When it comes to building your brand, your company image as a business is everything. Whether you work in retail, or manufacture, or something in between, you need people to know that you’re a reputable brand that they can trust.
People need to be able to believe in you, and often the company image can reflect on its products or services. As much as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, that becomes very much common practice when money is involved!
How to improve your company image
So how can you improve how your company image looks to others?
Your online company image
If there’s one place you should be working on your image, it’s online, and you have so much opportunity to do so. Firstly, you want to make sure that you have a website that can accurately reflect the quality of the service or product that you’re offering. Imagine you’re a potential client, and their first impression of you is going to be from viewing your website.
It’s more than just about the functionality of your website, but the appearance is very important. This is not something you should ever cheap out on, and it can go a long way to have a high-quality site made for your business!
It’s also very important how you and your employees carry themselves on social media. It can reflect badly on your business if employees are regularly being involved in a controversy, and you could find yourself losing customers and partners if you are not careful with who you hire, and how you carry yourself in the public eye.
Make sure that your employees know how you want your business’s image to be, both online and offline, as they are just as responsible for the presentation of the business as you are.
Your building
If your business operates from a building, and you frequently have to deal with clients and partners inside, then it’s important that you don’t skip over making the place look appealing.
Having big promotions or art made to decorate the area, having the best living walls you can get installed, all of it can help to improve your overall image. It’s a lot of money to spend on decor, but it’s all about what you stand to gain from spending it!
It doesn’t have to be a large and intrusive water feature to gain the attention of investors and clients, but making the extra effort to make your company image look promising to others can prove to have a high return on investment.
Service quality
No matter what it is that you provide or sell, no matter how you carry yourself, what’s most important is the quality of what you provide. If your products are of cheap quality, people will tie that to your company image, and you may lose a lot of customers from it.
You want to provide a product that will keep people coming back, for more than just saving money too. Compare yourself to competitors, get feedback from customers, paying more for better quality products is sometimes worth the investment!
Providing good quality products is important, but you should also have a heavy focus on customer service too. People need to know that they can trust you and that they can invest in you. They want to know that they can believe in you when they have queries and that the products they get from you aren’t going to be different from what you’ve advertised.
Failing to provide good customer service can stop your business from growing financially, and can start to make your brand unappealing to others.
Fundraising and charity
A lot of businesses like to take part in fundraising events to help out charities that they believe in, and it can be beneficial for many reasons. Most importantly, it’s great for building a relationship with customers, and while you won’t be making money, you’re likely to be gaining more customers as a result. People are more inclined to buy from a business that they can respect, and devoting yourself to good causes can do just that!
Networking
Being able to have collaborations with other reputable businesses can give you the boost in the reputation that you need. When a business someone trusts partners or collaborates with another business, you’re pretty safe to assume that both businesses are trustworthy.
It’s a lot to risk for businesses to partner up with others, and they have to make sure that they’re not going to ruin their own reputation – this is something that both businesses can benefit from.
