Reputation "Marketing" Strategy

By Mike Munter
Most visitors to this site are seeking affordable reputation management services; however, an often overlooked area by business owners is having an effective system in place for collecting and posting positive reviews.

Being proactive about getting positive reviews posted about your company is what we call Reputation Marketing and if you are forward thinking in this area, you may never have a need for reputation management.

Reputation Marketing Culture

We recommend that you create a culture based around quality customer service, so that all of your reviews are good ones!

This starts at the top and should be reinforced every day in your office.  Good service starts from within and if you are treating your employees well, they will treat you customers well and your customers will help spread the word about your business.

Here is a 5-step plan to actively increase the number of good online reviews about your business:

1 - Build an email list.  This is foundational.  Your email list of happy customers will be your ongoing source not only for marketing, but for posting quality reviews about your business.

2 - Make signing up for your email list easy and fun.  Put an opt-in box on your website and encourage in-store signups by offering an incentive.  At every opportunity or event your staff attends, ask them to collect emails.  Use "Enter To Win" prize giveaways to collect data and update your list on a regular basis.  It's like gold!

3 - Tell your customers what to do.  Now that you've got your email list growing, send out regular correspondence (once a month is fine) and as part of your email marketing, include a link to a specific site where you would like them to review your company.  As an incentive, you could offer a free item or service to everyone who posts a positive review by midnight.  Or, you could elect to choose 1 review at random and offer them a bigger reward. Be creative!

4 - Take action at the time of service.  This one is easy, but many businesses miss it.  Your best opportunity to get a review is when a customer has just happily completed a transaction with you.  Consider offering them an additional free service if they will write you a review in the next 24 hours.  We recommend using business cards to promote this.  Simply list your Google Places page on your business card, so customers can easily find it.  This also makes it easy for your sales and service staff to remember to remind them.

5 - Promote those good reviews on your website.  After you've collected a few of the great reviews about your business, publish them on your website, so new visitors can clearly see them.

Summary

These are just a few ideas that can help your business get out in front of the competition with an online reputation marketing strategy.  For ideas customized for your business, please call us at 503-890-6663.  If you are the victim of bad reviews, we can help you with that, too.