Reputation management is one of the most important aspects of running a business in today’s world. And it involves more than most business owners tend to think.
Aside from providing the best products or services that you possibly can, managing business reputation includes how your business communicates and interacts with its customers, how it advertises and promotes itself, how it handles negative customer feedback/press coverage, and more.
On the whole, it’s about managing how customers view your business – whether they view it as professional, reliable, caring, and trustworthy, or the opposite.
Managing your business’s reputation might sound like a lot to handle, but this guide will break it down for you.
No matter how small or large your business is, the following are the main ways to manage your company reputation.
Hire The Best Staff Possible
Staff are not just the competent workers you hire to fulfil a certain role; they’re also the representatives of your business and its brand values.
This ties in with their passion for what your business offers and how they treat customers, which is important for keeping company reputation to a high standard.
It might be easier said than done, but it’s important to hire staff who share your vision or at least understand your brand’s values.
Brand values are most important when it comes to your business’s customer service, especially if an unsatisfied customer expresses a problem.
Due to this, it’s important to maintain a good relationship with your staff.
This includes keeping them content and happy, and supporting and training them where needed so that they can fulfil their roles to the best of their ability and in line with your company’s values.
Manage Your Online Presence
Online presence is another factor that reflects your business’s reputation, simply because the internet is so widely used by customers.
Managing your online presence effectively will also benefit SEO, boosting your business’s reach and visibility across search engines and social media platforms.
Your business’s online presence includes its website and social media activity – specifically how professional and engaging all your online content is, from the business summary on your homepage to all your social media posts.
Social media activity does not only involve posting content on a regular basis, but also interacting with your customers in a way that’s engaging.
It’s hard work, but more important than most business owners think, so it may make sense to hire a social media manager, which is a relatively low-cost service.
Devise Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategies, which include ads, logos, campaigns, website design, and even social media content, are also part of managing your business’s reputation.
Marketing often reflects a brand’s products, services and values, so it’s important to put careful thought into how your business markets itself.
Whether you seek help from a marketing manager or not, it’s important to devise and monitor all aspects of your marketing strategy so that these accurately represent what your business is all about – including what it offers customers and the values it upholds or aims to fulfil.
Maintain Good Communication With Customers
Good communication with your customers involves being approachable, timely, helpful, and transparent.
This includes staff friendliness, email communication, customer service help, and social media interaction such as replying to direct messages and comments.
No matter whether a customer has made a simple inquiry, complained about an order/service, or tagged your business in a social media post, it’s important to acknowledge all of your customers equally.
Good communication with customers can not only improve your business’s reputation, but can generate rapport and loyalty.
These are small things that can go a long way, especially if potential customers notice how much your business cares to communicate with its existing customers.
Manage Customer Reviews
Last but not least, managing customer reviews. Customer reviews are arguably the most important factor affecting your business’s reputation, due to how reviews have such a huge influence on prospective customers, SEO rankings, and overall visibility.
Managing your customer reviews involves acknowledging all customers who post online reviews about your business, as well as actively working to get more reviews, which will help establish your business as an authority and improve company reputation.
No matter the review site, you should aim to reply to all customer reviews – both negative and positive reviews.
And if the review is negative, it’s all the more important to reply and try to resolve the customer’s issues promptly.
Needless to say, negative reviews will harm your online reputation, but can be less damaging if you respond quickly, collect a larger majority of positive reviews, and take effective measures to reduce the number of negative reviews you receive.
Build And Manage Your Business’s Reputation With ReputationStacker
As mentioned, customer reviews are among the most important—if not the most important—ways to manage business reputation.
Reviews often paint an accurate picture of a business’s reputation, with powerful influence over customers and whether or not they decide to use a business.
If you’re a business owner, we don’t have to tell you how hard it is to build your reputation online – let alone collect customer reviews on a consistent basis.
It’s a slow, tedious process, but ReputationStacker solves that problem. It’s a tool that generates positive reviews from real customers who have used your service while reducing the number of negative reviews your business receives.
ReputationStacker is fully automated so you don’t have to lift a finger.
All you’ll have to do is respond to the positive customer reviews ReputationStacker collects for you, helping to boost your company reputation even more.
There are numerous ways to manage your business’s reputation—as listed above—but ReputationStacker handles the most important one for you: getting more reviews.
By simply using ReputationStacker, your company’s reputation won’t just grow quickly, but organically.
