Improving, protecting and promoting your brand’s online reputation can ensure you stay ahead and keep your business afloat.
Every social media comment, review and blog post where your name is featured plays a role in defining your company’s online reputation. Statistics show that 92% of consumers read online reviews, so people look for online ratings to guide their decision making when it comes to choosing a brand.
So it is only reasonable to make the required effort to stay informed on the latest ways to ensure your brand is constantly being presented in the best possible light. Use these 6 genius strategies below to improve your business reputation online.
Get as many reviews as possible
If customers are looking for online reviews to read about your business, why not give them something good to chew on? The sad fact, however, is that happy customers and employees rarely write their positive reviews, but disgruntled clients and employees will always find a way to smear your company’s name.
Negative reviews deter buyers, and it is difficult to gauge how many sales that have been lost as a result of one negative review. Therefore, you should encourage your employees and customers to write reviews online, so that the bad reviews will be watered down by several satisfying experiences.
Also, take time to acknowledge and respond to every review. Remember too, that when you do, everyone can see your response, so ensure it adds positively to your business reputation.
In addition, by adding links to popular review sites like Google Plus and Facebook to your website, you make it easier for people to review your business.
Find out what people are saying about you
You cannot improve or protect your online reputation if you are in the dark about what is being said about your company online. By monitoring your brand, you can figure out the market’s (clients and potential clients) current perceptions about your brand image.
The first step is to locate where the buzz is coming from – whether from social media, on forums or review sites like Amazon or TripAdvisor.
The products and services you offer will guide your monitoring efforts. Restaurants, bars, and tourist attractions, for instance, get the most review from online review sites, in addition to Yelp and Google. However, you can track all the conversations happening all by yourself. Some efficient ways to track your brand’s online reputation include:
- Monitor your social channels in one place with Hootsuite.
- Set up Google Alerts for your business.
- Use your CRM to track customer communication and unhappy clients.
- Create IFTT Applets based on your business mentions on industry websites or forums.
Shine through your current employees
When it comes to improving your business reputation online, charity begins at home. Your current employees have untapped influencing power. With their activities on industry-relevant platforms, they can help drive a positive online reputation for your business.
So, have your employees write content for your company blog and promote their own content. With this strategy, you will grow your brand’s reputation and provide immediate equity for their efforts at the same time.
You can start by giving them a portion of the working hours to spend online, actively engaging others in the industry and creating brand awareness by commenting on articles, and posting on blogs, social media or forums.
In addition to improving your online reputation, their presence and activity on related platforms will build a public perspective that your business is actively involved in your industry as a thought-leader. In the process, you can drive more traffic and generate good leads to your website.
Project an image of consistency and reliability
By living up to your word and staying consistent in all your interactions with your customers, you can build a superb online reputation. Even if you spend a huge amount of money on a campaign to show how caring your company is about its customers, but your customer service is poor and unable to satisfactorily attend to complaints and related issues, you won’t have a successful or effective campaign.
If you carry out any changes to your products and products, it is your responsibility to let your customers know about it. Everything nowadays is online and public, so be sure to follow through on your promises and be honest about your situations.
The key to maintaining the good reputation online is to be proactive and improve your business with the most modern and effective tools and techniques from marketing professionals like Orthosynetics. You can be sure that savvy customers will notice and become loyal to your brand.
Study the competition
No business can make progress by sticking its head in the sand and acting like the competition does not exist. Monitoring the competition is important because you can learn from their successes, as well as their failures or mistakes to improve your own online reputation.
Find out if people like you or them more, why their customers prefer them over you and why your customers prefer your brand to theirs. Also, find out how people compare you’re the competing brands in terms of product, service or customer relations, and so on.
No business is perfect, and just as you are bound to make some mistakes from time to time, so also is your competition sure to slip up at one time or the other. This provides a good opportunity to improve your online reputation as well by making strategic moves when the other party makes a mistake. In addition, studying your competition puts you in the best position to reverse engineer their most effective marketing strategies based on the content they put out.
Tell your own story
More often than not, incorrect facts and misconceptions color the opinion of the public about a business, leading to negative online press. The best way around this is to correct any confusion about your products, services, and company culture and make the right information available online.
Have a firm control of the message people receive as they check out your company online (either through your website, social media or blogs) by taking the right steps to tell your story in the search engine results.
You can achieve this by creating clear and concise profiles for yourself and your business on different big social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, which will contribute to improving your online reputation.
