Effective Tips to Successfully Manage your Online Reputation

Online reputation management in today’s digital marketing world is about managing your brand's image and reputation so that you can effectively reach potential customers and customers. It encompasses the control of information flow about your brand to give it a good online image and to enable it compete strongly. From experience, no matter what you do about your brand and how well you do it, there is no guarantee that your brand will not end up on the receiving end of some bad news that can dent if not out rightly damage its reputation. With good and prior information management, that unhelpful scenario could have been prevented or managed better. You can take care and protect the reputation of your business well in advance if you deploy proper online reputation management techniques. The following tips can be of help in that quest.

Clearly Identify What You Want to Achieve: If you want to develop an effective online reputation management strategy, you must first identify what you want to achieve. You must set clear goals right from the outset making sure these goals are achievable. Your objectives must also be clear. Clearly identify what you want your brand image to be like and what kind of reputation you want for your business. You can set these goals by directly focusing on your target audience in terms of their demographics, psychographics, and geography. Your goals must match the overall goals of your business and not just your marketing campaigns. That way, you can better channel human efforts and resources to managing the reputation of your brand and business. 

Choose the Right Strategy: Choosing the right strategy is hugely important for your brand and business.  It is imperative to determine right from the outset how you want to manage your online reputation and then choose the right tools and platforms suitable for it. It is difficult to miss the mark if you correctly choose the right tools and platforms to manage your online reputation.

Focus on the Right Platforms: The best platforms to choose and focus on are platforms where your target audience habitually hangs out online. Doing so helps you to effectively reach the audience with your marketing messages. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes are reputed to have audience preferences, from young adults to middle age persons and so on. LinkedIn is particularly reputed for middle age professionals. So, if you want to manage your online reputation on any of these platforms, you must know the kind of marketing messages to use on each of the platforms to help your online reputation.

Choose the Right Marketing Tools: You can effectively use a well optimized website, blogs and even forums to manage your online reputation. If as part of your strategy you plan to use blogs or forums to manage your online reputation, be sure that your content is well-written and optimized for SEO purposes. That way, search engines particularly Google will rank the content high in their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic back to your website or blog since the material will benefit from better online searches.

Focus on Long-Term Results: When choosing an online reputation management strategy, it is best to think long term. No matter how good your strategy is, the effects will not be immediate. It may take weeks or even months to see positive impacts from your campaign efforts. Experience shows that when the effects start coming out, they are likely to continue for quite a while. So, do not get discouraged if the results you expect do not come immediately. It is best to think long term because the results will come anyway provided you are doing your campaigns correctly. 

Stay Up-To-Date on Your Social Media Platforms: With over 4.5 billion active users on social media, that’s one huge market out there online. An effective online reputation management strategy should therefore include staying up to date on your social media accounts. Social media platforms are busy 24/7 and all year round. A lot goes on in these platforms around the clock. Therefore, you can miss out on a lot of important information if you don't sign in often enough to check what’s going on. Make it a habit to always know what's going on with your social media account(s). If you are too busy or engaged somewhere and you cannot stay updated, consider hiring someone to keep an eye on your social media accounts for you. It is usually a good decision and investment for very busy executives who choose to do so. By staying up to date, you can easily see when something needs changing or updating and you take steps to fix it immediately before it attracts negative comments that can directly impact your online reputation.

Diligently Monitor Your Brand Online: If you want to have a good idea what people are saying about your brand/business/products/services, it is important you diligently monitor the brand/business/products/services online. You can use social media monitoring tools and Google alerts to get info about any comments about your business online. If you set up Google alerts for instance, you receive timely notifications whenever someone mentions your business name on the web. You can quickly trace and know where to make amends if the comment or observation in negative for instance. If you run an online shop, its dashboard analytics tools information can give you the right insights to determine whether or not there are any issues with your webpage load speed and if there are any broken links within pages or product listings that require immediate fixing.

Keep a Keen Eye on Negative Reviews: Yes, as you get positive reviews, it is inevitable that you’ll also get negative reviews. Even if you choose not to respond to positive reviews, be sure to quickly respond to negative reviews. Acknowledge and appreciate customers who post negative reviews and assure them that their concerns will be quickly addressed. Make sure you do so promptly as you have promised. Never ignore negative reviews outright. If it becomes necessary, never fail to sincerely apologize for what people see as not right. Take pains to always explain what went wrong and with a firm promise to have it fixed immediately. Doing so helps your online reputation a great deal.

