What is Reputation Management
Reputation management is managing, monitoring, and producing the digital narrative which surrounds your business. If done well, it allows you to grow brand awareness, counter negative sentiment, and better understand your competition.
Reputation Management Strategies Include:
-Social Media Marketing
-Crisis Management Tactics
-Consumer Sentiment Monitoring
-Search Engine Optimization
-Review Generation
-Negative Content Removal
-Public Relations
Good reputation management utilizes a wide variety of strategies for improving your business’s online image and generating new customers through unconventional marketing. Many small businesses utilize reputation management tactics to great success, whether their goals are to generate consumer awareness, gain new clients, boost positive brand association, or mitigate PR crisis.
How to do Effective Reputation Management
Good reputation management is attainable, though it is not easy. You can generate good reviews by asking valued customers, examine your website's presence through Google Analytics, and learn about SEO by reading books such as Franz Enzenhofer’s Understanding SEO.
There are some steps anyone can take to do good reputation management, but if you want to take your business reputation management strategy to the next level, you may want to consider utilizing a professional reputation management company. Here you can find a comprehensive overview of the reputation management industry, and find which company would be the best fit for your business.
What Does Successful Reputation Management Look Like
Successful reputation management is when you not only understand the digital narrative surrounding your business, you can control it as well. You understand how your social media posts affect the conversation, how your competitors influence your perception, how to generate positive reviews, and how to capitalize on your brand loyalty.
Services Offered by Leading Reputation Management Companies
-Competitor Monitoring
-Review Management
-Keyword Analysis
-Content Removal
-SEO Content Generation
-Social Media Management
-Brand Consulting
-Review Generation
-Web Ad Placement
A Good User Experience is Critical
While it is important to be focused on good reputation management, you must also always be focused on the creation of great web content. You need to always be creating the best user experience possible, because without a good user experience your online efforts will not be successful.
A website can not be search engine optimized if people do not have a good time using it. If people are having a bad user experience, they will leave the site quickly after arriving, and Google will take note. The most important part of SEO is providing a good experience to your users.
Integrating Reputation Management and Marketing Strategy
Examine your Marketing Strategy
What is your marketing strategy doing well? What is it doing poorly? If you could have more success doing one thing, what would it be? When thinking about changing any element of your business strategy, these questions are important to ask. Marketing is no different.
Reputation management tools are broad, and can be implemented in a variety of ways. This means they can be applied in many different ways, depending on what your business needs are.
Are you struggling to reach new customers? Maybe that’s because your website doesn’t rank highly in Google search results. The creation of SEO minded content, and improving the page layout of your site, will help with that.
Be Creative
Marketing is not just simply paying for advertisements in different places. It can be about spreading brand awareness, or generating more positive reviews. It can be getting your content to rank higher in search results. Think about ways you can reach new customers outside of plainly advertising to them.
Always be Monitoring
A critical element of reputation management is monitoring. Learning what consumer sentiment is surrounding your business, your industry, and your competitors is vital. Of course, consumer sentiment regarding all of these things is always changing. So it’s important to be constantly aware of what’s affecting these things and how.
When you’re monitoring, use what you’ve learned to tweak your marketing strategy. Imagine there’s some particular event that has led to a rush in interest in your industry sector. Say you’re a fishing rod manufacturer, and a new blockbuster movie has just been released which is a biopic of a fisherman. If you’re actively monitoring, you will see a spike in people searching about fishing and the movie. You may also see a spike in people wanting to buy fishing rods.
This may be a great time to tweak your marketing strategy. It may make sense to take funds you had earmarked for later in the year and invest them now, or increase your ad budget to take advantage of the interest.
When You’re Thinking SEO, Speed is Key
A lot of time in this article has been devoted to talking about search engine optimization, and the importance of ranking highly in Google search results. This is for good reason, and ranking high in Google search results can be the dominant reason your business grows. It can make or break you.
When you are thinking about how to rank higher in search engine results pages, there’s something people often forget to think about. The speed in which your website loads is the crucial factor in Google determining whether it should be shown .
This means that your website must be as fast as possible. If you are making changes to your site, and they slow it down, do not make those changes. Everything you do should either make your site faster, or have no effect.
Closing Thoughts
Reputation management strategies can be applied effectively to every business. They can transform how you understand your competition, reach new customers, and interact with existing ones. SEO can be critical to the success of your business. It should not be ignored.
Marking has meaningfully changed in recent years. It’s not just about advertisements, in fact in many cases the ads aren’t that important. A more well rounded, broad focused strategy will likely best serve your business.
