Working with Reputation Management to raise Your Marketing

While bad reviews in a newspaper can affect a company’s reputation, it is a fact that what people are discovering online has a much larger effect. Business owners will be happy to know, though, that they can see precisely what potential clients are seeing online. By periodically searching a company’s name or branded product online, it isn’t difficult to see what others are seeing when carrying out the same search. Google Alerts will even notify owners when new mentions of their company occur. If anything negative surfaces, it’s about time to do damage control.

• Create a Large Online Presence

While establishing a page online is helpful in numerous ways, reputation management is just about the most critical things a company can do. When a potential customer is looking for a local business by name or industry, you will not want them to see web pages with unfavorable reviews. This could be minimized by starting pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo Local. Since fewer than 10 percent of Google users move forward to the second page of results, having numerous relevant corners of the web assists in bumping negative sites to the dark recesses of Page 2.

• Monitor the Company Name and Products

One of the biggest factors of reputation management is what people are finding online. Luckily, a business owner can occasionally track this just as easily as people are discovering it. By simply heading over to Google and doing a search on the company name or its branded product, a company owner can see exactly what others are observing about their company. Additionally, it is easy to set up Google Alerts which informs you of new mentions with certain keywords, such as the company name. If anything negative pops up, corrective actions can be started.

• Be Transparent on Social Media

A number of business owners make the error of removing negative mentions from their social media pages. Actually, they should be contacting the angry customer in full view of the public. When others experience a company trying to right a wrong they already know the business actually really cares about its customers.

Marketing can only do so much once a company’s reputation is tainted. Reputation management, however, is capable of turning your business in the right direction.