Reputation Marketing

What does every business need these days?

An image and a Reputation that it is a trusted company and that customers who have dealt with them are very satisfied.

Traditionally a business would have relied on “Word Of Mouth” to achieve this status. As with a lot of marketing methods they can be a double edged sword, meaning if you do good by the customer they will do good by you and if you do bad by the customer they will let people know.

If you have been in business for a while, you will know that bad news spreads a lot faster. In fact, research has shown that a person who has had a good experience will usually tell 3 people where as a person who has had a bad experience will usually tell 7 people.

This is why a company has to not only be careful, but also be professional whilst giving great service or providing great products. This is where Reputation Marketing has the answers for every business out there.

Reputation Marketing, what is it and is it any good for my business?

Please, firstly, if anybody is selling you Reputation Management, run. Reputation Management is out-dated as management does not make your phone ring, Marketing does. You might say it is a simple twist of words and my reply to that would be – Take a look at what a Reputation Management Company does for you and then compare it to a Reputation Marketing Company. There is a very big difference so please don’t fall for it anymore, especially if you want your business to succeed and you want a high return for your marketing funds.

If you have heard about Reputation Marketing but not known what it was all about let me explain it like this.

Reputation Marketing is –
Building A 5 Star Reputation Online
And Leveraging That Reputation To
Get YOU More Customers.

The power is in the leveraging/marketing of your reputation to give it the widest possible distribution and exposure online. Typically, this would include locations such as Google+, Bing, Yellow Pages and many other country specific locations which accept written reviews.

As we all know there is a lot of action around Social Media and for this reason it is important that a good Reputation Marketing Strategy also involves Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. On Facebook alone there are 12% of users who do not get out of bed before they have checked their account and when you consider that they have about 1.3 Billion monthly active users, there is a great marketing opportunity there for a business. Also this is not for teenagers alone anymore. A fast growing market segment for Facebook are over 30 Females.

I bet if I was to ask you about your interaction with Facebook, if you have an account, you would say that it is mostly the pictures which attract your attention. This would stand to reason when you consider the fast rise to popularity of online picture sharing companies such as FourSquare, Photobucket, Pinterest and Flickr. Don’t worry if you have not heard of them, your customers have and that is what counts here.

Unfortunately, these are purely photo sharing sites but wouldn’t it be great if you could put your great review on them also to let you get the biggest return on your marketing investment possible?

Why would a business want to go through all this hard and time-consuming work? The answer is very simple – To get Google to market your reputation to people on the Internet for FREE. Yes Google will tell people how good your reputation is for Free but it comes with a little twist. This twist is what makes “Reputation Marketing” the online version of “Word Of Mouth”. Why? Because they will also tell people if you have a bad reputation.

It is for this very reason that I now tell business owners that the traditional forms of marketing such as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), CPC (Cost Per Click), Google+ pages and having a great website DO NOT work anymore, if you have a bad reputation.

Think about it when considering that Google will tell people about your reputation, be it good or bad. You have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours using several methods described above, I’m speaking about traditional online marketing methods, to make sure your expensive website reaches the first page and possibly the first spot in the Google Search results. After all this, what if a person sees your listing and Google has given your business a 2-star rating out of 5, which is not a very good rating at all?

Seeing this as part of your listing do you think that it will make your phone ring? What if your competitor has a 4 star or even a 5 star rating in his listing and he also shows up? Would you expect the person searching for your products to select your listing with the poor rating or your competitors with the high rating? You surely can see from this sample alone that Reputation Marketing has to be done first these days in order to get your phone ringing and not your competitions.

I have seen businesses turn around simply by implementing this method and marketing the great feedback their satisfied customers provided. Did I forget to mention this? You have to have satisfied customers, none of this can be made up as most countries carry very high penalties for falsifying reviews online.