Online reputation marketing refers to the strategy and tactics related to presenting your brand in the best possible light at all times. It involves promoting positive brand messaging, managing negative criticism responsibly, and more.
Tips for Online Reputation Marketing:
- Assign a Dedicated Person to Social Media
You may be surprised to learn that there are still many companies on social media who don’t assign a dedicated person to monitor activity.
As a result, comments and messages left by customers or prospective customers are often ignored.
This creates a double-edged sword: the person being ignored feels anger towards the brand, while people who check out your account gain the perception that you don’t care about your customers.
What actually happens, is that no one takes responsibility for responding because no one’s been assigned the task.
The solution is to assign a dedicated person to monitor these activities:
Tags
Comments
Messages
Uploading content
Reviews
Dissatisfaction
Complements
Listening to customers
Analytics
- Give Authority to the Right Person
Many brands may put a dedicated person in charge of social media but neglect to give them the authority to take action, where necessary, to turn negative situations into positive ones.
Instead, many customer-facing employees are too afraid to make decisions that may earn them a stern rap on the knuckles or a loss of their job.
- Equip Team Members With the Right Skills
Anyone in your staff complement who deals with customers, needs to be equipped with the right skills, like:
Interpersonal skills in the written word (the tone of voice used in responses, how to respond to positive as well as negative comments, and using wisdom when dealing with people digitally, especially because they can’t hear your tone of voice or pick up non-verbal clues on facial gestures).
Dealing with angry customers (depending on your industry, you may do well hiring someone trained in counseling for this role).
Handling negativity and knowing how to deal with each scenario.
- Build an Online Reputation Marketing Strategy
Not online reputation marketing strategy will work if the foundation is not in place; it is vital to first understand your target audience.
And if you’re just starting out with social media marketing, it should be knowledge around your target audience which drives the decision as to which channels to focus on.
Build a social media strategy that’s based on the company vision and goals.
Your social media marketing strategy should support the overall vision of the company, because that will determine your content and present a unified message online and offline; both online and offline channels work together for a more powerful brand experience.
- Educate Key Players About Online Reputation
Not only may your prospective clients look for what others are saying about your company brand online, but the higher the price range of your product or service means they’re likely to check out key players in your company too, because 76% of people trust what “normal” people are saying about a brand rather than what the brand is saying about the brand.
- Ask Satisfied Clients for Recommendations
Your satisfied customers will hardly ever take the initiative to look for a way to recommend your services. The idea is a) to build as much positivity as possible so that when a negative comment is made, it is only one of many comments, most of which are positive, and b) when potential customers are checking out your brand (and one of the first things many do during the pre-purchasing phase, is to check your social media pages), they can see what their peers are saying.
- Implement Standards
Everyone has their own perception of how social media should be managed, so to keep things consistent, it is strongly recommended that you implement social media standards, so that everyone in the company is on the same page.
Your standards should cover elements like:
Who should approve social media posts before they’re uploaded?
Which social media tools should be used?
What are the rules regarding images and copyrights?
What is allowed and what’s not?
How should links be included?
What other brands should be followed, and which ones should not?
Must logos be included in images and what size should they be?
What content is acceptable to be liked or commented on?
How long should it take for the brand representative to respond to a message or comment?
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