Everything You Should Know About Reputation Marketing

Whether small or big, the world is full of competitors and only those who compete with the right tools & techniques will succeed overpowering others. Everything you do for your business to get attention over others has a direct connection with the reputation. 

It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, its reputation holds the key. How you behave with your customers and what they think about you is directly proportional to your brand’s reputation. Even if you provide quality product or service, but if your behavior is rude or unacceptable, it will have a bad impact on your brand’s reputation plus will also show up in your end goals. 

Reputation marketing should not be confused with Online Reputation Management (ORM) as ORM focuses on SEO, PR, content creation, and other related strategies to manage a reputation online. While on the other hand, when it comes to reputation marketing, it involves showing the positive side of your brand to get more conversions and have a good clientele base. Let us see it in detail. 

What is Reputation Marketing?

Reputation marketing is not something different from other strategies used by businesses for their growth. It is evolved from a combination of techniques & practices like reputation management and brand marketing. Like all other factors responsible for the growth of a business, reputation marketing also holds a special place. Without this, you might not be able to convince your target audience about why they should choose you over others.

In other words, we can say that reputation marketing is a process of promoting your brand’s or business’s good reputation to grab more attention and earn positive reviews. It is done by managing the reviews, targeting social media channels, managing local listings, and showing how you are different from others. 

Why you need reputation marketing?

Reputation is something on which our business is striving and competing strongly in the market. It is of very high importance and every business must understand that. People only choose companies that they can trust on and for that, businesses need to show why & how they are reliable. And here’s the role of reputation marketing. 

The first thing we do before buying a product or service is to check the customer reviews and if they are satisfactory, we complete the purchase. While on the other hand, if we see that the product reviews are filled with negative ones, we shift our focus to some other brand. So, while running a reputation marketing campaign, businesses give attention to the review section and make sure that they are flooded with good ones. This is just an example of what reputation marketing can do, here’s a lot more that you’ll experience. 

One thing to consider about reviews is to ensure that there are frequent ones because the value of a too old review decreases whereas if there are some recent ones, it’ll build trust and create a positive image of your brand. 

Another importance of marketing your reputation is on social media. We all know that there are millions of social media users and reputation marketing will ensure having your good brand image in front of that huge audience. 

Strategies to improve reputation marketing

• Ensure systematic feedback system

One of the key factors of marketing your reputation is through customer reviews and there should be a proper system for collecting feedbacks so that they look genuine. 

Besides creating a review section on your website, you must also try capturing the opinions of your customers through social media by conducting a survey or via emails by sending short forms or even through forums. 

By doing this, you can collect the information received for the reference and use it to build a good reputation. You can use several channels to see what your target audience thinks about you including Facebook, Twitter, and your blog pages. 

To avoid annoying people by asking to fill a form or rate your service, you can smartly run contests having all the key questions that you want your target audience to ask and offer them something like discounts or shopping coupons or anything that tempts them to complete the form. This way you will be able to attract more customers. 

Another key importance of conducting surveys is that it’ll help you know your target audience better along with their age group. Thus, you can create better strategies for your future marketing campaigns.

• Build your reputation

A good reputation is not something that you’ll get overnight, for that you need to pull up your socks and put the best foot forward. One thing that you need to understand is not to run away from the negative comments. Those comments will help you become better if taken in a positive way and give a competitive advantage over your competitors. 

Now you must be thinking that how it will happen? The theory is simple, you just need to see what people are saying about your brand and why they are unhappy. If those negative reviews are common or frequent, this means that you need to do some serious improvement in that particular area. Because that is only how will overpower your competitors. Only when you know what you are doing wrong, you can make it right. 

For example, if a shoe-making company is frequently receiving negative reviews for having a bad sole quality, then it needs to focus on improving the quality of the sole and if possible, also offer some kind of compensation with an apology. This could be the best way to build a better and strong reputation. 

Not only negative, but it is also important to see what positives people are saying. This will show the strong point of your brand and you can make further improvements to make it better if required. That’s how you can become reputable with a strong market presence.

• Show who you are

This is one of the most important techniques to turn a negative perception of your customers into a positive one. What you have to do is to challenge in a polite way to the most common negative reviews by the clients. Let’s clear this out by taking the above example of a shoe sole. Having a footwear business, if you find that the sole of supplied shoes is of good quality, you can tell them how strong and flexible it is or any other qualities it possesses on social media. 

To do this, you can use interesting videos or infographics that justify your statements. You can even tell them about the material you use to make the shoe sole along with some guidelines. 

While on the other hand, if you have made changes in your product due to bad user experience, this could also become a positive sign to attract more customers and strengthen the relationship with existing ones. This will show how customers are important for you and you do care about their reviews. Thanking them to make your brand better could be an icing on the cake. 

