Manage Your Online Reputation

online reputation book

Available on Amazon Kindle or Softcover.  Click the image above

What is Reputation Management?

Let’s face it, Google reviews for businesses are essential for online reputation management.   Other reviews such as Facebook, Yelp, and major directories are also important.  But Google’s role in creating trust in your brand is unmatched by any other platform.

We have a much broader definition of reputation management than most reputation management agencies.  An important part of that definition is the process of driving up your average star ratings and number of reviews, marketing positive reviews for the client’s benefit, and monitoring the web for reputation comments. But it’s more than that.

If you do any marketing online for your business, you’ll need good marketing content for your online pages, ads, and social media.  You’ll need written copy that’s relevant to the reader, video that explains or entertains, scroll-stopping images, and on and off-page SEO. 

Why is Reputation Review Management Important?

Online reviews, particularly Google reviews are a necessary part of every brand’s reputation.  Studies have shown that 97% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase decision. And 85% of those consumers trust a review as much as a personal recommendation.

According to one study by Moz, 67% of consumers are influenced by online reviews.  And one negative review could cost you nearly a quarter of all potential customers who began researching your brand.

The good news about today’s online reputation is in the ultra-simple rule:  If your business has a better online reputation than your competitors, you’ll own a competitive edge.

Because most people research a businesses’ reputation before contacting them, a positive online reputation can be a prospect-generating asset.  Conversely, failure to work at building a trusted online reputation will lose business to competitors with better reputations.

The more positive online reviews your business or practice has, the more people are willing to try it.  And if the business is good at what it does, it will convert those businesses to paying customers, clients, or patients.

Negative reviews are online forever, and the only way to offset them is by having a lot more positive reviews than negative ones.

 

6 Keys To Creating A Strong Online Reputation

  1. Embrace both positive and negative reviews. Sure, people love the good things people say about them, but negative reviews are the way they can find out how to improve their business.  Pay attention to negative reviews, look at them as welcome news, and fix the underlying problems.  In addition, a mix of negative reviews and positive reviews looks more authentic.
  2. Respond professionally and publicly to both negative and positive reviews – and to as many as possible. This allows you to voice your branding message to people who read reviews and lets them know that your company listens to and cares about their customer’s experience.  This is particularly important for negative reviews.  People care less about the negative review and more about how the company responds to it.
  3. Ask everyone that experiences your business to leave you an honest review as soon after the experience as possible – while it’s fresh in their minds. The best time to ask for feedback is when customers are satisfied. They understand how the online world works and how important reviews are to a business.
  4. Be sure to train your employees to ask customers for reviews. Since they are the frontline of your business, they are in the best position to gather favorable comments.
  5. Make sure all employees know how important online reviews are to the business. Employees are the key to making this work.  They need to be enthusiastically involved in seeking reviews.  Some companies offer internal incentives for employees with outstanding performance in getting and responding to reviews.
  6. Create a system that automates as much of the work of requesting and monitoring reviews as possible, without losing the personal touch of engaging customers about their experience. Automating some of these steps helps to generate more reviews with less effort.

Use Automated Reputation Building Software

We’ve helped our clients generate thousands of feedback, Google, and Facebook reviews.  Here are some of the options in our Online Reputation Management System

  1. Directory Listing Setup
  2. 24/7 online reputation monitoring
  3. Posting reviews to social media and web pages
  4. Email or text Review Alerts to managers
  5. Monthly Reputation progress reports
  6. Employee Reputation Training Center
  7. Respond to all reviews
  8. Customized feedback page to send customers to
  9. Optional survey and feedback campaigns
  10. Customer sign in/feedback request page
  11. Print media and QR codes for customer review requests
  12. Monthly promotional campaigns
  13. Email list building
  14. Review video creation and posting

4 Things To Do Now To Enhance Your Online Reputation

  1. Create an optimized, verified Google My Business listing. GMB has become one of the most powerful factors in online branding and reputation management.
  2. Text enable your business landline and place a “text us” button on your website. Today, a majority of consumers would prefer to text a business rather than call it. Add this and your customers and patients will appreciate it. 
  3. Run banner ads and social media posts displaying your 5-star reviews. Consistent ad spend, even if it’s a small amount, keeps the company’s reputation online presence high and top of mind
  4. Strengthen social media engagement. Post your positive reviews to the major social media platforms to help create a buzz about your business.

