5 Ways Ecommerce Businesses Can Create Local Business Reputation

Every business is essentially local. That’s inclusive of ecommerce business. Significantly, most consumers always have a strong affinity for local businesses. Many spend a large percentage of their disposable income patronizing local businesses. This is something ecommerce businesses can always tap into if they use the right strategy. When ecommerce businesses create a local reputation for themselves, they continue to attract local business loyalty. They can even deepen this loyalty by being overly responsive to local community needs. This means they must as a matter of policy employ local people, give back to local causes, and attract local customers. This ultimately helps to drive revenue to the area. By deliberate strategies as discussed below, ecommerce businesses can easily acquire local reputation.
 
1. Experimenting with Geo-Targeting

By way of geo-targeting, ecommerce businesses can personalize their brand to a specific local audience. This is because, with geo-targeting as a marketing technique, these businesses are able to deliver content or advertisements to users based on their location. Doing so helps to increase conversions because these businesses can translate their content into local languages. They can match local currencies, serve specific offers locally, and adapt their marketing to make it relevant to a specific area. When this technique is used through native geo-targeting options on your GMB, Google Business Profile, it is very effective. You can also use location-specific hashtags on social media or location-based apps and services like Foursquare or Yelp to reach local customers.

2. Personalizing Shopping Experience Elements

Significantly, most (more than 80%) of consumers prefer local businesses because of the personalized attention they get from such businesses. This attention comes largely by way of socializing with staff, asking for recommendations on products or being helped to pick the right gifts. Ecommerce business owners can take advantage of this by using online tools to help personalize customer experience and even to deliver the same level of care and attention to customers. Some of the tools can help suggest products based on browsing history, past purchases, and items in shoppers’ carts. Some of these tools are designed to use historical data to show relevant content based on customer interests and past interactions. These tools help ecommerce businesses to personalize practically everything from email outreach to website design and layout. Adequate care must however be taken to ensure customer data collection is not interpreted as intrusive. Obtaining permission before collecting customer data is about the best way to avoid this.
 
3. Humanizing Your Brand and Team

Most consumers really feel at home if they know they’re dealing with real humans and not just machines or robots. This is exactly why many consumers prefer to deal with product merchants they can greet by name. To humanize your ecommerce business, you can use your ecommerce site and social media pages to showcase the names and faces of the good people behind your business. In addition to showcasing your team in your content, make sure you empower your team to respond to direct messages, host live video chats, and reply to comments to keep conversations flowing. This is one great way to humanize your brand and it helps a great deal in enhancing local business reputation for your business.

4. Sponsoring Local Events

If you want patronage from locals, be there for them in a visible way. One of such ways is to sponsor local events the people really identify with. Even if you are unable to physically host such events you can sponsor an event in your target community. You can consider donating free products to a local charity for instance. Sponsoring a local sports derby or providing a specific discount for nonprofits in the area is another great idea. If you explore all ways to give back to the community, local opinion molders take note and that creates a boost in your business. It helps your business reputation a great deal if you explore all ways to give back to the local community even if you’re not physically present there.

5. Partnering with Local Influencers

Smart ecommerce business owners like to tap into prominent, famous or influential members of their target communities to facilitate local connections. They never overlook Influencers in this quest. This is because Influencers with an active geo-specific community following can help spread the word with relative ease. With relevant geographic messaging, such Influencers can always provide the authentic messaging that resonates with their audience. This can help enhance local business reputation a great deal. It is therefore advisable to focus more on local micro-influencers. They are a great resource for ecommerce businesses because they are often more affordable. They in addition have high engagement rates for their specific niches.

Random Tips to Manage your Business' Reputation on Social Media

If you want to quickly build a reputation for your business, get it on social media. Social media aside from being a very suitable place for your business to post ads and promotions, just as the name applies, it is also one great place to socialize. Because of the huge popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can get to quickly build a large community of followers/friends. That becomes a great social media asset for your business. Through it, your followers/friends easily interact and engage with your brand by way of comments, reviews, feedback and asking questions. That helps to enhance your business reputation in no small measure. If you take positive proactive steps to manage your business’ reputation on social media, you can easily build a stronger relationship with your customers through whom you can generate positive word-of-mouth promo for your brand. Here's what you can do. 

