ShivaniYou might not have heard a lot about reputation marketing. That’s because it’s only an emerging field. It blends the elements of reputation management and brand marketing. It’s gradually gaining popularity because, if done rightly, it has the potential to enhance your brand, lower costs, increase sales, and boost revenue.
This blog is your complete guide to understanding everything about this powerful stuff called reputation marketing. Read on to know what reputation marketing is, What goes into it, why it is important, what its benefits are, and what are some of the proven reputation marketing strategies.
What is reputation marketing?
Reputation marketing is the promotion, acquisition, and monitoring of positive brand content like the traditional press, ratings, customer reviews, and medium social comments. It is a strategy to help you comprehend what people discuss about your brand online, and use that comprehension to enhance your brand and its overall reputation.
While people tend to perceive reputation marketing to be synonymous with reputation management, it isn’t. The former focuses on promoting positive content about a brand with the intention of improving its image, and thereby, sales. Though the latter also does this, it’s just one of the facets covered by the blanket term.
Additionally, working with a reputation management reseller can streamline this process, ensuring effective management of your brand’s online presence.
People also tend to confuse reputation marketing with brand marketing. But brand marketing is about publicizing your brand’s values and identity. It’s about spreading the word about what your company stands for.
What goes into reputation marketing?
Two major aspects are involved in reputation marketing. These include
- Improving your reputation: That is, you get your customers to post more positive reviews about you and recommend you more in their circle.
- Marketing your reputation: This is an extensive thing where you use those positive reviews, social mentions, testimonials, etc. in your own marketing.
Why is reputation marketing important?
Today a brand’s reputation matters much more than ever before. People are sceptical. They judge you quickly based on your reputation and online presence before deciding whether or not to buy or partner with you. So, you need to meet their expectations. This means you should put effort into delivering great first impressions and subsequent experiences.
For, great reputations are built via being dedicated to your missions, consistently keeping up to the expectations of your stakeholders, and incorporating an element of surprise. This is where reputation marketing comes in.
What are the benefits of reputation marketing?
Reputation marketing is gaining popularity these days because of the many benefits it ushers in.
- Increased brand awareness: When your brand has a great reputation, your consumers spread the word about your offerings. This in turn builds your brand awareness as people trust recommendations from other people more than they trust brand advertisements and messages.
- Decreased customer acquisition cost: Brands spend a significant amount of money on acquiring new customers. When companies establish a good brand reputation, their marketing efforts can be lowered. It costs less to attract customers who are already aware of your brand and its good reputation.
- Higher brand equity: When a brand has a good online reputation, it practically markets itself. For, people will choose it over its competitors and even pay more for its offerings. A study says that consumers are ready to spend 9% more for products from a firm with a positive corporate reputation. Further, brand equity enables a stable cash flow for the future. And this increases shareholder value.
- Increased customer lifetime value (CLV): It’s important for businesses to retain their customers. For, loyal customers are better aligned with your brand, and therefore, spend more on your products. Reputation marketing helps in increasing your CLV.
- Exponential growth: With a good reputation at hand, companies can generate more revenue. This helps them in investing in innovation. And this in turn can lead to the development of new and better products and services, which can be priced higher.
- Facilitate hiring and retaining top talent: When a company has a great reputation, it becomes easier for it to attract and retain talented employees. They in turn can help come up with big, promising ideas to take your business to the next level. And that can propel your reputation even higher!
What are some of the proven reputation marketing strategies?
Now that you know reputation marketing is good for your business, here are some of the reputation marketing strategies you can employ and benefit from.
- Optimize website for search engines: Work on your search engine optimization (SEO). If you can make search engines determine that your pages are an authority for the target keywords, it will rank your pages higher. There are some recommendations on SEO software for marketing agencies that you can use to assist you.
- Focus on local SEO: Local SEO involves optimizing your website for better visibility in Google’s local search page results. This will bring more customers to your brick-and-mortar store as well. Localizing your website’s content, optimizing your site for mobiles, and a lot more goes into local SEO.
- Run a referral program: You can tell your brand story and enhance your overall reputation with referral marketing. So, run a referral program to spread your story to your prospects. A tool like InviteReferrals can simplify the creation, management, and monitoring of your referral campaigns.
- Improve reviews and ratings: Though it’s true that a brand doesn’t have any direct control over online reviews, it can take steps to curate them over time. Keep a keen eye on them to make sure that they project your brand in the best possible way. Contact those who leave reviews ASAP. Respond to those glowing reviews with genuine gratitude, and take steps to resolve issues presented in the negative reviews. This will shoot up your reputation over time.
- Publish customer reviews on your website: Your website is your business’s online face. People who want to know about you or connect with you, visit your site. Posting glowing customer reviews on your homepage can boost your reputation and attract prospects and partnerships to your business.
- Promote customer reviews on social media: Social media is an inexpensive platform for reputation marketing. Share your positive reputation content such as reviews, ratings, testimonials, etc. in your social media posts. This is an easy way to boost sales, enhance reputation, and promote your brand.
- Develop a Wikipedia page: Getting a Wikipedia page isn’t an easy thing. Keep developing your brand to improve its notability. This will help you earn one in the long run.
- Set up Google My Business account: As a business seeking to boost its reputation, you should own a Google My Business account. Opening an account on this platform doesn’t cost you any money. But it opens the doors for connecting you with your potential customers and building your brand.
- Earn a place in Google’s knowledge panel: Google’s Knowledge Panel is the information box that appears on the right side of your screen when you search for entities using your desktop. It presents info that Google has pulled about an entity. By establishing your brand as an authority in its niche and posting good quality and quantity of structured data on your site, you can earn a Knowledge Panel for your business.
- Setup listings on review sites: Other platforms for your reputation marketing are those dedicated review sites such as Facebook reviews, Google reviews, Yellowpages reviews, Yelp reviews, etc. There are places where prospects search for and evaluate brands and businesses. Set up your presence on as many of such relevant sites.
Wrapping up
Reputation marketing is essential for any business looking to beat the competition and gain an upper hand in today’s business world. In this blog, we’ve discussed everything you need to know about reputation marketing. Put some of the strategies you learned from us into practice to boost your reputation and be launched on the path to success!
