for collecting consumer feedback. This form-builder tool allows you to create a variety of custom forms and send them to customers of your choice.
This is an inexpensive option to deploy NPS surveys quickly. With no coding required and tons of customization options, you can create an NPS survey and send it to customers in minutes. Jotform also offers 150+ integrations so you can automate NPS surveys within other processes and functions, such as email marketing or online shopping.
3. Qualtrics
Your brand reputation is shaped by your customers’ experiences, which is why Qualtrics’ Experience Management (XM) software can help you understand your reputation metrics. The platform includes survey capabilities to collect feedback from customers and stakeholders, customer sentiment analysis, and real-time data dashboards to track changes in perceptions over time.
Built-in dashboards are heavy on visuals to help you make sense of your data at a glance. For example, you can see what areas are helping or harming your brand reputation. Once you implement changes, you can visually monitor how those improvements affect your image.
Tip: Take a look at more customer experience software and platforms and at customer experience management software.
4. Keyhole
If tracking brand reputation on social media is your goal for the year, Keyhole should be on your list. Apart from tracking your social media presence, it also tracks any hashtags and keywords for you. So, whether it's a branded hashtag campaign or a relevant keyword, Keyhole has got you covered.
The tool also offers sentiment analysis and trend tracking features that help you monitor your marketing ventures with great precision. And let's not forget, Keyhole also provides the ability to share live dashboards, download customizable reports, and access unlimited publishing on top platforms, among other features.
5. Google Alerts
One of the best free (and informal) reputation measurement tools, Google Alerts is highly underutilized for reputation management. This tool allows you to track mentions of specific keywords, then receive email alerts when content using those keywords is published.
Combined with other reputation measurement tools, Google Alerts can add context to every mention your brand receives online. Learn who is publishing about your brand and how they’re presenting you in the media. If you’re receiving negative publicity, for example, you’ll know it before it spreads far and wide and can prepare an appropriate response.
6. Google Analytics
Dissatisfied customers aren’t shy about hitting businesses where it hurts most — right in the pocket. A drop in website traffic, backlinks, and conversions is sure to have an impact on sales, but Google Analytics can help spot potential problems.
Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that monitors key metrics, including:
- Total website traffic
- Website traffic by source
- Time spent on page
- Bounce rate
- Returning visitors
- Conversion rates
While not strictly for corporate reputation measurement, these insights can be very telling about how others perceive your online brand. For example, a decline in return traffic could mean your messaging, offers, or user experience aren’t compelling enough. The same could be true for low conversion rates. Or, it could indicate a bigger problem, such as negative publicity.
You can use these metrics to provide context into insights from other consumer intelligence tools, like Radarly. These metrics can illustrate the effect consumer sentiments, online reviews, and other insights have on your brand.
7. SOCi
Designed for corporate reputation measurement, SOCi helps you keep tabs on multiple locations from a central location. Monitor reviews, conversations, and surveys across each of your businesses to see how people in different markets perceive you.
You can also combine these insights to gain a sense of brand appeal on a holistic level.
8. Trustpilot
There are lots of ways to collect online reviews from your customers. But TrustPilot is purpose-built with the goal of instilling trust and confidence in future buyers.
More than 9 in 10 consumers ages 18-34 trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. These reviews are great sources of information and can make or break buying decisions.
Trustpilot aims to cut down on fake reviews by only connecting with people who have done business with you. This tool surfaces insights that users might not have shared with your brand otherwise, allowing you more insights into their experiences while presenting honest feedback to future customers.
9. Reputology
Another great tool for collecting reviews 24/7, Reputology makes it easy for businesses to see, respond to, and analyze reviews. Get immediate notifications when someone leaves you a review so you see feedback and respond accordingly. This unique reputation measurement tool monitors reviews across all review sites, including big names like Google and Facebook, and even employee review sites like Glassdoor.
The tool takes reputation measurement to the next level by transforming feedback into easy-to-digest insights. Sentiment analysis tools will show you what your reviews mean in the grand scheme of your reputation.
How to Track Reputation Metrics with Meltwater
Tracking your reputation requires ongoing commitment. Public perceptions and consumer preferences change at a moment’s notice. It’s essential to keep your finger on the pulse of your brand perceptions and be ready to react and respond accordingly.
Meltwater’s AI-driven consumer insights platform, Radarly, provides real-time insights into your audience so you can track and manage your reputation. Our platform combines tried-and-true market research methodologies with social media listening and analysis to learn what people are saying, thinking, and feeling about your brand, even if they’re not tagging you or sharing feedback with you directly.
By tapping into a global data feed, you can learn more about how your reputation stacks up and what you can do to change or maintain it.
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