Guide to Online Reputation Management - Paragon Themes
Online Reputation Management

Have you been looking at a stalled business growth? We guess one of the reasons for stalling could be a wrong methodology of reputation management, and that is factual.

Before we jump into why and how the reputation crisis can cause business growth stalling, we should also look for other possible causes for the negative projection.

You might be having website issues and a faulty website can surely reduce your chances at conversions. You need to make sure you have a speedy website for a better business reputation.

Moreover, your website should cater to all needs of your potential customers. Make sure you have everything it takes to reach out to your customers and inspire them to make a conversion.

These basic tactics that relate to the technical superiority that your website should have, focus on the perfect website and the right marketing tools and tactics.

If you have got those technical bases covered, you might need to dive deep into the concepts of customer behaviors to further evaluate and enunciate the reasons that are keeping your business from inclining.

What is brand reputation?

To discuss business success and growth factors on the digital front, we need to make sure that we understand the mechanics and the dynamics associated with the success and failures of online businesses.

Brand reputation is somewhat pivotal to the groundwork of success for any business, and especially the online ones. It is the base that brings new heights to your business.

In simple words, brand reputation is a measure of what people think about your business. It is both a qualitative and quantitative assessment of your business from your acquired and lost customers.

Brand reputation is a collective image of your brand based on the successful and unsuccessful sales, acquired and lost customers, and the social image of your business.

It is basically what encourages or discourages a potential customer from buying your product or service. With a good reputation, you are well set to acquire more customers, the opposite scenario means loss of revenue.

The mechanism of reputation management

To manage a reputation, you need to start with building one in the general public. You might be a successful business within a set premise, but expansion requires branding.

Branding is where you make your business the benchmark for the niche you are operating in. If you look at sodas, most people demand a Coke or a Pepsi instead of a Cola. That is branding.

How will you build and maintain a reputation for your business? The answer lies in the question itself. It is about building and maintaining a reputation, it certainly relates to customer interactions.

The basic construct that operates all business reputations is customer support and interaction norms. If you are engaging in friendly banter with past, present, and prospective clientele, you are doing well.

How to maintain a healthy brand reputation?

Let’s say you are a business that has been in the niche for a few months and you have had relative success for the start, but suddenly the rise has flattened out and you feel a little slower.

Maybe, your customers need to hear more from you and about you. One of our clients in the casino niche seemed to have the same stalling issue. They needed branding. They needed people to know their brand.

Now, we suggest an approach that is based on three basic principles. Inform, Interact, and Inspire. The three Is of brand reputation are basically what make you raise the flattened curve to an incline again.

Inform and Inspire

Informing your customers about your brand is very easy. All you need to do is to engage them through some communication channel. You need to make sure they know what new products, services, or offers you have for them.

This part correlates to two media of communication: Social Media and Email Marketing. You can opt for an aggressive SEO and SEM approach too for the same goal.

When you engage your customers with your business and provide them with information about every new step you take, you are basically creating and maintaining your brand reputation simultaneously.

For your recurring customers, informative communication, through social media or through emails, is your way of maintaining the brand reputation. For new ones, it is building a reputation.

With regular social media posts, email blasts, and newsletters, you can inform the customers about your brand and inspire them to make a purchase. Informative communication is a paradigm for creating a revenue stream.

Interact

What do people know about you if you don’t interact with them and let them interact with you? The social principle of acknowledgment and social ties stands true for business reputations too.

When you are allowing people to interact with your business through different platforms and means, they feel comfortable doing business with you. They will buy your product or service if they know you are real and more of a human-operated business and not a scam.

How do you create that trust through interaction? It is simple. You allow users to interact with your website and your content, they trust your credibility and your brand.

With good interactions from past customers, you build a brand reputation and also improve your search rankings. If people can share your content with their social media, it is a means of free branding too.

If you allow them to comment on your content and provide you with reviews, it is branding through the creation of a sense of trust and credibility for prospective customers.

You need to make sure that you provide every possible instance of interaction to your customers with your business. Let them share your content, review your services, and build a reputation for you.

Get help maintaining the reputation

We know that the liberty of comments and interaction can have negative effects if you get spam reviews or too many bad ones. You can monitor your brand reputation with a few tools on hand.

  1. BirdEye

BirdEye helps you keep a keen eye on your brand reputation by monitoring social media platforms and reviews from your customers with an in-built dashboard. Isn’t that smooth?

  1. Review Tracker

Keep a track of all the reviews you get on your website and on the internet with this brand reputation management tool that helps you know what people say when they review you online.

Conclusion

Creating and maintaining a brand reputation is all about having your clientele involved with your business. You need to make sure people know your business well enough to trust you with a purchase.

//do nothing