Brand safety refers to a set of measures that businesses take to protect their brand image and reputation online. This involves ensuring that their ads, content and partnerships align with their values and do not compromise their integrity or ethics.
Businesses' online presence can suffer without proper brand safety measures. After all, maintaining a positive brand image is crucial for a business' growth and success. On the other hand, negative associations, such as being linked to inappropriate or offensive content, can damage a brand's reputation, leading to the loss of customers, revenue, and trust.
This guide will highlight key strategies for maintaining brand safety online. These strategies include being mindful of ad placements, using brand safety tools, having clear social media guidelines, monitoring social media accounts, promptly responding to negative feedback, and having a crisis management plan.
Any negative association with your brand can occur when ads appear near offensive or inappropriate content. This can result in an unfavorable perception of your brand. Contextual advertising can help minimize these risks by targeting ads based on content relevance and ensuring they appear in appropriate contexts.
You can implement best practices to avoid inappropriate ad placements, such as blacklisting and whitelisting specific websites. Blacklisting involves excluding specific websites from ad placement, while whitelisting involves allowing placement only on approved websites.
To exert greater control over ad placement, you should also consider excluding specific content categories to prevent your ads from appearing alongside inappropriate content. In addition to blacklisting and whitelisting websites or platforms, this approach enables you to precisely choose the types of content you want your ads to be associated with.
Ad fraud poses a significant threat to brand safety, as it can result in wasted ad spending and sales team resources. Click fraud, for instance, involves fake clicks on an ad by bots or individuals, which can inflate the cost per click for advertisers.
Likewise, impression fraud artificially inflates the number of ad impressions to create the impression of higher engagement and reach. Unfortunately, this can lead to wasted sales efforts as businesses try to convert phony engagement and reach into leads.
To prevent ad fraud, you can use ad verification tools that help ensure that ads are displayed to real people in safe environments. These tools can detect ad fraud by flagging suspicious activity, such as high click-through rates or a large number of impressions from a single IP address.
You should also regularly monitor ad traffic for unusual patterns and investigate any irregularities promptly. Proactively identifying and preventing ad fraud can help protect your ad spend and maintain a positive brand image.
User-generated content, particularly negative comments or inappropriate posts, can harm a brand's reputation in various ways. Such content can spread rapidly on social media, quickly reaching a large audience, including the brand's existing and potential customers.
If the content portrays the brand negatively, it can create a perception among the public that the brand is not trustworthy, reliable, or ethical. Harmful content can also trigger customer backlash, leading to declining sales, brand loyalty and customer retention.
A comprehensive social media monitoring strategy is required to address potential issues and maintain the brand’s image. This strategy involves actively monitoring social media platforms for brand mentions, analyzing those mentions' sentiments and promptly responding to harmful or inappropriate content.
Social media screening also plays a crucial role in the hiring process to maintain brand safety by avoiding potential brand-damaging employees. This process involves screening candidates' social media profiles to identify content that could damage the brand's reputation. This includes posts, comments or shares that could be considered discriminatory, offensive or inappropriate.
Effective crisis communication is vital during a brand safety incident because it can determine damage to a brand's reputation and long-term success. Consumers expect timely and transparent messaging during a crisis, and failure to respond adequately can result in widespread negative publicity and even financial repercussions.
Public relations plays a vital role in maintaining brand safety and managing crises. PR professionals are responsible for developing crisis communication plans, monitoring brand mentions and engaging with stakeholders during one. The goal is to mitigate negative impacts and protect the brand's reputation.
One key strategy in crisis management is media outreach, where PR professionals work with media outlets to ensure accurate reporting and manage the narrative. Reputation repair is another strategy that involves acknowledging mistakes, taking responsibility and offering solutions to address the issue.
PR strategies should be proactive, rather than reactive, to minimize brand safety risks and maintain a positive brand image. This involves monitoring social media and other online platforms for potential threats, responding to negative comments with the best PR practices in mind and implementing procedures to prevent future incidents.
Ad verification involves the process of validating that ads are in the appropriate contexts and that they reach the intended audience. By validating ad placements, for example, brands can ensure brand safety by aligning their advertising efforts with their values and avoiding negative associations with inappropriate content.
Ensuring an ad is visible to users is also an essential aspect of ad verification. This is called viewability, which measures how much of an ad a user sees. There are various tools and techniques available for verifying ad placements and viewability.