If you would like to get a free assessment of your company’s online presence – go here.

Get The Book On Reputation Management

We’ve written a book:   Own Your Reputation – A Guide To An Online Reputation That Attracts more Customers, Clients, Patients, and Followers. 

In this book, we’ve captured some of our real-world experience in building an online presence.  You’ll see how Google’s star ratings and the number of reviews, along with social media and brand journalism approaches are the foundation for building a local business brand that tops your competitors.

If you need an online reputation that differentiates you from competitors or a better online reputation strategy, or if your business just needs that extra boost, then this book is for you.  Some of the topics covered include:

  • Reputation monitoring
  • How to respond to positive and negative reviews
  • Protecting your reputation
  • Online Reputation Management Systems overview
  • Success examples
  • Senior care case study
  • And more

The book is available in paperback or Kindle formats.

How Marketing Copy Builds Online Presence

The Words You Use Are More Important Than Ever

Yes, we are visual creatures and video and images catch our eye.  But, every day you use words to describe your business, products, and services.  Think about it, email, packaging, signs, articles, ad copy – all use words and phrases.

Good marketing copy is engaging and persuasive.

In the old days of internet marketing, having tons of backlinks to your webpage was one of only a few things that marketers needed to worry about to get their pages to rank highly in web searches.

If you do any marketing online for your business, you’ll need good marketing content for your online pages, ads, and social media.  You’ll need written copy that’s relevant to the reader, video that explains or entertains, scroll-stopping images, and on and off-page SEO. 

When you include these elements in your web pages or blogs, they attract and hold the reader’s attention, and build a reputation that people trust.

Factors like time spent on pages, bounce rates, comments, and shares, demonstrate how much people engage with your content.  These and other behavioral factors may now be the most important ranking factors.  This demands that quality, relevant content is used in marketing the business.

 

Serving clients in many locations including: 

Audit Your Local Business Website

If your website is confusing or not bringing you the results you want, it’s likely that it’s not contributing to a solid online presence.

A website is like your 24 hr. sales team.  People arrive at the site and if your site’s content, look and feel, are good, then you have a chance at building a relationship with a new customer, client, or patient.

Even before that, the site has to have enough ranking juice that Google will display your site when people are searching for products and services like yours.  

Improving website traffic requires three things:

  • The analysis of the site’s SEO factors
  • The “compellingness” of your content
  • The overall look and feel of the page

Most site assessments address the first issue.  We work with all three of them in our audit and specialize in local business audits.

Our main tools for local businesses are:

  1. Google Analytics
  2. Google Search Console
  3. Website structure assessment
  4. Persuasive copywriting principles
  5. Google My Business and Google Maps optimization techniques

It’s really important that you analyze your site with these tools to determine what adjustments need to be made in order to keep up with or stand out from your competitors.

If you don’t have Google Analytics and Search Console, we’ll set it up for you.  We’ll create specific reports that track metrics important to a specific business.  We’ll need access to your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts.

For the content audit, we focus on your messages, and how effective they are at getting a clear message that causes site visitors to take action.

Our experience, tools, and checklists for evaluating items 3, 4, and 5 are second to none.

After the audit, we create recommendations for making changes to your website that you can either implement on your own, or we can help if needed.

We’re Google Analytics certified, and committed to the success of our clients.

Give us a call today.  You’ll be surprised at how affordable it is, and how many things you can find to improve how you’re found on the web, and how well your 24 hr sales team can perform.

The Power Of The Special Report As A Marketing Tool

White Papers and Case Studies are management or customer-briefing documents on topical business issues.  They help readers to understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. Writing a white paper establishes your business as a thought leader and generates prospects.

They’re most valuable when they show how to solve a problem and how your service and products can help the reader.

The best use of a white paper is to give it away as a lead magnet in exchange for prospects’ contact info so you can market to them later.  These are some of the most qualified leads you can get.

