Reputation marketing is a marketing approach that has become increasingly popular, overtaking other more traditional marketing approaches. But unless you regularly monitor the various industries tied into marketing and advertising, then the chances are that you have no idea what reputation marketing is or what it means. So today, we’re taking a look at what reputation marketing is and how you can put it to work for you!
Reputation Marketing
What is Reputation Marketing?
Let us begin by breaking things down to their most basic definitions.
Reputation refers to the general opinion that others have about your business.
Marketing is the process of making others aware of your business, product, and services.
So what exactly is it when you put these two elements together?
Reputation marketing is the idea of using your company reputation to market your business, product, or service.
How Does Reputation Marketing Work?
So, how does a company go about reputation marketing? How do you use your company reputation to market your business?
The first step in reputation marketing is to begin looking at your company reputation the same way that you would look at traditional marketing material. Your company reputation is something that sets your company apart, it’s what can give you a competitive advantage over the competition.
I know what you’re thinking – that means letting other people write your marketing material for you…and in a sense, you’re right. Your company reputation is the result of the opinion of others, so, yes, you are relying on the opinions of others for your marketing material. But it’s not exactly as though you have no influence over your reputation…which brings us to reputation marketing versus reputation management.
Reputation Marketing Vs. Reputation Management
Most companies don’t give thought to their reputation until it becomes a crisis management problem. It’s not until someone with an axe to grind starts to grind that axe online and mar a company reputation, that a company realizes how important it is to manage their online reputation. This shouldn’t be the case, though.
Rather than being something that draws negative attention to your company and something that needs “fixing”, your company’s reputation should be something that you can build, curate, and use to your advantage.
How Does Reputation Marketing Compare to Traditional Marketing and Promotion?
So why should you consider reputation marketing versus traditional marketing and promotion? Because reputation marketing allows others to do your marketing for you. Rather than creating marketing material and marketing AT your clients and potential clients, reputation marketing allows you to incorporate consumers into your marketing process and let them do your marketing for you. You are making marketing a more interactive experience.
What Does Reputation Marketing Require?
So, what does reputation marketing require?
Monitoring
The first step in reputation marketing is to focus on monitoring – something an online reputation manager can handle for you. Regularly monitoring feedback, comments, and mentions of your business online will give you the opportunity to see what others think about your business. From here you can make adjustments to your practice when necessary to improve customer satisfaction but you can also address concerns and complaints when they occur. This will prevent things from getting out of hand and give you the opportunity to rectify any problems before they grow into issues that can ruin your reputation.
Increasing Your Reviews
The next step in reputation marketing is to increase the number of reviews, comments, and feedback that your company has received online. An online presence manager can help you to do this by encouraging interaction and soliciting more reviews and feedback from existing customers.
Increasing your reviews will not only allow you to get a larger number of reviews to use to your marketing advantage, but it will also give you more feedback to use to tweak your business to provide more satisfactory service which in turn will result in more positive reviews.
Amplifying Your Positive Reviews
With better reviews and a better response to reviews and feedback and more reviews to work with, you can now amplify those reviews to promote your business. There are various marketing methods you can implement to use these reviews to your advantage and an experienced and reputable OPM can help to do that.
Why not just share these reviews as “customer testimonials”? Because too many scammers use “customer testimonials” that have been fabricated to promote their business. The idea of customer testimonials has been sullied for too long so it’s important to use alternate strategies for amplifying your reviews through sharing information from and on third-party websites. A social media manager can do this by drawing attention to specific ratings on third party websites on social media networks. A content manager can do this by creating unique content that highlights third-party site reviews. An all-around online presence manager can do this by tweaking your website design, structure, and content, to reference third party reviews.
Need Help With Your Reputation Marketing Campaign?
If you need help with your reputation marketing campaign or any other aspect of marketing your business online, Online Presence Manager can help! Just give me a call toll-free at 727-475-6460 to see how I can help you!
