When it comes to marketing yourself as a business, agency, freelancer, or any other type of online professional, there’s no better form of advertising than the word of mouth of your existing loyal customers.
Why?
It’s because when someone tells one of their friends or family members about your business, they’re getting the information straight from a person with first-hand experience dealing with you. Plus, pretty much anyone is more likely to trust the opinion of someone they actually know rather than a business they’ve never heard.
In fact, roughly 90% of consumers believe that referrals and reviews from existing customers are far more important than anything your company or its sales team will say about it.
In essence, this is what reputation marketing is. You’ll be using the opinions of your new and existing customers, in order to market your business or brand.
So with that in mind, I thought it’d be a good idea to put together this handy field guide on reputation marketing.
The goal of this article is to help illustrate just how effective reputation marketing can be at improving the overall reputation of your company, in turn, skyrocketing your business’ organic search traffic, and of course, boosting your business’ bottom line.
What Is Reputation Marketing?
The truth is that there’s nothing new about reputation marketing.
In fact, for as long as businesses and salesmen have been around, their reputations have been one of the biggest contributing factors to what people think about their products or services, and whether or not anyone is going to actually want to buy from them.
Think about it, if you’ve only heard bad things about a company, are you going to want to risk dealing with them?
Reputation marketing is the act of using your reputation, consisting of social proofs and customer referrals, to help improve your brand’s search rankings. And in the end, this is almost guaranteed to increase traffic on your website, and at the same time, increase your sales as well.
So if you’re able to harness the power of reputation marketing effectively, you’ll be able to use your existing customers to do all of the selling for you. And fortunately, this is truly more powerful than any other type of marketing strategy you could hope to implement for your business.
The Importance Of Online Reviews
When a potential customer has a product or service they’re looking for, one of the first things they’re going to do is to search for businesses that offer said product or service. And when they enter a keyword to find a list of brands that offer what they’re looking for, they’re going to want to choose the company that has the best overall reputation.
Online reviews are one of the best ways to prove that your brand has a good reputation.
And not only that, According to Inboundmarketer.co on average, a brand’s online reviews have approximately a 12% impact on its
In fact, when you make a search for a local company or service provider on Google, you’ll see the Google Maps widget, which will display local businesses based on 3 main criteria:
1. Your proximity to the business location
2. How relevant their products or service are to your search query
3. A business’ reputation, based on the number of reviews it has and how recent those reviews are
So even if your company is in close proximity to the searcher and provides relevant products/services, you’re not likely going to capture that person’s attention, unless you have good reviews.
Furthermore, having a number of reviews won’t just help increase traffic to your brand’s website, but it will also help improve the quality of that traffic. In other words, having a good number of reviews works to convince the searcher that you’re a reputable company, even before they click on your website to learn about your brand.
How To Build Your Online Reputation
Just like having an abundance of poor reviews, not having any reviews is also going to have a negative effect on your business. This is because brands that don’t have any online reviews represent a risk.
In other words, internet users want to know that you’re a trustworthy brand before they decide to deal with you. At the same time, if you don’t have any reviews and your competitors do, people are more likely to trust your competition, and not you.
So how do you build your online reputation?
The simplest way to do this is to start asking your customers for reviews.
Fortunately, there are two main platforms you can use to get reviews and help skyrocket your online business: Facebook and Google.
Reputation Marketing On Facebook
Reviews or recommendations on Facebook can be an extremely effective way to target new business opportunities for your brand. This is because Facebook is one of the most popular social platforms used today.
Plus, when a person leaves you a review on Facebook, some of their friends might also see that review in their newsfeed stating that their friend recommends your business.
So again, this is essentially word of mouth marketing, but it’s even more powerful since it’s not just in a conversation between two people; they’ll be telling all of their Facebook friends about your brand at the same time.
Reputation Marketing On Google
Aside from using Facebook, you can also harness reputation marketing by focusing on Google reviews. Although Facebook reviews are more targeted, Google reviews will help improve your brand’s visibility, driving an increased amount of traffic to your website.
One interesting facet of using Google for your marketing is that as a service provider, you’ll only show up for Google users that are within your pre-defined service area, as per your Google My Business account.
But when you get reviews from users outside of this area, Google automatically expands your service area to wherever that review was left from.
So in other words, you’ll start seeing traffic from people in the new area more frequently, potentially leading to newly acquired customers from outside your business’ local vicinity.
Protecting Your Online Reputation
When working to build your online reputation, it’s also important to take the necessary precautions to protect the work that you’ve done.
In today’s digital world, having an online presence puts you and your business at the mercy of the world wide web. And while there are millions of internet users who are trustworthy, there are also millions of criminals and fraudsters looking to take advantage of unsuspecting business owners.
So how can you protect all the hard work that you do to build your reputation?
Fortunately, there are many cybersecurity tools and steps you can take to protect your business from online scams. For example, one of the best things you can do is to enforce a strong password policy for your website and all of its associated accounts.
This means using different passwords for each and every one of your accounts, as well as ensuring that these passwords are at least 8 to 10 characters in length, including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
However, when doing this, keeping track of your passwords can be tedious. Therefore, it’s best to use password management software, which is simultaneously capable of generating and tracking strong passwords for you.
There are also many online cybersecurity tools that can help you:
1. Keep your software current and up-to-date
2. Encrypt your website login pages
3. Secure your website hosting
4. Scan your website for vulnerabilities
5. Backup your site data
Additionally, you might also want to consider hiring the help of a professional cybersecurity expert. They’ll have the knowledge and expertise to recommend the best cybersecurity tools to help keep your online website reputation safe at all times.
Reputation Marketing For Better SEO , More Website Traffic, And Increased Sales
By now, it should be easy to see why a business’s online reputation is so important to its overall success. It shows people that your company is reputable and trusted by all those who’ve dealt with you before. That is, so long as your reviews are mostly positive reviews.
And the fact is that by having a good reputation, both on and offline, your brand is going to be able to stand out from its competitors, making it easier for potential customers to trust you.
In the end, by harnessing the power of reputation marketing, you’ll easily be able to improve your website’s
excellent review concept -DepositPhotos