For example, third-party verification services like Integral Ad Science or DoubleVerify are commonly used by advertisers and agencies to validate ad placements and ensure viewability. These services also offer real-time reporting and optimization capabilities, allowing brands to adjust their advertising efforts based on performance data.
Reputation managers play a critical role in maintaining brand safety by monitoring online mentions and addressing negative feedback promptly. They are also responsible for maintaining a positive brand image by monitoring and influencing social media, review sites and other online platforms to manage hostile comments, reviews or feedback about the brand.
One of the key strategies for online review management is to respond to negative reviews professionally. The response should address the concerns raised by the reviewer and offer a solution to their problem. This approach demonstrates your brand's commitment to customer satisfaction and can turn a negative review into a positive experience for the customer.
You can also incentivize customers to leave positive reviews by offering discounts, loyalty points or other rewards. Likewise, you can reach out to satisfied customers and request them to leave a review. This approach not only helps to build a positive brand image but also increases customer engagement and loyalty.
Social listening tools will make your job much easier, as they help track brand mentions and sentiment across social platforms. These tools allow you to monitor online conversations about your products or services, identify trends and gain insights into your audience's perception. In addition, you can quickly identify and mitigate potential safety issues by tracking brand mentions and sentiment.
Sentiment analysis is another essential tool for gaining insights into audience perception and informing brand safety strategies. Sentiment analysis pulls data and insights from online content to determine the positive, negative or neutral sentiment. This analysis can help you understand how your audience receives your brand's message and track important topical insights.
Competitor analysis involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, their marketing strategies, product offerings, customer base and overall performance. Trend identification, meanwhile, consists of tracking emerging trends and market changes, including consumer preferences, technological advancements, and industry developments.
Keeping abreast of market trends helps you anticipate customer behavior changes, adapt marketing strategies and seize new opportunities while mitigating risks. Identifying and analyzing competitors' strategies allows you to find the best approaches to meet customer needs effectively.
What you can do to get insights on trends and risks in the market:
Having brand guidelines is a must to maintain a consistent and recognizable brand identity across all channels. You must also collaborate with various departments, including marketing, design and legal, to create comprehensive guidelines that align with your brand messaging and visual identity.
Here are some best practices for crafting effective brand guidelines:
When building an online presence for your brand, you should pay close attention to personal branding, especially for executives and employees. By creating a cohesive brand image across individual online presences, personal branding helps to reinforce the company's values, messaging and goals. It also enhances trust and credibility among stakeholders.
Here are some tips for developing a solid personal brand:
Programmatic advertising refers to the use of automated technology to buy and sell ad inventory in real-time. It offers numerous benefits, including increased efficiency, targeting precision and cost savings.
Some benefits of programmatic advertising for brand safety include increased efficiency due to the automated process and targeting precision resulting from data and algorithms used to identify and target specific audiences. However, it also carries risks like ad fraud and inappropriate ad placements.
To ensure brand safety in programmatic ad buying, advertisers can execute several strategies, such as:
Educating and training employees about brand protection is indispensable for any organization that values its reputation and wants to safeguard its brand image. You should create a culture where brand safety is a top priority, and everyone understands their role in maintaining it.
To start, you should communicate why education and training on brand safety are important to protect the company's brand and the impact it can have on the business if the brand is compromised. This can be achieved through regular training sessions, company-wide emails or workshops.
Additionally, you need to ensure employees understand the potential risks that can arise when brand safety fails to be a priority, including data breaches, phishing attacks and counterfeit products. Simultaneously, you must also provide clear guidelines on avoiding these risks, ensuring that your employees understand the company's security policies and procedures.
You should provide regular updates and refreshers to maintain employee engagement and ensure they are up-to-date with best practices. In addition, interactive elements like quizzes, games, or role-playing exercises can keep employees engaged. Engaged employees are more likely to retain the information during the training.
In conclusion, brand safety is crucial for businesses to maintain their brand image and reputation online. Failure to follow its best practices can damage a brand's reputation, leading to loss of customers, revenue and trust.
Strategies for maintaining brand safety online include:
Viral Nation Secure offers an advanced brand safety and reputation management solution through robust social media monitoring and screening capabilities. With its AI-powered tools, Viral Nation Secure can identify potential risks and threats to your brand's reputation across major social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Google News.