• Manage the reputation

Just building and marketing the reputation will not do it for you in the long run, to ensure that, you need to maintain it. Just like content is the king for SEO, similarly, the customer is the king for building and maintaining the reputation. 

Now offering one good product or service will not help maintain a good image of your brand neither providing good customer service for a short period of your time. If you are looking for long-term results, all your products or services must offer complete satisfaction and your customer service must be excellent throughout your business’s life. 

To achieve that, every business has to make efforts to ensure that people talk good about them. Besides, it is also important to make clients and target audience special by providing discounts, exclusive offers, and anything that pleases them. 

Another exciting thing that you can do is ask your target audience to provide innovative ideas on how you can improve and serve them better. You can even try asking them to design your next product. Doing this will make the audience more engaged and it will help maintain long-term relationships with your customers. 

• Never remove your eyes away

It is always important to keep an eye on whatever you do. Why we are saying this is because it is necessary to track the progress of your applied techniques. That is the only way by which you can analyze that what you have implemented has hit the right spot. 

Similarly, regular monitoring of your brand’s reputation is as important as other marketing strategies. 

Doing this will not only tell you how you are doing in the market but it will also give you some better ideas for your future planning. The market is not always the same, what is liked by people now might become an old trend in the future or vice-versa. 

So, regular monitoring about what people are saying about your brand and what new interest they have will be of great help for your business. 

With this, you will be able to fulfill their demands wherever possible and we should say that considering your customer’s opinions is one of the best ways to get positive reviews and show what value they hold for your business. 

What a customer want is to be listened and doing this will be a key factor in ensuring a good reputation of your brand. 

These are the ways by which you can effectively run a reputation marketing campaign and get the best out of it. But before that, it is important for you to focus on ensuring a good reputation for your business. Let us see some extra techniques to help you out with your business’s reputation marketing success.

How to get success with reputation marketing 

• Mobile presence is must

People are shifting their focus from desktops to mobile phones for doing most of the internet-related stuff. This is not just a statement, rather it is proved by several studies conducted across the globe. Thus, it is important for every business to ensure a strong mobile presence. If people are not able to access your site on their mobile, the chances become very low that they are going to like you. 

Also, make sure that people can easily navigate through your mobile-friendly website. Do focus on whether they are able to write reviews via their smartphones or not. 

• Register yourself locally

Reputation will only build when your target audience will be able to find you, and for that, it is important to have a presence in local directories. For most of the companies, local customers generate a good percentage of businesses. Thus, if you have registered your business with local online directories, the chances of being found increases, and it will be a huge boost for the reputation of your brand. 

• Manage social media profiles

Your website alone cannot drive you the attention you seek. For that, you must create accounts on popular & relevant social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. In addition, to create an account, you must also manage it regularly to show how active and engaged you are with your target audience. 

Update your social media accounts by posting new, relevant, and informative content. If people love the content posted by you, it will have a direct impact on the reputation of your brand and you will experience it through increased visibility & traffic on your website. 

• Listen to what people are sayin

You need to understand this fact that you cannot decide on your own about how your business is doing. To analyze the success of your business, you need to listen to what people are saying about you and this could be done through your website’s review section and social media accounts.

Considering this will give you a better idea of the reputation of your business and based on that, you can plan different strategies to improve the image. To ease this process, you can take the help of several tools that are available in the market. 

• Respond positively

If a customer raises any query, he/she always looks for a satisfactory response from the brand. That is how good relationships are built. It doesn’t matter how furious or annoyed a person seems in his/her reviews, being a service provider, it is your responsibility to take that concern seriously and give a positive response that pleases the customer and shows the intent of being heard. 

A proactive response is always the best and has the highest chances of satisfying a customer. Plus, another vital point while answering to the queries is to respond timely. If you delay the response, more difficult it will be for you to convert the negative review into a positive one.

Maintaining a professional intent will also do it for you. If you find that the issue is genuine and the customer has faced the consequences, do offer some compensation with an apology to ensure that same will not happen again. 

Sometimes, there is not your fault, but still, you have to apologize. Never hesitate to apologize if such situations occur because one apology can bring you many more genuine leads. 

Considering these strategies could be a deciding factor for your business to become a reputable one and get the attention you want. You must understand that even a single unsatisfied customer could be harmful to your business, so never ignore such reviews and try to do anything possible to get them removed or turned into positive ones. 

