Your reputation is one of the most important assets for your business. Without it, your business could become faceless and your customers may turn elsewhere. For long, businesses have focused on managing their reputation rather than marketing it. However, reputation marketing has become a buzzword today because of the relevance it holds for businesses.
Reputation marketing could be the difference between your business and that of your competitors. However, businesses find it difficult to ramp up their efforts in marketing their reputations.
Reputation Marketing Viewed as Marketing
Reputation is intangible. It is not something you can control by your will or something you can create by yourself. As a matter of fact, your customers determine and create your reputation to a large extent but you can market it and steer the wheel to the direction you choose. It is all your choice.
Reputation marketing is just like any other kind of marketing, albeit in a different way. Word of mouth has become so important nowadays, however, in the form of comments and customer reviews. You can actually harness the comments and reviews to your benefit.
Key Tactics for Reputation Marketing
Most businesses take the wrong stance when it comes to reputation marketing. Since reputation is not something you can control by your will, some businesses rather choose to do nothing. But doing nothing will only make your reputation to go sour.
Reputation marketing involves actively managing the comments and criticisms posted by your customers and it can help you to create the brand image you have always wanted. The process is not necessarily complicated, you just have to follow the right strategies and make it work for you.
Here are the five key strategies you can follow for excellent reputation marketing.
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Develop a System to Collect Feedback
Customer feedback and reviews are an invaluable asset. Interestingly, you can create a system to have these assets at your fingertips. The review funnel should be maximized by every business that wants to succeed. However, it is easy to create such a channel. You can make use of already existing review sites such as Yelp.com, Facebook or you can create your custom review platform linked to your website.
Some businesses prefer to make use of as many review sites available to their reach. This could also be a more effective way as it gives your customers an opportunity to leave reviews for you wherever and however they want. However, collecting feedback is not just about reviews, you can also collect tweeting questions, blog posts, comments, and so forth.
The beauty of this kind of data is that it helps you to know exactly what your customers are thinking and to know who your customers are, their buying patterns, age, where they live, and so forth. The information comes in handy because they can help you to be proactive and also make informed decisions to boost your reputation as much as possible and take your business a notch higher.
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Build Your Reputation
You don’t just have to collect customers’ feedback you also need to get actively involved. The most interesting thing here is that you can chart the course for your reputation. This does not imply manipulating things but it implies being actively involved in the entire process.
You can build your reputation in a very interesting and simple way. You need to start by reading comments, searching for relevant hashtags and scanning the internet for every iota of reviews relating to your business. You then have to harness the information you get once you find out what customers are saying about your business.
This will help you to know the exact thing you are doing wrong, and also inform you about what you can do to make it better. You can't afford to make little of your customers’ reviews.
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Market Your Reputation
Of course, your customers are doing a lot of hard work for you. They are marketing your reputation, even without knowing it. However, this does not mean you should sit down and do nothing. In fact, things might get wrong if you fail to get into the scene. You need to drill deep to find out what your customers are saying and make use of the information to market your reputation the way it should go.
For instance, if your customers make use of the word “inconvenient” in their reviews and comments, you can focus your marketing strategies around that word and ensure that you convince your customers that you are or you will render convenient services.
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Managing Your Reputation
Even after marketing your reputation, there is also a place for managing your reputation. Of course, it has been said that reputation marketing should replace reputation management but here, the two have to work hand in hand to achieve the desired outcome. Reputation management here can come in various fronts. For instance, you need to ensure that your reputation is actively being portrayed. You need to ensure that customers are active in commenting or reviewing your products. You will notice that customers are more active in commenting or reviewing your products when you introduce a new product or service.
You can ensure that the reputation is well managed by introducing special offers, promotions, bonuses, and so forth. These serve to incentivize and motivate customers to be actively involved.
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Monitoring Your Reputation
You need to keep looking. Your reputation should be constantly monitored and managed. Reputation management and marketing are never complete, it is a continuous process. For instance, the information that might be irrelevant to your customers yesterday might become the hot trend for today. This means that you should not neglect any information. Also, make sure you keep tabs on your customers and reply to each comment. This will ensure that you solve every issue that arises per day.
Allowing issues to linger before addressing them can spell doom for your business. However, by keeping tabs on your reputation, you will find out areas that require improvement and improve them as much as possible to achieve the desired results.
The most interesting part of it is that you have a platform like Wiremo at your disposal to effectively market and manage your reputation. You can effectively wield the tools provided here to steer your reputation to the direction you want. Wiremo makes collecting feedbacks, building reputation, marketing reputation, managing reputation and monitoring reputation a lot easy and seamless.
