When you hire a professional digital marketing agency to navigate your reputation management strategies, they will help monitor, address, and mitigate aspects like social media mentions, reviews, and the results of search engine queries to enhance the positive image of your reputation to your practice’s advantage. The agency will use two reputation management approaches – proactive and reactive.
Proactive Reputation Management
When a small business is proactive about its reputation management, it takes responsibility for it – it doesn’t make excuses or blame circumstances. A business spreads the good, including their good deeds in the community, their customer experiences, desire to help others, sharing helpful information, and marketing it to its benefit. A professional helping with reputation management will use this and more when creating the proactive strategy necessary to boost positivity.
Reactive Reputation Management
The opposite of proactive is reactive. In a reactive reputation management strategy, the practice and its marketing partner will work together to develop an actionable strategy for dealing with negative reviews and turn them into something positive for the business. A professional marketing agency will help the business identify, address, and monitor the problems pinpointed in negative user reviews. Many negative reviews and comments are often made because a customer doesn’t feel like they are being heard. These types of problems may include long wait times, poor front desk training, etc. But knowing and monitoring are the first step to ensuring they do not happen again.
Navigating Platforms for Effective Reputation Management
When prospective customers look up your information online, they are likely to see your practice in several results – Facebook, Google, Yelp and more. If you are coming up on these platforms in these searches, it is likely due to your marketing efforts and the reputation being built about the company online. What type of reputation do you want potential customers to see?
Facebook and social media marketing for your practice are vital in reaching a customer base. There are millions of users on Facebook, and these users are scrolling through ads, leaving reviews on businesses, and commenting on posts. If one user leaves a review, chances are at least ten more are going to see it before the day is over. Social media is like a snowball – the impact is small at first, but before you know it, it has gotten out of control. When a professional agency helps you with your reputation management, they can step in and help monitor the situation, mitigating the impact by keeping things positive.
Google is the search engine of choice for most internet users. All the marketing your practice does is for the sake of SEO – ranking on search engines like Google. The higher the SEO rank, the higher the exposure to your business a prospective customer will have to your company. This exposure includes negative comments and reviews. For the sake of keeping your company’s image positive, a professional will not only monitor how you are ranking but also what you are ranking for.
Yelp
Yelp is a platform that helps connect consumers with great local businesses. As customers visit your business, they may begin leaving reviews on platforms like Yelp. One way to be proactive with Yelp reviews is by advertising on the platform. Instead of leaving the profile unclaimed, your practice can be proactive by claiming and marketing the profile to benefit the practice, not the detriment. A professional agency will be able to help monitor and implement the right strategy on Yelp and sites like it to elevate a positive reputation management strategy.
Other Platforms
A quick internet search will populate countless platforms that review businesses in your particular industry. While some are not as well-known as Google or Yelp, they can still impact the reputation of your small business. When working to create a reputation management strategy, your digital marketing agency professional will zero in on the sites that have your business listed, help create the necessary free profiles, and monitor them to ensure accuracy and review information is handled appropriately.
Don’t be alarmed if new ones keep popping up – many of these sites use area data and create the profiles, but it is up to you and your marketing professional to ensure that these profiles are claimed, verified, and include the overall branding of the office.
Benefits of Reputation Management
The benefits are important to consider when building a positive reputation management strategy for your business. Some of the benefits you can expect when working with a professional marketing agency include:
- Increases in customer volume – The more engaged and personable your practice is, the more likely your customer is going to be satisfied and leave the right kind of review you need.
- Increased trust and credibility – Earning and keeping a customer’s trust is the key to a lasting relationship. When you have a great reputation management system in place to nurture the way customers see you, they are more likely to go beyond just being a customer and become an advocate for your business, referring their friends and family to your business.
- Higher SEO rankings – the goal of marketing is to rank highly in searches; the goal of reputation management is to utilize your good standing in the industry in addition to those rankings to convert prospective customers into long-term customers.
- Gain customer insight – Your reputation management strategy should include using your customer’s insight to improve. There is always room for improvement in your business, and you should never settle for where you currently rank, not if you want to have a business full of customers. Using the feedback from customers who visit your business, you can create the right plans to make changes within the company that will be inviting for other customers. There is a lot to be said about how negative feedback is approached, and when done properly, it gains the respect of your customers.
- Remove negative reviews – there are times when customers are upset when something happens that your business has no control over. In these circumstances, it may be possible to get negative reviews removed from platforms. Your reputation management professional will help you zero in on these reviews, find out the situation, and, if warranted, appeal through the proper channels to get the negative review removed.
Trusting a Professional with Your Company’s Reputation
Did you know that 92% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from real people? That means that most of your prospective customers are looking to outside review sites to learn more about your business before ever meeting you. You could try to create a reputation management strategy on your own, but trusting a professional with your practice’s reputation may prove more beneficial in the end.
Working closely with a professional can help unlock potential that you didn’t know existed. From marketing from the good reviews to implementing changes to prevent future negative reviews from being posted, how you approach the reputation of your business is crucial for success. Your reputation is important to the marketing agency you work with, and in many cases, negative reviews can be disputed, something many business owners do not know. Only when working with a professional can you unlock the untapped potential your reputation has in the community.