Highlight and Promote Positive Reviews

If you market on social media, always keep an eye on reviews and testimonials from any of the platforms you have an account on. What you do with these reviews/testimonials (even if negative), can go a long way to help your online reputation management efforts. You can respond directly to reviews or you use them as user-generated content to build trust and your business reputation. This is because user-generated content is by far more persuasive to potential customers and as a result, does more to establish your reputation better than most other promotional activities. This gets better when you factor in that you can easily share reviews and testimonials very widely on social media platforms. Most digital marketers are aware that a very large percentage of consumers rely on online reviews to make their buy decisions. It is smart social media marketing therefore to always take a proactive approach to reputation management to ensure that you’re making the right impression on these prospective customers. With quality reputation management, business owners take control of the narrative surrounding their brands. Doing so helps them to post such great results that ensure positive actual growths in their businesses.

Respond Promptly to Comments and Reviews

On social media, when brands respond promptly to customer reviews, they send a positive message which demonstrates their commitment to customer service. That helps brands to create a positive image, more so when such responses relate to negative reviews. A positive, personalized response to reviews goes a long way to shape a positive narrative for the brand. This is more so when you factor in that social platforms are often where customers go to share their experiences with brands. If these customers leave reviews, a prompt response is imperative, to enhance your business reputation. As a business owner, if you give a positive response that adequately addresses your customer’s concern or complaints, it clearly demonstrates to others who might read the review that your brand takes customer service seriously. Doing so helps your business reputation positively thereby avoiding losing good customers unnecessarily in the bargain.

Diligently Track all Conversations about Your Brand

Every second, every hour, every day, countless conversations are taking place on social media. It is always a very huge challenge for most businesses to decipher which of these conversations relate directly to their brands. How then can you find the conversations that relate to your brand? Simple, through diligent tracking! Doing this manually however is a very daunting task. Online social listening tools help businesses to solve this problem. By using these tools effectively, it is pretty difficult for businesses to miss out on any online conversation involving their brands. Online social listening tools like HootSuite help businesses to track branded keywords even if such brands are not tagged by name. With these tools, business owners do not need to search through social media manually (even if that is feasible), since the tools provide direct notifications when a conversation about your brand is taking place on social media platforms. This allows business owners to easily gauge the overall sentiment surrounding their brands on social media. It provides them great opportunities to step up and engage directly with customers. A move that no doubt helps their business’ reputations a great deal!

How to Avoid Online Reputation Crises

Every business no matter how small or big thrives on its reputation. That is what makes reputation a closely-guarded and well-protected asset in business. Building a reputation for your business takes time, very valuable time! It however takes a very short while to lose and with attendant devastating impact to boot. Online, the impact is better left to the imagination of everyone. There are many simple things you can do to avoid online reputation crises such as:

Being extremely vigilant: Nearly everyone is online these days and just one scathing review undetected early can do tremendous damage to your reputation! That is because of the extremely quick pace information spreads online. The solution is real vigilance on your part. Detect-respond-and-promise line of action easily helps your vigilance efforts.

Astute monitoring: When you detect challenges, it is not enough to respond and leave things at that. It pays to keep monitoring to see if there are further negative feedback which you can quickly attend to. Tip: Do not ignore to pay special attention to niche review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor where negative feedback can be really damaging.

Acting quickly: Regardless of whether online reviews recommend your brand or not, it pays to take quick action responding to them. This where your diligence and tactfulness can help you win back skeptics thereby enhancing your business reputation.

Being proactive: From experience, it is possible to anticipate customer reaction. The real reason for FAQ as part of your website displays. By anticipating customer reaction correctly, you can take proactive measures to shore up your reputation and avoid real damage. Appropriately deployed Analytics can help your online reputation if you know how to use them. If not, consulting experts is not a bad idea.

Routine evaluation/corrections: Taking a look back and going over what you have been doing online about your business is one way to get hints and clues about what works and what doesn’t to enable you make amendments and or corrections as you go along. Proper analysis of customer-feedback and online campaign results help a great deal here. A major benefit of constant review is to learn and that is what grows your experience. Nothing beats experience when it comes to doing business online. Just ask any professional marketer and you’ll get to appreciate my drift here.