Online Reputation Management.
Brought To You By:
Richard Smith
Content:
-What Is Reputation Management?
-Why Managing It Is Important!
-Startling Stats
-Monitor And Influence
-2 Simple Tips
-False Assumptions
-Conclusion
What Is Reputation Management
First things first, let’s define what Reputation Management is….
It’s the practice of understanding or influencing an individual or business brand.
I’ll break it down a little more…
In a nutshell, online reputation management is the practice of making people and businesses “like yours” look their best on the internet. To accomplish that, people need to control their online search results because they frequently contain inaccurate, misleading or outdated material which can adversely influence how your customers will view you!
However, controlling search results isn’t the only goal of online reputation management. Since where someone lives, their income and their marital status all affect the perception of a person, it’s important to prevent private information from being made public as well.
Online reputation management became necessary with the advent of social networks, online forums, blogs and other forms of online communication and information sharing. But since current laws are insufficient to prevent total strangers from damaging your online reputation… online reputation management is now critical.
This is a great way to get positive reviews.
If you’re asking, why can’t I just go online and make up reviews. For one, that’s not ethical and for 2, review sites can track your IP address and the reviews you post won’t stick. Sure they might for a day or 2 but they will eventually be taken down, so it’s not worth your time. Plus if you’re running an ethical business in general, you should have no problem getting happy customers to post a review about your business.
Monitoring your reputation also allows you to catch any negative reviews a disgruntled customer may post. Now you can’t really do anything about this unless you contact the customer directly, but you can offset it with ramping up the number of positive reviews you get. Meaning, ramping up the number of customers you ask to leave a review for you.
Or… and this is the worst case scenario, if they post on a site like ripoffreport.com and the report is showing up when your business name is googled… you can make sure that you start countering it asap. The longer a negative review actually sits in the search results for a specific keyword, the harder it will be to move down in the rankings. That’s another reason that monitoring your reputation is so important… you can catch anything that’s fishy or damning to your business early on.
The last benefit I’m going to go over is, you’ll be ahead of the majority of your competition.
Why, you ask?
Because they simply don’t know how to go about doing this and they don’t see its importance like you do now.
Put yourself in your consumer’s shoes. If you were looking for “their industry” and you saw one business with 45 positive reviews and another one with 1 or 2 reviews, who would you choose?
Exactly!
You want to be the business with 45 positive reviews! This is only going to enhance the public perception about your business and I guarantee it will have a positive effect as well on your bottom line!
There really isn’t one negative I can think of when it comes to implementing Reputation Management, other than the fact that it can be a pain if you already have negative reviews.
Monitor and influence it before that’s ever an issue!
2 Simple Tips
2 simple tips that you can implement today to make sure you’re getting positive reviews.
The first, I have mentioned a couple times already.
Give out a coupon or some incentive to make sure your happy customers are going home and leaving you a review.
If they have a smartphone you can give them the coupon, giftcard, or whatever you decide.. on the spot if they go to a review site and leave you a review right then and there.
That’s the route I recommend!
Second,
.. you can add an email capture form to your website. You can get opt ins by giving a free report, a coupon, a giftcard… once they have opted in and are in your database you can send out content that will benefit them as well as an invite to leave a review about your business.
This report isn’t about how to actually do that but if you need help setting that up on your website, contact me and I will gladly help.
Richard Smith
As I have mentioned previously, you want to influence the positive perception of your business as much as you can. I don’t care if you already have 10 positive reviews and you’re in the number one spot on Google for your keyword… you want to make it an absolute NO BRAINER on who your potential customer should buy from.
Turn those 10 positive reviews into 50+ and watch your bottom line explode. I guarantee it!
I also here, “most of my business comes from word of mouth referrals, why do I need reputation management”.
And I follow with, I think you just answered your question for me.
Reputation management online is pretty much the same exact thing. The more positive reviews you get the more business you will get. Every positive review acts as a friend saying “yea this company is great for xyz”… just like a referral!
Conclusion
Your online reputation can easily make or break your business. This is not something to take lightly.
Contact me if you need more help or if you would like for us to monitor your Reputation for you!
Richard Smith
The Richard Smith are sales and marketing implementers, are business and method agnostic and actually focus on getting stuff done. Page 13
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