Your reputation is critical to your online success
What are people saying about you or your business?
Online reputation management has never been more important for companies. With social media and business review websites within easy grasp of an unhappy customer, a lack of online reputation management can leave your business in a precarious position should anyone try to target you. With mobile phones so accessible, searching for information about a business or service is done by most buyers prior to purchasing — so, having a bad online review or news story relating to your business name can not only be bad for your reputation but can directly hurt your bottom line.
Basically, online reputation management is a process of regulating what information is displayed in search engine results when people look for your brand or an employee’s name online. The techniques used to control what information is displayed is to promote positive content about your business to the top search results and push down unwanted content (incorrect, negative or irrelevant). This method ensures that when people Google your business or employees, the results which appear at the top of search engines contain positive, informative and relevant content that you want customers to see.
Offline you work hard, treat customers well while providing quality products and on time services, so it’s wise to ensure that your online reputation also reflects how good your business is. The fact is, you can’t make every customer happy, no matter how hard you try, but please don’t leave your online presence idol as this can bite your bottom line very hard. Successful companies invest in the development and protection of their online brand and proactively manage their reputation as they realise that it costs considerably more to repair abrupt damage and rebuild reputations in the long run.
It is critical that online reputation management is part of an overall marketing strategy and that daily checks are completed to ensure that any bad reviews or comments are dealt with immediately. Every day that people see negative information about your company can take months to repair and in many cases, you may lose a customer forever despite whether the published information is true or false.
If your business name closely identifies the names of your proprietors/founders (such as a sole trader or a generational business name) or if it is important to protect the names of your executives, then poor online reputation management means more than simply losing a few customers; it can be detrimental to families and livelihoods.
Unfortunately, we find that it’s not only customers and the odd competitor that publish negative information about businesses online. Sometimes a disgruntled employee might want to take revenge against an executive’s name or a business.
So, it’s best to be proactive about managing your online reputation so you know that when customers research your brand online, they will see that your business is professional and reliable and therefore feel safe about purchasing from you.
Don’t let a negative online reputation or one bad online review affect your bottom line. Talk to us today and start to recover that lost revenue and showcase your business at its best.