Everyone wants their company to be successful. Success can take the form of sales, gross net income, online ratings, and reviews. One feature that can help increase the success of these characteristics would be your business’s brand reputation. Brands and business owners recognize this fact: every day, our reputations are bringing opportunities to our doors or diverting them to our competitors.
In today’s world, it’s no longer sufficient to think about reputation management like crisis management. You need to start thinking about your reputation as a competitive advantage, a driver of growth, and a strategic asset in helping craft your brand’s image. This is why you need to make the switch from reputation management to reputation marketing.
What Is Reputation Management?
Reputation management focuses on restoring a positive reputation for your business after you’ve received negative reviews or negative press. While this is a helpful strategy to fix any issues, this method is reactive, and if you want your company to thrive, you need to take a proactive approach.
What Is Reputation Marketing?
Reputation marketing is similar to reputation management; however, this strategy is a proactive approach. You’re focusing on taking control of your reputation to better showcase your strengths. This strategy is useful because customers who hold positive views or beliefs of companies are more loyal, more likely to make a purchase, and more likely to recommend your company to people they know.
Advantages of Reputation Marketing
Since reputation marketing helps you show your best side first to customers, it helps influence their opinion of you. Google your business, and you’ll probably see a Google listing in the search results, as well as listings from review sites. These sites will show individual reviews, as well as an overall average of all the scores. Unless you’re already working on getting reviews from customers, it’s normal to see fewer than 10 reviews on each review site.
Usually, people will only post reviews if they are really upset or if you’ve gone above and beyond: the scoring can be fairly skewed and can create an inaccurate image of your practice. Reputation management lets you work on building up a stronger online reputation so that customers will always see an accurate representation of your business when they search online.
Making the Switch to Reputation Marketing
What does reputation marketing look like? Below are a few tips to help you make the switch.
1. Go Where People are Looking for You
For customers to see how great your business is, they have to be able to find you easily on the web. Getting on local listing sites can help your company reach people when they need you. Sites such as Angie’s List, Yelp, and Foursquare are a couple of the local listing sites that are available.
2. Get More Reviews (and Better Ones)
If people aren’t leaving you reviews, then you can’t show potential customers how much your current customers love you. Get more reviews in the easiest way — asking for them. When a customer is about to leave your site, offer them the chance to leave a review or follow up with an email when their product or service is being delivered. If you don’t see a lot of responses when you are doing this, you can consider offering an incentive, like offering an exclusive discount or offer.
3. Track what People are Saying about You
Since your reputation is based around what other people are saying, it’s important for you to keep track of their conversations. This can give you an idea of how customers feel about you as well as open your eyes to areas of opportunity. The topics these people are talking about can clue you in on what they like about your business, and what they would like to see in the future. If you can track this, then you can keep everyone happy and keep your reputation in the 5-star rated range.
Your reputation is as crucial as ever in today’s digital world, where a single negative search result can dramatically alter the public’s perception of your brand. Making this change from reputation management to reputation marketing seems like a simple task; however, it can be time-consuming. As a comprehensive online marketing agency, we provide the help and expertise to make the switch flawless, especially when you’re not quite sure what to do. Contact our experts to get started today.
