Brand Protection: 5 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

For every business owner, maintaining a positive brand image is crucial. However, other websites and individuals can try to infringe on your brand, damaging your reputation and negatively impacting customer loyalty.

Using brand protection strategies, you can prevent people from illegally undermining your brand. You can proactively deter counterfeiting, trademark infringement, patent theft, and more. This way, you can maintain credibility within your industry.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at brand protection and why it’s important. Then, we’ll discuss five ways to manage your online reputation. Let’s get to it!

What Is Brand Protection (And Why Is It Important)?

Brand protection efforts help keep other companies and individuals from violating your intellectual property (IP) rights. These measures should prevent counterfeit products, copyright infringment, patent theft, and other brand abuse incidents that violate your trademarks, designs, and brand identity.

Here are the most popular forms of brand abuse:

• Counterfeit goods replicate legitimate products to deceive customers. Companies selling counterfeit and pirated goods are also usually in breach of intellectual property rights.
• Domain spoofing usually takes the form of rogue websites attempting to impersonate authentic websites and are often created for malicious purposes (like to steal sensitive data).
• Patent theft is a type of intellectual property infringement that happens when individuals create products that are too similar in design or functionality to authentic products.
• Social media impersonation occurs when third-parties set up social media accounts that pose as well known brands. Usually, this is with the intention to sell counterfeit goods, distribute malware, or carry out phishing attacks.

Therefore, a brand protection strategy is crucial to protect your intellectual property and deter brand abusers. Not only is this important to prevent revenue loss, but it’s key to developing long-term success and sustainability.

On top of this, fake products that use your brand logo and name can put your hard-earned business reputation in jeopardy. In turn, this can permanently damage your customer relationships and nudge consumers to brands that appear more trustworthy and reliable than yours.

Brand Protection: 5 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Now that you know why it’s important to implement brand protection solutions, here are five ways to manage your brand’s reputation more effectively.

1. Domain Name Management

Without proper domain name management, your brand can be at risk of domain-based attacks like phishing and cybersquatting. Phishing websites can use variations of your domain to steal sensitive information from unsuspecting visitors.

Meanwhile, cybersquatters register and use domain names that are similar to your own in order to make a profit by selling it back to you. And, counterfeiters can even set up entire websites based on variations of your domain – where they can sell fake goods using your brand name and logo.

Domain management is a process that refers to all the tasks involved with properly managing your domain portfolio. The first step is to choose a reputable domain registrar like SirsteveHQ.

You can browse domains by industry, availability, and price. Better yet, you can find a range of quality domain extensions which can help you build trust with customers. And, it’s easy to enable several add-ons like domain privacy protection.

Your privacy settings are another important part of domain management. It’s best to activate privacy protection to hide your registration information online. Other tasks include renewing domains promptly (or automatically), and forwarding domains (which is necessary if you have multiple domains connected to one website).

2. Domain Monitoring 

Domain monitoring is one of the key ways to identify domain infringement incidents. Plus, it enables you to collect sufficient evidence if you need to take legal action. And, since it’s a preventative brand protection measure, you can detect potential issues before any damage is done to your brand.

Typically, this process starts with domain watching, which enables you to track new domain registrations that are similar to your own domain name. Services like DomainTools can help you do this:

Then, you can keep an eye on these registered domains that might eventually become a threat to your brand.

For instance, the domain may go from a parked domain to an active domain. Or, there may be signs of a more serious problem in the event that the WHOIS information changes, or mail servers get added with the intention of sending fraudulent emails.

3. Trademarks to Protect IP

Intellectual property (IP) refers to anything original that you create – like a brand name or a product design. There are several different types of intellectual property. But, a trademark is what you’ll need to protect your brand name and logo, and distinguish it from others.

This way, you can ward off IP theft. Additionally, it makes it easier to take legal action against individuals that engage in counterfeit trade. Meanwhile, if you don’t register your name as a trademark, someone else might use it and attempt to stop you from using it for your own business.

Trademarks are especially relevant for growing brands, since more people may start to copy you as your reputation increases and you become more established. It’s also essential if you want to franchise your business. That said, trademarks are a crucial part of online brand protection regardless of the size of your business.

4. Defensive (Or Proactive) Domain Registration

Defensive domain registration is the process of registering domains that are similar to your own to prevent other individuals or companies from buying them. This is one of the most effective ways to protect your brand against typosquatters that may attempt to steal traffic or customer details.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to register additional general top level domains that point towards your primary domain. For instance, if your website resides at yourdomain.com, you can also register yourdomain.net, yourdomain.co, yourdomain.org, and so on.

Additionally, if you run an international business, it can be a good idea to register regional or country-code top level domains like yourdomain.fr (for France) and yourdomain.de (for Germany). Defensive domain registration can also involve purchasing domain names that cover common misspellings or mispronunciations.

5. Cybersecurity Measures

In addition to the previous strategies we’ve discussed, you can also implement general cybersecurity measures to improve brand protection and defend your website (and customers) against online threats.

This way, you can prevent data breaches, and block a range of cyberattacks like phishing and malware. Not only can these sort of attacks damage your company’s reputation, but they can also lead to legal issues.

For instance, you can face hefty fines if customer details get stolen, as that may put you in breach of data protection laws such as the GDPR. Meanwhile, if you aren’t following ecommerce security standards like the PCI DSS, your company may be more vulnerable to lawsuits in the case of a hacking incident.

Moreover, if you’re a smaller business with limited resources, it can be difficult to recover from these setbacks. With all of that in mind, here are some of the best security measures you can implement to block cybersecurity threats and improve brand protection:

• Keep software and hardware up-to-date
• Regularly back up important data and store it in a safe location
• Use and enforce strong passwords
• Educate employees about cybersecurity (particularly how to recognize phishing emails)
• Install a web application firewall (WAF)
• Regularly evaluate user roles and permissions

This way, you can secure your server and avoid unintentionally creating back doors, which hackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access to your website. Plus, these measures help you protect customer data and prevent all kinds of cyberattacks which can permanently damage your online reputation.

Where to Register and Manage Domains

One of the simplest ways to execute a robust brand protection strategy is to register and manage domain names securely. This way, you can hide your domain registration information so that it isn’t publicly available.

Additionally, diligent domain management enables you to prevent imitation websites and domain spoofing incidents. Meanwhile, defensive domain registration allows you to purchase domains that are similar to your own to prevent others from benefiting from them.

With that in mind, you’ll need to find somewhere to register and manage domains. There are plenty of domain registrars, but SirsteveHQ is an excellent option.

You can use the free instant search tool to find your ideal domain, filtering by available domains, premium domains, and specific industries. Better yet, SirsteveHQ makes it easy to manage domain renewals, add WHOIS spam protection, and enjoy 24/7 customer support.

What’s more, SirsteveHQ is a great option for new brand owners. That’s because you can purchase a web hosting package and then manage all web resources and domains from a dedicated client area. Plus, you can even set up a custom email domain that reflects your brand identity and helps build trust with customers.

Conclusion

Brand protection strategies enable you to prevent people from stealing (and profiting) from your intellectual property. As such, it’s important for maintaining a successful and sustainable business. It can also help you strengthen customer relationships by building and preserving trust.

To recap, here are five ways to manage your online reputation:

1. Domain name management.
2. Domain monitoring.
3. Trademarks to protect IP.
4. Defensive (or proactive) domain registration.
5. Cyber security measures.

Do you have any questions about how to protect your brand against infringement? Let us know in the comments section below!