The following is an article “Online Reputation Management and Your Business” by Marc Primo.
Your online reputation dictates how target users take your business at face value. It’s a no-brainer that good management tactics can greatly influence users’ views and lead more of them to visit sites regularly. With users leaving positive comments and ratings on your site, your brand reputation can push you to the top of the public’s consciousness and way ahead of the competition.
In managing your online reputation, you should note that there are certain strategies that you can do to bury unwanted content on Google’s search engine results pages or SERPs. Your aim is to get within the first five searches that come up in SERPs as these get around 67% of all the search traffic online. You can achieve this by designing your marketing strategies in a way that lets you gain positive feedback from your customers. Almost 90% of shoppers trust reviews they read on the internet, and around 50% require at least a 4-star rating before they pick a product or service online. By working to create positive impacts for your customers, these reviews and ratings add credibility to your brand and protect its reputation.
Don’t play down your brand reputation efforts and apply these digital marketing tips that can help you generate more leads for your business.
Define your online reputation. Embarking on a digital marketing venture always starts with how you define your brand essence. Some of the questions you might want to answer in order to come up with an insight are: Where you are positioned in terms of industry rankings? What are your company’s unique attributes that set it apart from the competition? How excellent is your customer service and response turnaround? There are plenty of questions that need to be answered first before you determine how you would want to position your brand. Once you are able to address these questions with honest and affirmative answers, you may then proceed to define your brand essence for your customers’ appreciation.
Perform assessments. After defining your brand essence, ask around how people perceive your company from the outside. Does it live up to your claim? Give high regard to what your clients, business partners, and stakeholders think and review if your presence online effectively defines you. Go to assessment sites such as Brand Grader or Mention for a free summary of your digital presence and recent tags from various sites. These free services also give you ratings on how you actually fare online in terms of brand reputation.
Create guidelines. Having a positive presence online requires an effective policy or a reference guide for you and your employees on how to interact on social media. In instituting a social media policy, bear in mind that each of your business posts should go through proper screening and review before it goes online. No employee should freely post personal thoughts about your business or sensitive data which can be detrimental to your brand reputation. Be professional in drafting your guidelines, but make sure that it is both engaging and fair to your employees.
Manage your content. Plotting what to focus on in terms of brand management also means that you have to come up with an effective content management strategy. Set up a team that will handle your content creation and management. This team is primarily responsible for identifying your social media goals and what social platforms to post on. The team must also review your competitor’s presence, research content ideas, and execute a task calendar for content trafficking. This is the best way for you to focus on monitoring what works and doesn’t for your online reputation, then adjusting accordingly.