Your Online Brand Reputation is the image of your company seen by internet users. It’s how the public feels about your products and perceives your brand. A positive brand reputation- both on and offline- means that customers not only trust your business, but they are also likely to purchase your product or service.
Brand Reputation Management is the process of monitoring how consumers perceive your business and taking strategic action when necessary to improve your brands image.
The key to a winning reputation management strategy is recognizing that you don’t have to wait for people to form their own opinions of your brand. Instead, by building your brand’s experiences around your target customers’ needs, wants, values and opinions, you can also shape how they perceive your company.
Brand safety ensures advertisements, their content and any content shared by brands are appropriate and not associated with topics of consumer opinions that may be negative. By making sure your advertising is legitimate, your consumers won’t feel deceived by your brand and keeps them from having to second guess your business or distrust what you have to offer.
Various factors such as, online reviews, consumer forums, news articles, social media behavior and visibility in search results all impact your brand reputation. Your online brand reputation has become increasingly more important as the digital era continues to explode.
Building a strong brand takes a lot of work. Having a solid reputation strategy will not only help you on your goals of achieving your ideal perception but will also help when your brand inevitably must deal with a crisis.
Why is Brand Reputation Management Important?
Creates More Loyal Customers: For Outdoor Power Equipment companies, the majority of earnings come from a long and loyal customer set. When you follow a brand management strategy, you can look more closely at what avenues will attract and retain the most loyal customers. Customer Loyalty programs work because people like to do business with people they like and trust. Maintaining your brand’s reputation helps to build that trust.
Quickens Your Response to the Competition: Having a marketing strategy in place will help you identify what marketing or sales tactics you need when dealing with a competitive threat. Your Brand reputation strategy can help you decide if it’s a better idea to prioritize a new marketing campaign that focuses on selling to your existing clients, or if it’s better to narrow in on acquiring new customers in a currently under-served area.
Stabilizes Employee Growth: If you articulate the way you want your brand to be perceived, it’s much easier to identify good hires that will promote the culture you are trying to create. People look for jobs where they feel fulfilled and can make a meaningful contribution to something they believe in. Companies that have a clear brand identity and a well-founded brand reputation are the ones who offer these types of opportunities to perspective employees. With a great reputation both inside and outside, a company will have a more devoted workforce and lower levels of turnover and turmoil.
Build Your Brand Identity: Before you can even begin to think about a brand management strategy, you must first create a brand worth managing. Developing a strong brand identity ensures you have a clear understanding of what your company stands for and can help guide decisions in certain situations.
Your brand identity should include:
Logo, Colors & Imagery that are Cohesive
A Consistent Voice from the Brand
A Clear Company Mission, Vision and Value Statement
Establish Your Online Presence: Create a website that will allow visitors to experience your brand identity and form an accurate impression of your business right from the start. Setup and Manage your Google Business Profile and Social Media Accounts.
Actively Ask for and Respond to Reviews: The average consumer will read 10 reviews of your company prior to deciding they can or cannot trust your brand. Make sure to include a place for customers to leave reviews and include them as testimonials on your website. No matter the venue, make sure that you respond to every review as they come in, even the bad ones. If you address them honestly and quickly, many times you will find that you are able to turn a poor experience around and retain your customer’s business. Not only that, but it will show other people reading the reviews, that your brand cares about your consumers and that you will listen and resolve issues and complaints when they arise.
Listen to Feedback: Keeping an eye on what is being said about your brand is key to reputation management. Add a form to your website to create a place for customer feedback. The input you will receive is incredibly valuable.
Improve the Customer Experience: According to Microsoft Consumer Data, 58% of Consumers who feel like their experience falls short with a brand will sever all ties with them. It’s not just the lost revenue that you should concern yourself with.Customers who have had a poor experience are much more likely to leave a public facing review for a company than those who had a good one.
94% of consumers say a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business.
You must be ready to manage your brand reputation before others do it for you. A single bad review can deter multiple potential customers from doing business with your brand.
Company Culture Counts: Good things happen when a company promotes a healthy and positive internal environment. By giving your team members meaningful work and empowering them to take charge of their professional lives, they will become more confident and productive collaborators instead of individual contributors. This has a huge impact on your public reputation. When employees are more satisfied and fulfilled by their work, they will take pride in what they do, and as a result, do better work. Company culture also effects your internal brand reputation. The better supported your employees feel, the prouder of their work they will be which in turn will have a positive influence on your overall brand reputation.
Create a Brand Style Guide: As your company grows. You must always maintain the same identity and message across all channels with internal documentation. Creating a Brand Style Guide ensures that everything remains consistent when it comes to design choices, communication strategies, quality of customer service, etc.
Brand Reputation is critical to any growing business. A Positive brand reputation builds loyalty and increases customer confidence in your brand and product, ultimately, driving both sales and bottom-line growth.
