Introduction
Reputation management is a critical component of any business. It involves monitoring what kinds of online attention your business receives and actively working to shape and maintain a positive image.
When you think of reputation management, one of the first things that comes to mind is customer reviews. Reviews in particular have enormous influence over potential clients who are looking for reasons to trust your services. While reviews are a major piece, there is more to building a stellar reputation. It requires a multi-variety approach, including creating consistent messaging across channels, monitoring social media, and promoting positive content. Here’s a simple starter guide to creating a reputation management strategy, broken into three steps.
Research: The first step involves auditing your business’ online presence and reputation. It’s crucial to ensure that all your owned channels reflect your current imagery, messaging, and values. This includes checking for outdated logos, company descriptions, or mission statements. Discover what people are saying about your business and seek out different types of conversations. All feedback is helpful for understanding perceptions. Negative feedback can offer extremely helpful insight into areas for improvement and provide an opportunity to show that you value your client’s experience.
Strategize: Create reactive and proactive management strategies and develop a tone guide for responding to comments and reviews. Reactive strategies focus on how to respond to feedback and mentions. It’s essential to respond to comments about your business with a consistent tone of voice and to react quickly to negative feedback. Proactive strategies focus on how to build and maintain a positive reputation. This includes actively incentivizing clients to leave reviews, showcasing valuable testimonials to serve as validation across channels, and creating reputable content.
Enact: Once you’ve mapped out your action plan, make sure the new standard operating procedures are clearly communicated and delegated to the appropriate staff. Since a company’s online reputation is built over time and constantly subject to change, it’s crucial to stay on top of regular monitoring and optimization. When done well, reputation management can make a big difference in your sales. If you’re struggling to see improvements, consider working with an agency that can help you reconfigure your game plan and get those ratings to climb.
