The internet can be a battleground, and your business needs a superhero to protect it against inaccurate information, competitors, and other nefarious forces. In a bygone era, you could rely on a commitment to good business practices to ensure a positive relationship with the public. In the modern digital marketplace, it is important to implement a variety of strategies for brand reputation protection.

What Is Brand Reputation Protection?

It has never been easier for a business to target and interact directly with potential customers. Gone are the days of the anonymous comments box where businesses could receive suggestions and complaints out of public view. Today, customers use social media to offer praise or vent their displeasure.

The unwritten rule is that even if customers leave a complaint on their personal social media account, they secretly expect the brand will hear their objection and respond accordingly. This unvoiced expectation creates a need for all businesses to implement an online reputation management strategy.

Brand reputation protection allows business owners to monitor the online discussion over their service, brand, or product. All businesses hope to be the focus of a positive viral media story, which can provide a staggering level of brand visibility. However, it is equally important to protect against negative viral media attention that can cause irreparable brand damage. Brand reputation protection gives business owners the power to influence the online discussion about their brand and provide course corrections when necessary.

6 Things to Know

1. It Should Prevent Inaccurate Listings

One of the first things you need to ensure is that any online listings that reference your brand have accurate information. It is easy to ensure the listings are accurate on pages you control.

However, there are many listings that harvest and copy information from third party sites. If these listings are inaccurate, or your business hours change, they could lead to customer frustration. Frustrated customers often leave negative reviews, which can severely damage your online reputation.

Digital reputation experts use smart tools to scour the internet in search of incomplete or inaccurate data. With the regular demands of a business, you don’t have time to search the internet for listings to verify their accuracy. Smart tools help provide business owners with the peace of mind that they will not be subject to a negative online response because of an inaccurate third party listing that they didn’t even know existed.

2. It Involves Cultivating Positive Reviews

Recent studies have concluded that potential customers give nearly the same credibility to online reviews as they do to recommendations from friends and acquaintances. Many people search for a business and make their final choice based on the star rating and the number of reviews that turn up in the search. Therefore, it is important for all brands to develop a positive presence on review sites.

One star reviews can be very damaging to your brand’s online presence, but there are some things businesses can do to minimize the negative effect. Businesses can request the removal of obviously illegitimate reviews, but this can be a time-consuming process. A better response is to bury negative reviews with promotions that lead to a proliferation of positive reviews. Your digital marketing expert can help ensure that all review pages have positive reviews that will help make your business a more attractive choice for potential customers.

3. It Uses Smart Tools

A single person, or even a team of people, cannot monitor the whole Internet in search of conversations that relate to your brand. Scrolling through thousands of pages of data would be time consuming and inefficient. However, it’s very important that you know what is being said about your brand so that you can respond appropriately and make sure the conversation remains positive.

Modern smart tools can effectively monitor the internet and provide you with simple, actionable reports to a single dashboard, email, or even text messages. The sooner you respond to a trending issue, the better chance you have of converting a potentially negative discussion into something positive for your business. Time is critical for brand reputation protection, and you should consider every mention of your brand as an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to superior customer service.

4. It Involves Proper Training for Employees

Things can get out of control quickly on the internet, and it’s important that everyone involved with your business has a strong foundation in professional online etiquette. All businesses should regard online interactions with the same importance and with the same expectations for professionalism that they have for employee interactions with customers in their place of business.

Every employee represents your business and has an influence on the online perception of your brand. This applies both to your employees when they are interacting with the public from a business social media account and when they make posts on their private social media pages. Your digital marketing expert can help you design and implement workshops so you and all your employees know expectations for online interactions that will protect your brand’s reputation.

5. You Must Keep Up-to-Date With New Trends

Brand reputation protection is as important to your business as your legal or accounting team. You don’t have to be a digital marketing expert to understand that technology evolves quickly. Marketing tactics that were effective as little as six months ago become obsolete and represent a sunk cost if your business cannot adapt and implement new strategies. Keeping up to date with modern techniques, tools, and methods is a full-time job that requires the diligence of an expert.

Many businesses attempt to handle their brand reputation protection in house, but this is an inefficient and ineffective strategy. Employees do not have time to research digital marketing trends and implement them while they perform their other duties. The result is that your business will be slow to learn and implement new strategies. Building a relationship with a professional digital marketing team helps ensure you will have access to the most dynamic strategies.

6. It’s the Best Return on Your Investment

Brand reputation management is like a shield that helps ensure your business will not be caught off guard by a negative viral media story. The information you receive from your brand reputation practices can also be used to magnify the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

The more you know about how potential clients respond to your services and your advertisements, the more you can adapt your business to suit the needs of your clients. With targeted marketing and smart tools, you can apply statistical analysis to ensure you get the most out of every marketing dollar you spend.

Take Control of Your Brand

The internet evolves fast, and if you don’t have a knowledgeable expert on your side, you and your business can quickly fall behind. The internet has enormous power both to elevate your business to new levels of profitability, or to bring it crashing down.

Disregarding brand reputation protection can also leave you vulnerable to smear campaigns from unscrupulous competitors. In the lawless wasteland of the internet, it’s important to have a protector on your side. Contact the experts at DM Collective today to discover how to take your brand to the next level.

