Online marketers have spent thousands of hours, guiding local business about online ratings and reviews. But reputation has a much broader impact than those reviews on Yelp and Google.
Occasionally, customer issues arise in almost every business out there. Fortunately, you can resolve things before it reaches a point – where a customer believes they get satisfaction through a public forum or feels they ought to warn people about your business. The internet has entirely eliminated the barriers between one and another customer. Word-of-mouth can travel literally at the speed of light!
However, if you want to know – how to handle online criticism of your company in order to reduce the impact of complaints. In addition, you can respond effectively and rapidly to minimize monetary impact. Online reputation management is a best practice.
Online reputation management techniques have been a burgeoning segment of online marketing for years. We have worked on numerous cases of reputation repair. It’s quite clear- if a business doesn’t invest in maintaining their online presence and reputation proactively. They have to pay considerable costs later in terms of lost revenues, repairing abrupt damage, and developing out positive presence.
Proprietor/Founder identities are closely associated with their organization. Proactively manage their search results is a significant area of reputation that needs to be focused. A lot of executives desire to keep a low profile, which in turn eliminate all forms of social media out of a desire for privacy.
Keeping this in mind. Here are 8 online reputation management tips available to build, boost or repair you and your business presence.
Create an Effective Online Presence
Most of the organizations, incorporate Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts. But, if you want to compete in today`s competitive market, you must be active on some surplus social media platforms. Dozens are available that are precise to your industry.
Business including, B2B, high-tech and/or professional, having executives and employees integrate with LinkedIn that can be valuable. Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr for visually-oriented products. Video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo can also benefit businesses in various aspects.
Use Social Media Proactively
Creating social media accounts for your business is an imperative online reputation management strategy. Simply, having Twitter, Facebook and Google+ account/page is not enough – It should contain adequate audiences in order to effectively interact with customers and increase your influence as well as engagement scores.
By doing this, your business accounts/pages hold a strong position in a search engine to outrank negative postings. Precisely, we don’t know whether Google and Bing may assess the strength of social media accounts, you can use some independent scoring utilities to assess your achieving growth.
Build SEO Focused Content
For different brand products, you have to create online materials and social profiles – more than just your company name. Simultaneously, published SEO focused content to improve the rank for the names. Also, you may need to develop websites, web pages, social media profiles and collateral materials just to claim and reserve each brand name.
Strengthen Your Personal and Executive Presence
A strong social presence of a founders’, owners’, or executives’ names, particularly if they are distinctive – is essential. Otherwise, a low online profile just leaves you wide open for any drive-by defamers!
A very few business executives have been entangled with their company’s identity. A solid online reputation management strategy is thus vital in place. Query regarding doctors, dentists, and lawyers, consumers often search by name, so create collateral to rank these individuals.
Implement Authorship Where Applicable
Authorship is among the best online reputation management tips that still a significant advantage when done properly. Primarily, it emphasizes businesses where a founder/proprietor is closely associated with the business’s identity. Google requires authors to be individuals – in order to associate the author tag with an individual Google+ profile, not with a business page.
Using author tag assumes, you’ll be doing some ongoing publishing of articles or blog posts over time. Otherwise, it’s not worthwhile which leads us to the next point.
Publish Blogs
Indeed! We have named blogging a secret reputation management weapon of local SEO strategies – it helps with a site’s ranking on good keywords (if done properly) and provides fodder for one’s social media accounts.
For reputation management purposes, not only it improves ranking for your name, also it gives you a solid “home court” ground – where you can directly respond to any major assertions made about your company if required.
Listen to Your Customers
Seriously consider the weaknesses in the process of responding to online complaints or bad reviews. If you get frequent negative feedbacks from customers, you should address failure factors. Remember the adage – “the customer is always right” so present in a creative way to give customers what they’re wanting without creating friction.
Various business processes that just seems dumb, or service fees that just made customers feel like they’ve been gouged. Just because customers are willing to pay more doesn’t mean you false show them. By this way, you are simply driving existing or potential customers into the arms of your competitor. The extra money you make from an annoyed customer can turn out to be a business loss from those who see numerous complaints about it online.
Make Apologize When Necessary
Sometimes, individual or company messes up, fails or otherwise does something wrong, own up to it – making a genuine apology to customers that have been affected. A transparent apology can go far toward diffusing a situation, while moving the process along toward reconciliation or at least, toward making a crisis situation come to a close.
While doing it, make sure to keep the apology authentic, avoid using – “I’m sorry you allowed my actions to make you feel bad”. These are disingenuous nonsense.
Final Thoughts
By following above online reputation management tips, you and your business acquire in a stronger position – helpful to eliminate negative results that slam your good name.
Similar to your Insurance, proactive online reputation management is going to cost you something to put in place, but it will save you some money in the long run if the nearly-inevitable occurs.