**What is Reputation Marketing?**
Reputation marketing is a specialized
version of brand marketing. Companies devote a great deal of time and resources
to branding their business, with more attention devoted to digital branding
than ever before.
Reputation marketing refers to the real-time
brand identity that businesses capture from online comments, reviews,
complaints, and critiques that come from their customers.
Word of mouth is more powerful than ever,
only now it comes in the shape of blog comments, re-tweets, Facebook likes, and
sharing/liking/following on every social media platform possible.
Reputation marketing allows your business
to take what consumers are already saying about your products or services, and
leverage it for your own use, to increase your industry ratings and,
ultimately, your revenue.
**5 Keys to Reputation Marketing Success**
Given that reputation marketing stems from
what other people are saying about your business, it’s tempting to sit back and
relax.
You can’t control what people will post or
change the mind of every customer who has a bad review, so you can just leave
them to say what they will, right?
Wrong – reputation marketing isn’t just
people’s ideas about your business that pop into their head for no reason.
Reputation marketing is the active management
of your customer’s comments and criticisms to create the brand image that you
desire.
Reputation marketing doesn’t need to be
complicated, just stick with these core strategies to achieve reputation
marketing success:
**1\.**
**Create Systems for Collecting**
**Feedback**
Rather than just
trolling around to find out what people are saying about your product, go out
there and capture that information yourself.
Customers are
eager to review products and weigh in with their opinions, so create forums for
them to do so and collect the data that comes from it.
Some of the most
effective ways to gather feedback on your brand is through online surveys,
contests for users on your Facebook page or from your email list, opening your
blog posts up for comments, or tweeting questions for your followers to answer.
This type of data
collection is priceless – it gives you a direct link to what your customer
thinks.
Don’t let this
information go to waste – devote some analysis to your reputation marketing
strategy where you look closely at who your customers are. Are they the same
people that you thought you were targeting?
What are their
buying patterns? Ages? Where do they live? Which customers seem more likely to
leave a positive review?
Developing systems
for data collection and interpretation allows you to tap into the great
resources that are already out there via your online presence.
**2\.**
**Build Your Reputation**
Waiting around for
a good reputation to “happen” to you isn’t an effective marketing strategy.
If you want to
have your customers say positive things about your products and services, you
need to put the time and energy into making that happen.
To do this, you
need to open yourself up to what’s going on around you. Read the comments,
search relevant hashtags, or scan the internet for reviews of your business.
Once you're aware
of what people are saying, you have the power to harness it.
Take your bad
reviews and deconstruct them. What specifically are you doing wrong? If enough
people have the same comments, changing the way you perform in that area can
create a huge shift in your customer's minds.
Then look at the
praise your brand gets – what are the areas that you excel in? How can you
strive to be even better, so you leave your competitor far behind you?
Reviews are an
indispensable way to gather your customers' likes and dislikes about your
products so you can turn around and give them exactly what they want.
**3.** **Market Your Reputation**
Even though your
customers are doing a substantial portion of your marketing for you, it doesn’t
mean you shouldn’t continue using your existing channels to communicate your
brand’s message.
To use reputation
marketing to your advantage when creating your other campaigns, you need to pay
close attention.
This means looking
at more than just whether your customers are leaving positive or negative
reviews. Drill down into the specific things they’re saying.
Paying attention
to the keywords that keep popping up in your comments or online reviews can
inspire your next campaign and directly address those comments.
For example, if
you keep seeing the word “inconvenient” coming up in negative reviews, you can
tailor your marketing campaigns or social media strategies to focus on
highlighting how convenient your product or service can make their lives.
In this way,
reputation marketing helps you identify a problem and create a solution to it
that you can drop directly in your customer's laps.
**4\.**
**Manage Your Reputation**
The beauty of
reputation marketing is the wealth of information it gives about your
customers. To keep their comments and reviews pouring in, you’ll need to spend
some time creating an incentive for your customers to engage in the
conversation.
For example, you
might see a spike in reviews when you introduce a new product. However, after
several months on the market, you may lose momentum and see your customers turn
their attention elsewhere.
To manage your
reputation and keep the dialogue open, your business sometimes has to make an
effort to keep the hype going, so you don't fall off your customers' radars.
Some ideas for
generating buzz is to create and offer promotions, special offers for your
followers, host events, or offer exclusive discounts.
These tactics
motivate customers to purchase when they might normally be ready to move onto
the next thing.
**5.** **Monitor Your Reputation**
The key to
monitoring your reputation is in repetition. This doesn’t mean reading reviews
once and then never looking at them again. The conversation is always changing.
What was irrelevant yesterday could be tomorrow’s hottest trend.
For this reason,
monitoring requires regular attention to what’s being said about your brand.
This might mean a weekly or daily read through your social media posts,
searching for online reviews, and scrolling through the comments on your blog
or Facebook page.
Regular monitoring
allows you to see if things are working or if they're de-railing in a
relatively short period. Looking at comments once a year means that someone may
have said something negative six months ago that you could have acted on or
addressed, and now it's too late.
Keeping close tabs
on your reputation allows you to spring into action as soon as your customers
identify an area that needs improvement.
Consumers love to support businesses who
have a personal touch. If your reputation matters to you and you make an effort
to give your customers what they want (not just what you think they do), you’ll
stand out in a sea of faceless businesses who don’t have the time to listen to
their ideas and comments. Satisfying and delighting your customers doesn’t
require a flashy sales tactics or aggressive marketing.
What you need to do is get quiet and
listen. Your customers are telling you what they want, what they dislike, and
what they love.
Now it’s your job to deliver more of the
things that make them happy and keep them engaged in the success of your
business.