The majority of business is already done online, and your online presence will only become more important in the future. The internet puts the power back in the consumers’ hands. Not only can everyone tell the world about their experience with each business, more and more consumers are checking reviews before they even set foot inside the business. Today, every business needs a strong online reputation management strategy.

The technological world evolves quickly, and to ensure the greatest profitability, businesses need to develop a relationship with a diligent and knowledgeable digital marketing expert who keeps up with all the new trends. Read on to discover six tips for improving your online reputation quickly.

Why Online Reputation Is Crucial

Many customers consider a Google review to be as trustworthy as a personal recommendation, so businesses have to monitor their online reputation. Any good online reputation management strategy is complex and multifaceted. Your business has to have a professional-looking online presence, and you and your employees must be trained to interact with customers appropriately when you are online.

Finally, you need a system to monitor relevant online discussions and provide you with convenient, actionable reports. Online reputation management strategy is in a constant state of evolution, and you must be able to implement new tactics and abandon old ones or risk falling behind competitors. Here are some important tips to consider.

6 Tips for Online Reputation Management Strategy

1. Don’t Try to Do It Alone

Many businesses make the mistake of attempting to handle their online reputation management strategy in-house. Running a business poses a unique set of challenges, and your reputation management strategy can be too much to add to an already demanding work schedule.

Reputation management is as important to the health of your business as your legal representation or your contracted accountant. Just because an employee is social media savvy does not mean they are qualified to handle your fundamental online reputation strategy. A business that assigns online reputation management to its employees often sees an increase of hours wasted on social media with no benefit to the reputation of the business.

Without a knowledgeable strategy, these individuals often use ineffective marketing tactics and often fail to obtain an accurate overall picture. The result is that decision-makers in the business do not have the information when they need it, and the money spent is ultimately thrown away.

2. Focus on Results-Driven Tactics

A professional consultant will allow you to capitalize on results-driven tactics that are much more affordable than traditional strategies. Ever-evolving smart tools allow businesses to scan the internet and harvest information. This information is then interpreted and supplied in the form of an actionable report that shows up as a text message or email.

This format allows business owners to get a quick glimpse of their online reputation while they’re having their coffee in the morning and alerts them immediately when they must take action. Smart monitoring and marketing tools are much more efficient than traditional strategies.

Smart tools allow you to target potential clients so you can focus on the specific individuals who are most likely to be interested in your goods and services. Businesses often discover that when they switch to an online reputation management company, they see dramatic savings and improved effectiveness over traditional marketing efforts.

3. Monitor the Discussion

With smart reports, you can see what people are saying the moment they say it. The days of the anonymous customer suggestion box have long since passed. Today, when customers have a complaint, they are much more likely to post about it on social media with the hope and assumption that the criticism will get back to the business.

If you never see a social media complaint, you are unable to correct the situation, and it reflects poorly on your business. With smart reports, you can be assured of receiving notifications whenever there is a problem. This allows you to turn a potentially negative situation into a positive for your company.

Potential customers observe how a company interacts with online complaints, and if you conduct yourself well, you can earn the trust of new clients even if the initial complaint was unfair or unreasonable. Capitalizing on opportunities for social media interaction between a business and its clients is one of the best and most affordable ways to improve online reputation.

4. Assure Correct Information

One of the most vital components of an effective online reputation management strategy is also the simplest. It is important that every online listing regarding your business shows the correct information. Unfortunately, may web services copy their information from preexisting sources.

If a listing is incorrect, or your information changes, the incorrect information could proliferate throughout the web. If customers obtain bad information and arrive at your business when it’s closed, the result could be an unfair, negative review.

Smart monitoring tools will help you stay on top of all your listings to ensure that your customers always have the right information. The more you can do to eliminate the possibility of bad reviews, the better it is for your online reputation.

5. Bury Negative Reviews

Many individuals report that when they are looking for goods and services, their research goes no farther than the star rating of a business. No business is invulnerable to receiving a few one-star reviews from unfortunate customer interactions that may or may not have anything to do with the level of service provided.

You can manage a few one-star reviews, and they won’t hurt your business provided it’s clear that those reviews are an aberration. When a one-star review is clearly fake, you have the option to report those reviews to the host site. This will initiate a review and, if you’re lucky, the review will be taken down.

However, a more proactive tactic is to ensure you have plenty of five-star reviews to offset any negative comments. You can use in-store and digital promotions to cultivate five-star reviews, so your star rating remains healthy even after you receive a few unfair comments.

6. Have Clear Expectations for Employees

Everyone who works for your business will reflect on your business. Your employees have to understand the effect they can have on the reputation of your business both when they are working as employees and when they interact online in their spare time.

You can’t over-emphasize how detrimental an inappropriate online interaction with a customer can be. A discourteous response from a social media account linked to your business has the potential to go viral and cause enormous damage to your online reputation.

It’s important that you have a clear and courteous conversation with your employees so that they understand what is expected of them in their online interactions. Workshops and regular refresher courses are also encouraged. It is always better to prevent an online reputation crisis and develop employees who are assets.

Improve Your Online Reputation Quickly

The internet can be very intimidating, and it’s often unfair. The good news that it is possible to improve your online reputation quickly and affordably by following these and other sound reputation management tactics. If you would like to develop a relationship with a customer-first company that focuses on online reputation management strategy, contact DM Collective today.

or call 1-888-577-7888

Month: December 2019

What Is Brand Reputation Protection? 6 Things You Need to Know