Fundamentals of reputation marketing

The reputation marketing revolves around the below-mentioned 7 parameters and if you focus on each of these with a plan, no one can steal away the success you are looking for. Let us see which of these parameters are

• Listing

The first and foremost thing that you need to consider is the listing of your business. Make sure that each and every information you provide about your business online is correct. Because, while searching for a product or service, people also look for information about the company from where they can get that product or service. 

For example, if someone finds the shoes your company provides appealing and to buy those, he/she will look for the information about your company to find out how to buy them. Now imagine, you have got your details wrong on the web platform and you are unaware of this silly fact. In this case, you will lose a customer or we must say many more. 

This could go even worst if people start marking your business as spam. So to avoid this condition, fill in your company’s details properly, and check thoroughly to avoid any mistakes. This is the most basic thing that every business must consider. 

• Reviews

For reputation marketing, reviews are considered as one of the strongest pillars and rightly so, because reviews will tell what people think about your business and whether you will get new customers or not. This the reason why we are focusing on reviews right from the start. 

The key reason why reviews hold such importance is that any visitor on your site can see it and if they are on the social media platform, anyone visiting your social media page can react on that. This means reviews can inspire people for buying or not buying the product or service you are offering. It all depends upon the customer service you provide. 

Remember, a large percentage of buyers first read reviews before choosing a brand over others, so, take every possible measure to make your brand’s reviews positive to create the desired reputation in the market. 

• Social Media

Not only millennials, but even the older generation is also using social media extensively nowadays. It is no more a medium to have fun, contact friends, and share images. Social media has evolved into something else that no one would have thought. Social media has become professional and we must say that it is an integral part of all businesses that connect them with their target audience.

If you are able to create a good image of your brand on social media through the right means, then it will become difficult to defeat you. Social media has millions of users and getting their support will open the gates of success for you.

So, adopt the right strategies to engage people on social media and bring them on your side. Doing this will be a huge boost for your business and it will show up in the form of increased website traffic, more leads, and better ROI. 

• SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the most basic thing that every business focuses on while making efforts to create a strong online presence. Those who ignore SEO, will not be able to compete on the digital platform as popular search engines like Google never rank sites with a bad SEO. Thus, if people are not able to find you, how will you generate business via an online platform?

So, SEO is a must and each of its tactics should be implemented correctly to get the desired results. Right keywords, right page title, informative & unique content, and user-friendly website design, these are some of the factors that come under SEO and you should know what value each of these factors holds. 

• Website design

Online business presence never means only having a website, it is much more than that. But, if you want your business to have an online presence, having a website is a must. Now, when it comes to having a website, how it should be? holds equal importance. 

The most vital things for a website are to ensure mobile-friendliness and after that user-friendliness. If these two factors are lacking in your website, believe us, it will be a hell of a journey for you on the digital platform. Plus, you even cannot imagine standing up in front of your competitors. 

There are several other factors that also require attention like loading speed, navigability, and style. So, reputation marketing will only work out if you focus on these factors at the starting phase of your business’s digital presence. 

It is always advised to hire an experienced digital marketing agency like RankSoldier to get things done in the right way. 

• Advertisement

Everything that promotes your business to the global audience is important for maintaining the reputation of your business. And another on the list is an advertisement. Be it traditional or digital, the quality and approach of your brand’s advertisement create an impact on the target audience. If your advertisements are innovative and unique, people will remember it for long and it will have a positive impact in the long run. Plus, if you manage to deliver a social message with your advertisement, it will add a synergistic effect. 

Another key point to be considered while placing an advertisement is that it should clearly define the product or service you are offering. This becomes most important when people are unsure of which brand they should go for. Above everything, never forget to target the right keyword though. 

• Content

Content is like roots for digital marketing and it holds equal importance for building a reputation as well. If you can engage customers by providing them with the latest and key information about the products & services that no one would, people will prefer you over others. This is because it will show your expertise in your business’s niche and we all want an expert to get things done. 

The best way to keep your target audience and customers informed is by regularly updating blogs. Plus, another way of sharing unique content is through infographics, images, and videos. Combining all, if people are loving the content posted by you, the chances of lead generation become high along with the ROI.

Final Thoughts

Whether an individual or a business, everyone wants a good reputation so that people can recognize you as the best one. No doubt that reputation is important and if you run a business, it becomes vital to compete strongly. (Tramadol) But for that, you are required to tell the target audience which services you offer and how they are different from your competitors. This process of telling positives about your brand is known as reputation marketing and it should be done in the right way. 

Reputation marketing is not a complex thing, it’s just that you have to ensure the basics right and everything will go your way. On the web platform, where there is a huge audience that can connect you, reputation marketing holds the key and you have to take it seriously. 

On that note, we end this post saying that if you are able to build and maintain your reputation on the digital platform, it will require some serious effort to bring you down.