A business’s reputation used to be what they said about themselves in their advertising, and how far the voices of their customers could reach.
Now, consumers are pushing out a company’s reputation and image collectively by providing real-time feedback online through review sites, social media, forums and other channels. Essentially, if it is an online source and a consumer can say something about a business on it, then it is a channel where your business’s reputation should be managed.
Digital marketing and online reputation management for businesses
Online reputation management is a part of a greater digital marketing strategy. This strategy should work alongside review management, business listings, paid search/ads, social media management and SEO to help your business stay competitive and relevant online.
While your business should be managing each of these segments to maintain your online presence and (consequently) offline reputation, many businesses are not.
Four in five consumers surveyed use search engines to find local information from multiple devices to find store address, business hours, product availability and directions.
Online reputation management: your business has options
Your business’s reputation can be affected at any time, on just about any source across the web.
You can use products, third-party services or hire people to cut down on your personal reputation management time expenditure. Even if your business tracks and constantly checks on social media, there may be sources that your business is unaware of such as a new review site from a listing that your business never knew that existed.
Your business should weigh the pros and cons of conducting online reputation management in-house or outsourcing, but there are definite best practices when responding to reviews that your business should be aware of.
Maintaining your business’s online presence is one of the most worthwhile services you can invest in.
Why your business’s online reputation matters
An online reputation needs to be backed by reviews and ratings by consumers. Without them, there would be no reputation to manage and quite frankly, it would appear as if no one ever visited the business.
Ready or not, consumers are talking about your business
Whether a business chooses to manage their reputation online or not, consumers are talking about their favorite and not-so-favorite businesses. If a business simply ignores their reputation online, the consequences can be detrimental.
Unmanaged negative responses can create an angry mob mentality and bad word of mouth spreads like wildfire. While a business may not realize how exactly one instance can affect their online reputation, it is possible that only one negative post on a highly ranked site can actually be what shows up near the top of a search results page when a consumer searches for that business’s name.
Consumers Control the Conversation and Everyone’s Feedback Matters
Social media is a two-way conversation — businesses can no longer broadcast the message they want people to see. There is a democratic nature to social, with brands, consumers and everyone having an equal voice in a shared space. Customers can rave about a business or let everyone know they had a terrible experience. Social networks have dramatically changed the way businesses communicate. Today, consumers can converse with brands and vice versa as if they were talking to a friend. As a result, businesses have had to become more personable than simply a business entity and manage their social presence in a manner that reflects as such. Reputation drives conversion
What people see online matters.
Approximately 74% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations—this is a huge shift in thinking that has become more prominent as time goes on. This trust in reviews translates to dollars, as customers put their money where their trust is. A Harvard Business School study found that a restaurant that sees a one star increase on Yelp will see revenues increase anywhere from five to nine per cent.
As discussed previously, many businesses find that cultivating their digital profile on their own is too time consuming. There are reputation monitoring tools that make keeping up with customers way easier, saving time and money. Whatever your business does, it is essential that you are not perceived to be ignoring your customers online. The worst thing your business can do is appear unresponsive.
What makes a good online reputation?
Being present (listed online) and having a good reputation (reviews and reputation management) go hand in hand. Not being listed on a reference site customers use is just as bad as having bad reviews on that site. Building a consistent online presence and a positive reputation is important for both consumers and search engines. Some of the most important aspects of the online footprint include:
number of business listings
consistency of business listing information (name, address, phone)
overall sentiment in reviews
frequency or current velocity of new reviews
overall volume of reviews
social activity and engagement (especially with reviewers)
Customers now view social recommendations and reviews as more authentic, expecting reviews to be a mirror of the actual customer experience that they would experience themselves. This means that maintaining your business’s online reputation is gaining importance as each review is a perceived snippet of what your potential customer expects to experience.
Online reputation management: the main sell
According to Google, 9 out of 10 of local searches lead to action, with more than 50% leading to sales. If businesses have a good web presence, customers will go to them rather than the competitor. Once they’re in the store, 79% of customer use their smartphones inside to look at reviews or compare prices and 74% of them end up making a purchase. Those numbers alone make the opportunity clear: online reputation management is essential for your business to get consumers in the door to make the sale.
If you think all this reputation management stuff sounds too complex, or too time-consuming, give us a call!
As a business, how likely is it that potential customers will come through your door if there’s no way for them to know if you exist? The whole point of an online presence and digital business listings is to entice customers into your showroom so you can convert them to paying customers rather than just browsers online. Anything else is just a waste of time.
Nothing is more frustrating as a customer than finding out that you have been given the wrong information about where a business is located. As a customer, how likely are you to give this company your business? Not very. In fact, according to Placeable, 73% of consumers stated that they lose trust in a brand when the online listing shows incorrect information.
