Big companies spend thousands of dollars to ensure that both established and prospective customers view their brand in a positive way and thus their brand’s online reputation gets enhanced. This is an ongoing concern for small and medium sized companies too!
Reputation management
If you belong to the latter category, think about how your customers look at your brand. Place yourself as a customer. What would you have done to know the nitty-gritty of services or products such as a property in Mumbai offered by a company? Perhaps you would read the reviews, go through the company’s official website, visit their social networking pages etc. And this is what reputation management does. It controls how your brand and the products/services offered by your company are perceived and maintaining a positive online reputation for your business as well as the brand throughout the web. In a nutshell, it’s all about protecting and maintaining your company’s reputation online. It can be divided in three sections.
- Building brand reputation – Whether you’re a new company launching new products like a property in Mumbai or a veteran one branching out to a new clientele, your key focus is building up good name for your brand.
- Maintaining brand reputation – After building up a positive reputation, your next duty is to keep up with this. Even if you have a great reputation, you need to continue it as reputation management is an ongoing process.
- Recovering brand reputation – Sometimes a company’s reputation can be smashed with just a negative review. In such a case, you need to use a positive and strategic marketing to recover your business reputation.
Online reputation strategies
Having an online positive presence is very important part of a business. It helps to manage your corporate reputation too. Here are the strategies to create, preserve and safeguard your brand reputation on the Internet.
- Be focused – Listen to what your customers want and know your niche market. Use Internet to go along with latest industry developments, competition and news to help your company steer how to act online.
- Monitor – Search for your brand on a regular basis and monitor where your brand ranks in search results. Check if there is any feedback from customer’s end. Recognize what you can control or reputation management strategies you can adopt. You can use apps like Review Monitoring, Google Alert or Social Mention.
- Be honest – Make sure you use a human tone in social platforms to fit your target customer base. You should be honest, open and authentic. React properly to negative comments and posts instead of covering back with marketing spoils which might end up encouraging tolls.
- Create good content – Write useful, informative and appealing content that your target customers would love to read. It shouldn’t be promotional. Try to reciprocate rather than adopting direct sales approaches.
- Be interactive – Be accessible to the customers and respond quickly to build a relationship. Delayed response on social sites like Tweets as well as comments, questions and posts may build negative reputation.
- Be social – Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, Pinterest etc should be used in the right way as this could shape brand as well as its reputation. It doesn’t ensure quick result, but in long term it guarantees building up a genuine profile that resonates with your niche market. Understand the usefulness of real connections.
Discussed above are just 6 of enormous strategies to build up, manage and uphold your company’s online reputation.