Things to Need To Know About Reputation Marketing

Reputation marketing is the way of working on your business reputation in the same way you work for your business marketing. In other words, it is a proactive approach to build and manage your business reputation among the customers. You can understand this concept with the fact that companies with better reputation earn more sales just because they are highly reputed.

It would be worth mentioning another example of reputation. When you apply for jobs right out of your college, your advisor would tell you to be careful about what you post on social media. The reason is that you would need to build a positive reputation in order to get a job.

According to a survey, most of the companies do not think about reputation until their marketing falls into a crisis and their sales drop. At this point when the reputation is at stake, the companies think about reputation management. Experts suggest that it is a wrong approach to go for the reputation management. Instead, the companies need to be proactive and do something about building and maintaining reputation. This is what we call reputation marketing.

Promoting your brand with reputation marketing

There are different ways to promote your brand with the help of reputation marketing. You can start by having reviews from your existing customers. Their feedback will convince potential customers about your brand and products.

When customers do a research about a business, they go online. About 63.6 percent say that they look at online reviews on Google before visiting any business because Google is the largest platform for searching and researching for the business.

And since customers go online to search and research for a business, you have to make sure that you are being attentive to what your customers have to say about your brand and product. It’s important because this is the way you can respond to any review right after it is posted.

According to a survey in 2018, 53% of the customers say that they expect businesses to respond to their negative reviews within a week. However, most of the businesses are not meeting this expectation. About 63% of the customers say that a business never responded to their negative review.

When you are working on reputation marketing, you will have to make sure that you are actively analyzing the customer feedback.

Using customer reviews to improve business operations

The customers will say about your business right according to their experience about your business. It means that if they find any problem in your product, they will say about this problem in the review section. While it is a bad review in the first sight, it is actually an opportunity for you to correct the error. The matter of fact is that you can bring your customer support team into the action to deal with this issue. And this quick response will benefit your business reputation in an amazing manner.

Why Are The Customer Reviews Important For Online Marketing?

If you are wondering whether or not the customer reviews are important, they are very much important. Emergence of several online and social platforms has allowed to the users to share their experience about brands and businesses. Thus, it’s not just the e-commerce websites where you can find reviews. Customer reviews exist everywhere from social media platforms to forums. In fact, there are some dedicated sites whose only job is to collect and manage customer reviews. Such websites include Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor. These platforms allow the customers to give their opinion about any brand or product with complete freedom.

Customer reviews are very important for all B2C companies. In this article, we are going to discuss why customer reviews are so important for the businesses.

They help in making buying decisions

Customer reviews are basically a feedback which the customers give about your business. If they find your product and brand good, they are going to leave positive reviews. And this feedback is then read by the potential customers when they think about buying your product. According to an estimate in 2017, about 97% of the internet users view online reviews regularly or occasionally. And 85% of the people trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations from their friends. From these stats, you can realize the importance of these reviews when it comes to developing buying decisions in the potential customers.

You will be able to know what your customers think about your product

Customers will say what they want to say about your product. Now, you may get the negative reviews in the process but you can actually use those negative reviews in favor of your brand and products. When there is a negative review about your product, you can read this review to know about the problem your customer is having with the product. If it is a genuine problem, you can work to fix the issue. If the problem is with the product only that your customer is complaining about, you can reach out to the customer to fix this problem. If the problem is related to the error or flaw in production and/or packaging, you can work to fix this systematic error in order to prevent any future problems.

Getting visibility

Apart from the benefit that you will get from the positive reviews in terms of increased credibility of your brand, you will also be able to enjoy SEO benefits. When there are reviews about your product on your website and over other platforms, you actually have the content which can bring your website in the top ranks. In this case, it doesn’t matter if you have positive or negative reviews. As a result of this fresh content, you will be able to improve the visibility of your site.

Importance of Reputation Marketing For Brands

If we look at the term “reputation management’, it will become pretty obvious that this term doesn’t have great reputation among the brands. The reason is that it is somewhat pretty close to crisis management.

Brands consider taking reputation management measures when they see fewer prospects of winning the market. At that moment, they call the reputation management providers in order to have desperate measures being followed at desperate times. And since these are the desperate measures, you can expect your sites getting flooded with the traffic through black-hat SEO practices and fake reviews and ratings.

Shifting from reputation management to reputation marketing

When it comes to reputation marketing, the first thing you will have to take into consideration is the encouragement to reviewers to write reviews for you. Luckily, several platforms make it possible for any business to receive the unbiased reviews. Although we cannot deny the benefits of having a website on the first page of Google and other major search engines, review sites have become the information resources for potential customers as they gain access to the feedback of existing customers of any business listed in those sites. And it is worth mentioning here that potential customers would trust your existing customers more than they trust your version of facts about your products.

In this scenario, it becomes important to discuss how you can go with the reputation marketing. The important elements of reputation marketing include monitoring, acquisition, and amplification.

Monitoring

Monitoring is an important aspect of reputation marketing. It’s like keeping a finger on the customers’ pulse. Marketers and business owners need to know what customers are thinking about their brands and products.

To monitor the reviews, you first need to claim your listings over the review platforms. You can turn the alerts on in order to get updates about the reviews. The reason to monitor is that you will not only be able to know about the happy customers but you will also be able to deal with the unhappy customers on timely basis. In other words, monitoring can help you in providing effective customer support to your customers.

Acquisition

Getting positive reviews is easier said than done. In a perfect world, you would get positive reviews no matter what if the quality of your product is good. But this is not the case in the real world. When you will ask the happy customers why they didn’t leave a review, they will either say that they forgot about it or say that they don’t consider it quite important. Difficult process is another major reason people do not leave review about a business.

In order to encourage your customers to leave a review, you need to make sure that the process of leaving review is easier. Then you need to remind them about leaving the review. However, you also have to make sure that you remind them at an appropriate time. Asking them too early or too late is not going to work.

Amplification

Amplification refers to the practice of adding positive reviews in the marketing campaigns. You can look at the reviews left by your customers across different platforms and gather the best ones. You can display those good reviews on your main site. This practice of amplification will help your business get the valuable leads.