As part of our commitment to top brands using our tools for online reputation management, we’re going to explore factors that influence brand influence. Brand influence is important to increasing a brand’s market value, and here’s how you can define your brand’s influence.

Define your brand’s influence with engagement

Being present on all channels as your prospective clients is a good way to start making your brand relevant, credible, and useful to the end consumer. While you can always benefit from peer-to-peer conversations and industry news, social listening is integral to understanding brand influence. Today, it has become easier than ever to keep track of your brand’s movement in the market and of what people say about your products or services.

Understanding customer sentiment is the first step to defining the influence of your brand. There is no better way to understand your customer than through their engagements with your brand. Studying customer engagement with your brand can devise ways to improve your market presence and reach. So how can you define such influence?

How many people are happy with your brand?

Social listening can help you learn about conversations around your brand. You should be on the lookout for how many people say nice things about your brand. They are your promoters. But you should also be aware of the negative buzz surrounding your brand. The people who are unhappy with your brand are called detractors. Knowing what people say is crucial to learning about customers’ sentiment and to drafting a solid plan to further your market reach and presence.

To understand whether your brand is offering more value than criticism, you can use something called the Net Promoter Score. This NPS is achieved by subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters. If you have more promoters than detractors, your brand is doing considerably well. While it’s impossible to satisfy all the detractors, you can still make relevant content to reach the right people at the right time.

Essentially, knowledge is power, and when you have a clear picture of your promoters and detractors through social listening, you have a pathway to promote yourself better. By encouraging promoters to promote your brand and detractors to notice the good about your brand, you can define your brand’s influence step by step.

Do you know what influencers are up to?

People want to hear about other users’ experiences with your brand—what better source of branded information than your favorite influencer. Using data collected from social listening, you can narrow down the best influencers and their engagement with brands. Even if they are promoting your competitor, you have a lot to learn about influencers and their role in marketing. Remember, they don’t have to be extremely popular. They just have to foster regular engagement on their platform in significant numbers.

The influencer marketing space was estimated to grow by 13.8 billion in 2021, and that figure has been surpassed already. If you want to stay competitive, you have to leverage influencer marketing. Because knowing how many influencers are willing to promote your brand’s offering will foster long-term consumer relationships in the market. That’s because, in the age of social media, influencers have a massive say in what consumers buy and what they don’t.

Being on the good side of influencers, unless you’re attempting reverse psychology, is vital to your brand’s continued engagement online. Because leveraging influencers to promote your brand is a strong indicator of your brand’s influence as a whole.

Is your brand catching up with trends?

Another powerful metric that defines and grows your brand’s influence is keeping up with the latest trends. If your business talks about hot topics related to the industry, it’s likelier to get found by interested users. Besides bolstering your credibility as an establishment, keeping up with trends also helps connect with a wide range of internet users.

Thus, SEO-optimized blogs, video marketing, and relevant content can compete with others in the market to showcase the value that your brand provides. A brand’s influence is linked to its value. If you are catching up to the hype with informational and witty content, you are defining your brand’s influence by positioning yourself for success.

That being said, it’s important that while you define your brand influence with trending topics, you retain your authenticity and brand voice. Because, ultimately, a loyal consumer is nurtured with a unique style that defines your true influence.

Are you a subject matter expert?

Brands that associate with influencers gain influence themselves. However, it is important to retain your position as the subject matter expert in your niche. To create a solid content marketing strategy, you have to address the pain points of your ideal customer and position your brand as the solution. You must add value to the consumer journey by monitoring their experiences. If you manage to foster engagement with your whitepapers and thought leadership content, you have succeeded at retaining interested people.

Providing informational, relevant, and easily accessible resources to the consumer can help you achieve more credibility. As you become a subject matter expert, you may have to spend more time developing content, but you will also gain more insight into user behaviour. Thus, being a subject matter expert fosters loyalty. When it comes to a brand’s influence, the loyalty of your consumer is the biggest prize.

And if you’re just starting out, here’s a bonus tip. Don’t worry if you spend hours making content but receive only 10 readers a day. Consistency is key to nurturing and defining your brand’s influence. If you keep up the good work, those 10 readers will become lifetime supporters. The 10 people who promote your brand are more important than the 10,000 that haven’t heard of your brand. As is the case, when it comes to defining brand influence, loyalty goes both ways.

Wrapping up

Influence plays an essential role in online reputation management. If you’re wondering about how to gain all the above-mentioned insights to define your brand’s influence, you will be happy to know that social listening is the key. Using social listening with tools like Konnect Insights, all the above factors can be measured and analysed to define where your brand’s influence stands.

You can pick up on any conversation across the world related to your brand and its offerings. You get access to dashboards offering insights into your brand’s positioning, reputation, influence, engagement, campaign performance, and even your brand’s customer response management. Don’t waste another moment wondering about your ideal consumer; find them all with Konnect Insights.