When you first hear about reputation management, you may think of the PR maneuvers companies use after they’re hit with bad press. But a proactive reputation management strategy should be getting ahead of just damage control after the fact.
Online reputation management done right makes it easier to monitor what’s being said about your brand. This allows you to control which messages to illuminate and which ones to bury. In today’s digital world of online trolls and pessimists, this service is essential if you want to have a strong online presence. Below, we go over some of the core benefits to explain why you need online reputation management to grow your business and manage your brand.
A good marketing communications strategy should show your prospects that they can trust your brand. While ad creativity may draw in some views and impressions, it’s not enough. Customers want to know that you have their best interest at heart and that you wouldn’t sell them a product or service if you didn’t believe in it.
Most shoppers do a fair amount of research before buying online, especially if the brand is new to them. They look for trust signals in order to inform their decision. These signals are things like:
• Excellent customer reviews.
• Impressive customer testimonials.
• A secure website so they know their information will stay protected.
Reputation management is designed to make sure customers can believe in your credibility. Implementing trust signals in your marketing strategy is a great way to gain your customer’s attention. Make your reviews easily accessible, and put the positive reviews at the top of the list. Crafting a credible and trustworthy image may take some time, but that’s how you’ll see improvement in leads and conversions.
Reputation management can have a direct effect on your sales. Once you are seen as credible through a customer-centric approach in your marketing, you’ll start to see better conversion rates. This is likely due to a few reasons:
• Customers who now trust you have recommended your business to their friends.
• Your happy customers have left positive reviews.
• Your product is leaving people satisfied and wanting more.
Trust also means you’ve broken down the barriers of risks and threats that plague so many eCommerce shops. When customers understand and trust that they’ll receive the quality that was promised to them, they’ll feel more compelled to buy from you.
Trust isn’t only good for generating new leads—it can turn into loyalty. Once you’ve reached this stage, you no longer have to compete for the attention of these repeat customers and will have a much easier time retaining them.
If credibility and trust are the first elements of gaining a customer’s attention, a brand’s value and public perception are what keep customers around. A brand’s value and perception influence things like:
• The monetary value of the brand.
• The image associated with a brand’s customers.
• A brand’s current reputation.
Think about clothing, food, and personal hygiene products that are considered “name brands.” The idea is these brands are more expensive because they’re of higher quality and will meet the customer’s needs better than any other brand. This isn’t often the case. All of this talk about “quality” and “durability” tends to come from marketing and reputation management. In fact, many of these brands are often the same exact quality of what’s considered the “knock-off” brand—and may even be manufactured by the same company.
Brand perception also takes into account the image and emotion consumers associate with a brand. Take Harley Davidson, a motorcycle manufacturer that many associates with rough-and-tumble biker gangs and road warriors. Their competitor, Ducati, has a completely different image, related more to the sleek motorcycle you’d see a movie’s protagonist riding in a chase sequence. This is the result of years of quality reputation management.
Though you can put all of this work into crafting the perfect brand image, it can easily fall apart. Even some of the biggest brand names have been tarnished by controversies and didn’t have proper reputation management to keep things in check. Just recently, Apple was sued for purposefully slowing down older iPhone models. This was in an attempt to entice customers to their newer phones, showing that Apple no longer prioritized gaining customer trust.
Every company needs reputation management if they want to see an improved level of customer trust. Even if your product really is the most life-changing thing on the market, you still have to convince your leads of that truth.
Shopper Approved is a champion of garnering trust, credibility, and excellent reviews for your business. Our solutions are completely customizable and will help you to gather customer reviews and help resolve reputation issues with our Customer Resolution feature. We’re proud to offer a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee—which is one way we can prove our credibility to you.
Stop waiting for reviews to come to you. Partner with Shopper Approved and get more high-quality customer reviews today.