Respond Timely to Reviews: You must make it a business habit to respond to reviews promptly. Make sure your responses are well thought out, should be sufficiently welcoming, respectful, and helpful to your customer concerns. This way, your responses will greatly help mitigate the impact of negative reviews particularly from users who write malicious or defamatory content in their reviews. Never take negative reviewers as adversaries. You must find ways to accommodate all reviews and respond to them promptly and intelligently. Doing so helps your online reputation in many ways.

Set Up Google Alerts: Google Alerts are a great way to track people's opinions online about your brand or product. Presently, one of the best and most reliable ways to keep track of what people are saying about your brand/products is through Google Alerts. Once you set up the alerts in the configuration you want your info, Google thereafter never fails to alert you when it hits on the information you want. You can also effectively use Google alerts to monitor your competition and what they are doing. Google alerts can also help you to stay on top of industry trends by alerting you about new info as it is coming in. So, if you set up Google alerts on things that really matter to your business, it helps your online reputation a great deal.

Wrapping Up

Building your brand reputation online is one of the smartest things to do if you are a digital marketer. If online users perceive your brand/business in positive light, it helps the growth of your business. The foregoing techniques have been tested and tried by marketers who take online reputation seriously and they work. The positive results they give lend them to other marketers/businesses who also want to build their online reputation. They can help you too to build a very good image for your own brand/business if you try them out.

How to Use Digital Marketing to Position Your Business

The internet remains very deep, wide and very complex. It is this complexity digital marketing explores to get promotional messages out to customers and potential customers. The real reason smart marketers habitually dedicate quality time, efforts and energy on digital marketing to get good results. Marketers not doing so are in critical error which inevitably costs their businesses very dearly on the long run. Such marketers may no doubt understand the importance of digital marketing. The snag however is that many of them don’t really know how to implement it for their specific situations as may be related to their own specific types of businesses.

If you want to succeed as a marketer and to position your business very well in the digital world, there are two things you must first focus on. First you must decide on your brand image and secondly you must know the audience you are targeting with your marketing campaigns. Once you decide on these, it is then possible to send out effective campaign messages that help to get some action from your audience. These efforts help to position your brand/business for good results even in the complexity of the digital marketing world. 

 

Here is how it works:

Project Your Brand Image

Everything about your business revolves around your brand image. A brand image is simply a very fancy way your business wants others to see it. It is an all-encompassing picture involving your reputation and what you stand for. Exactly how you want others to see you, think about you and remember you anytime they think of a product/service.
For this reason, every single information, advertisement or marketing campaign on social media posts, emails, handbills, flyers, billboards, TV ads, etc. etc, must as of necessity reflect and project the brand image you decided for your business right from the outset.

For a brand image to be effective, it must’ve been shaped from the following:

Why must someone remember or buy my product?
What do people feel when they buy the product?
What is unique about the product?
Who are the target customers?
Why these customers and not others?
How will they react when they buy the product?
Will they be satisfied with the product?
What feelings come to people’s minds when they think about the product?
How generally do others perceive the product?

If you design a brand with these concerns in mind, it is bound to make impact and help your business to grow in our complex digital world. These are some of the concerns that helped shape the business outlook of popular brands like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Hp, Dell and many others.

Define Your Ideal Customer

You cannot successfully do any business without first defining who your customers/clients are. Because these are persons you must target, your first order of business is to decide on who your ideal customer/client is. You really need this because of the fierceness of the competition characteristic of the digital world. Knowing who you want to sell your products/services to is the first step to selling any product/service. You risk failure to sell products if you think of your customers in broad and nonspecific terms particularly in a highly competitive marketing place like the digital environment. Once you can successfully identify who your target audience is, it is easier to align it with your brand image. Everything else flows from there to give your business a very formidable foundation. Building your marketing strategy on a formidable foundation can be great for your marketing campaigns, leads, sales and business growth. Knowing who your customer is appears to be the most important step to growing your business by way of digital marketing. This is because without a clear target audience to market to, you may be marketing in vain. Marketing in vain can in no way help your business to grow.  To avoid that scenario, you must always endeavour to decide on a target audience first, and then you create a brand image to appeal to that particular audience. That is the surest way to make sales and grow your business in digital marketing environment.