If you want to have a successful online business, you have to build and maintain a positive reputation. An online reputation management company can help you with this. They will help you to understand just how important your reputation is, since an online business is “faceless” and people hence have to place their trust in you without knowing you. This is about both managing and marketing, and your starting point should be marketing.
The Difference between Marketing and Managing
There are two key things involved in reputation management:
- Monitoring the conversations about you.
- Repairing the damage done by any negative conversations.
The first step has to be ongoing. If you market your reputation properly, you may not even have to complete the second step.
Marketing your reputation is a proactive means of making sure you can be found online, and that was is being found about you is positive. The harder you work on your marketing, the more positive messages will be out there about you. And this means you will have a positive reputation.
When you market your reputation properly, and continue to do so, you won’t have to manage it at a later stage either. This is because, if properly marketed, your starting point will be a very positive reputation, and that cannot be damaged by a single negative view. Naturally, you should always address negative views as well.
When the Good Outweighs the Bad
No business on this planet can keep everybody happy. And sometimes, people who are really unhappy will voice this in very damaging ways. If you market your reputation properly, however, then the positive things will continue to outweigh the negative. This makes you more trustworthy in the eyes of potential customers.
If, however, you suddenly face multiple negative reviews, then it is likely that something is going wrong. You need to identify and resolve that. Perhaps you need to improve your customer service, or have greater quality control in place. When you do receive negative reviews, you need to make sure that your customers know how you are trying to resolve the issue. If you do this properly, then you turn the bad into something good again.
The moral of the story is that marketing your reputation is a lot easier, and a lot more effective, than managing it at a later stage. You need to make sure that, from the word go, your customers can build confidence and trust in you. This is particularly important if your brand isn’t very well known yet. Well-established brands can recover from a negative review in a much easier way, because they already control the positive narrative. What this demonstrates is how important it is to always be proactive, and to only be reactive when there is actually something that needs to be improved. If you simply hope for the best and think customers will eventually come to like and trust you, you will quickly find that your business will stagnate or even shrink.