1. Missing hours of operation information can be a dealbreaker
There are many things that people look for in listings, whether they are looking at that search engine on a PC or on a mobile device. The top piece of information that most people look for is the hours of operation, especially with mobile searchers who are highly likely to visit a business within 24 hours of searching..
In fact, in a study conducted by local data aggregator Localeze, hours of operation were noted as the most helpful feature in selecting a business during local search. 76% of respondent reporting that they expect this information when searching and 61% believe that it is a feature that helps them to select a business.
Even if people are new to your dealership, it doesn’t give people a good impression if the business hours are not listed and they don’t know that it’s only open from 11 a.m-6p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Imagine that potential customer who is ready to spend their money on a fancy new zero-turn mower, but shows up on Monday at noon only to find it closed. That customer is likely going to do another search on a mobile phone to find a different store and spend their money there.
2.You can’t spell NAP data (and score a citation) without an A(ddress)
While most people would assume that the number one reason people do a search online is for the address or location of a business, the address is actually behind hours of operation as the second most desired information. But, of course, the whole point of being in business is to make money doing what you love or selling what you love. And that happens by attracting foot traffic and increasing customer base.
It bears repeating that if a business address is incorrect on listing sites such as Google or Bing, then customers will not be crossing the threshold. A simple thing such as the wrong number on a street address, or even the wrong town, can mean that a customer cannot find you. The US Postal Service relies on a complex system of checks to verify and standardize addresses, and many of the search engines will default to the USPS for correct mailing addresses.
What this means for the average dealership is that unless a business is in an established location, getting the correct address on their listing means that both the address from City Hall and the information on USPS must be consistent. If USPS doesn’t recognize that address, then a business owner must contact them to verify their new address and get that information updated on USPS’s online database.
3. Local searchers are mobile creatures
According to Localeze, mobile-phone-based searches drive in-store purchases with more than 75% of searches ending in a purchase—if a business has their listing details correct. Now if half of the people searching for a business listing on a local search engine, such as Google Local/Maps, can’t find the store’s business listing details, then the business is going to lose 100% of their business.
For ease of use for potential customers, some of those details need to be as readily available as possible in a mobile-friendly manner. This can be accomplished with a responsive website that supports cellphone and tablet-specific versions. Is your website responsive? We can help.
4. Updated, accurate websites still serve as a first impression
At the same time, more than 60% of searches on PC platforms have a similar chance of ending in a purchase. While mobile searches are becoming more of a standard in where a customer searches, you can’t discount the power of a consistent and accurate listing that is reflective of the business website.
Any listing should be linked to the business’s website and feature the exact same information, but more of it. While a website should be enough to entice a customer to visit or buy, if those inconsistencies exist, then trust issues may arise in a business’s practices before a customer ever crosses their threshold.
5. Local searchers mix it up across multiple devices, situations and times
People who search for listings are doing it in many more ways than when the Internet first coalesced into existence about two decades ago. In that time, we went from working on desktops to laptops to PDAs to Blackberries to Apples to tablets—and in each iteration, the methods of search have changed.
However, that has slowed over the last five years or so as web developers realize that they need to be smarter. Rather than designing three different sites for three different platforms, they have created websites that are scalable to the search device. And that has been helped along by the proliferation of types of devices in use everyday.
According to Pew Research Center, In 2015, smartphone ownership in America was at 68%, with tablet and computer ownership at 45%. Statista says that almost half of American adults use their smartphones the most to search for local information online, the other half being split between computers (40%) and tablets (11%). According to Localeze, like the types of devices used, what we are searching for varies by the time of day and device. Entertainment is searched for during work hours on computers, restaurants during evening using phones and health/fitness evening using tablets.
The most important part of those mobile searches is accuracy. If someone cannot find your business in a local search or find inaccurate results whilst out and about, then your business has lost the chance for that browser to become a customer. So having those business listings correct in all of the device formats is a must as we, and our technology, continue to evolve in the way we interact with local businesses.
6. Local search results are trusted sources of information
Last but certainly not least is the fact that local search results are considered the most trustworthy. In a study by Neustar, it was determined that these searches, such as “zero turn mowers Batavia, NY”, are what people do the most since they put that trust in local business more than big box, big website stores.
Local searches lend themselves to instant gratification and that interaction between browser and salesperson will convert that browser from someone who might get just the minimum to a loyal customer – a customer who brings their equipment back in time and time again for parts, service and repair. Acquiring a customer is a big deal. And local search visibility is the first step to earning that business.
Those interactions are what lead people to local searches and the absolute necessity of getting your listings correct. Trust leads to loyalty, which leads to more business, which leads to happy customers and business owners.
And it all starts with that correct business listing in that customer’s local search.