Email marketing

Even though social media monopolizes a lot of our attention, email marketing has remained one of the most relevant ways to reach an audience and spread your message.   Most importantly, an email list is an asset of the business that owns it – that can’t be said about their social media page – the social media platforms own those pages.

According to research from HostPapa:

  • 94% of Internet users use email, while only 61% use social media
  • 75% of adult online users say that email is their preferred marketing medium

Almost every business can benefit from building a segmented email list of clients, customers, patients, and prospects. With this list, the business can send out information and offers and stay top of mind with its audience, without spending a cent on ads.

We help our clients create email lists and write high-converting email sequences when this is part of their marketing strategy.

Press Release Marketing

One of the simple, most effective techniques for getting your business in Google’s 3 pack is through what we call Brand Journalism – getting information and news about your business in the media through a series of articles – aka press releases.

Press releases are often overlooked as a marketing tool by local businesses who think that they’re only for the really big girls and boys.

Because properly written and formatted press releases provide hundreds of authority backlinks to the client’s website, they can catapult a business from lower local search rankings, into Google’s 3-pack.  

We write and syndicate our client’s articles that are displayed by an average of 400 authority web properties locally, regionally, and nationally, providing a major search engine ranking boost.

Turn Your Marketing Copy Into Video

There is NO better way to reach your customers than with VIDEO!

It’s been said, “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.” If that’s true, then how much is a Video worth? Beyond the fact that people like to watch videos and sometimes prefer them to reading.

It’s also more effective for a prospect to both hear and see your message communicated in multi-media videos than to simply read plain text.

Do you know what the 3 most-visited websites on the Internet are? #1 and #2 are Google and Facebook, respectively. And #3 is YouTube.

In truth, many people are too busy to read huge chunks of text on a website, and even when they do read, they skim, often missing some of the most important points you wanted to get across.

In fact, you’re probably skimming this page right now. . . aren’t you?

It’s ok; we all do it.

“With a video, however, your audience will hear every word and see every image, and your message becomes much easier to understand and digest, especially to someone without a lot of time and patience.”

Having a video on YouTube which is embedded on your website can help you rank higher in Search Engine results.

“In fact, a webpage with a video embedded on it is 50 times more likely to rank on Google’s First Page than a webpage without a video.”
Videos are also incredibly easy to share on Social Media, increasing the odds that your message could “go viral”!

Some of the benefits and features of our video service

    • Professional quality videos.
    • Experts at creating videos
    • Highest standards in the Industry
    • Experts at creating interesting and compelling content in videos.
    • We keep SEO in mind and match your market and keywords in the video.
    • You completely own the video and all distribution rights.
    • Excellent customer service.
    • Fast turnaround time.
    • Affordable price, and high quality

No matter what you’re promoting, you can explain it better with a video.

Best of all, creating short YouTube Videos that explain your business is one of the best ways to present your services. Call us at (941) 867 4520 today to learn more about our Video Creation Services for small businesses.

We turn your presentations, images, and other media sources into informative creative videos that can be used to enhance your online presence.  Once the video is created it can be posted on the website and social media platforms.

Don’t forget that you likely have a ton of existing content that can be re-purposed and used in different ways to make it new and fresh again.  

We recommend a process of asking simple questions about your business, turning those answers into short articles, and then making short videos from the articles.  Once many articles are written they can be turned into long-form content such as a book, or report, all designed to offer your customers information of value, and position your business as a solution to their problems.

So, there you have it.  Good marketing copy contributes to an online presence. 

What To Do Next

Your Online Reputation is everything. It takes a long time to attract new customers, but it only takes a second to lose them.  If you currently have an online reputation management problem, or just need to grow your online presence, we can help.

The online reputation of any business is at the mercy of internet commenting 24/7.  Unflattering news, reviews, pictures, and even outright lies can be posted instantaneously and can spread online very quickly.

Reputation management is critical in order for you and your organization to maintain or improve your current ranking on search engines.  You might not have complete control over what other people say about your business, but you do have control over your own messages.

We understand how important an online reputation is and how it can make or break your business and we offer comprehensive Online Reputation Management solutions. 

Let us help you with your online presence needs. Call or text us today at  (941) 867 4520.