As many as 81% of consumers feel that they need to trust a brand before they’ll consider buying from them.
A business is nothing without its customers, so it’s important to always work to serve them in the best way possible. How people perceive your brand will affect its success, so you want to present your business in the best way possible.
Local reputation marketing can prove very effective if it’s implemented correctly. Getting assistance from the right local reputation marketing professional will go a long way toward helping you achieve your business goals.
So what is local reputation marketing, and why is it so important? Keep reading to find out.
Local reputation marketing is a type of marketing approach that focuses on improving the reputation of your brand within the community it serves. It monitors how customers perceive your brand with the overall purpose of finding ways to improve this perception.
There are various online reputation management assets that local reputation marketing professionals use. This includes things like reviews, testimonials, social media mentions, and customer ratings.
Local reputation marketing can serve as a connection between your business and customers. How effective this marketing is will have a sizable impact on how many leads you can attract and how many of those leads you can convert into paying customers.
There are various types of marketing that you can implement as a business owner. The types that will prove the most useful will vary between different organizations.
It’s important to understand the advantages of each so you can figure out what will be the most helpful for your brand. Local reputation marketing offers a range of benefits that could help almost any business achieve greater success.
When people are looking for products or services, they often begin their search online. As such, being successful in today’s world means you need to have an online presence – and the stronger, the better.
You can do this using your website, business profiles, review sites, and more. If people can easily find out about your business online (and what they find is good) then it will make them more likely to choose your brand over your competitors.
Bear in mind that most (if not all) of your competitors will also be online. If you don’t put in the effort to keep up, you’ll lose a lot of potential business.
Having a better local reputation will help with your SEO, leading to higher search engine rankings. This is ideal if you want more people to discover your brand – especially when people are searching for local businesses.
When looking at reviews, many brands will look impressive. If your competitors have plenty of 4 and 5-star reviews, you need the same.
Before a customer buys from a company, reviews are often the best way for them to get an idea of what to expect. Ensuring you have a lot of positive reviews will have a huge impact on how many local leads you’re able to generate.
A lot of people will look at Google My Business when looking for a local product or service. Local reputation marketing will help you improve the credibility of your brand. You can do this through local business directories as well as social media platforms.
You can present your brand as trustworthy to your target audience. Doing so can have a strong positive impact on your local business reputation.
If you want to keep up with the competition, awareness is key. If people don’t know about your business, they’ll always go to your competitors.
Improving your local SEO will help ensure your brand shows up higher when people are searching for local businesses. The higher you show up, the more people will know about your businesses. Through this, it becomes easier to market your brand and provide people with information on who you are and what you do.
Almost everyone makes use of Google Maps to get around – especially in unfamiliar places. If you own a restaurant, for example, and people are looking for somewhere to eat, you want to ensure your business shows up. If people can easily find your business, it will lead to an increase in foot traffic, which will result in more sales.
No business wants to experience a crisis, but every business should prepare for it. Something unexpected could happen at any time that could have a huge negative impact on your business reputation.
This kind of issue can do a lot of harm to a company. If you’ve maintained a strong local reputation marketing strategy, you’ll be in a better position to deal with such a situation.
Organic growth is ideal for any business, and quality local reputation marketing will help. When you have happy customers, they’ll be more likely to share their experiences of your brand with their friends and family.
Social media is perfect for this, as you can create posts on a range of platforms that your customers use. They may then share these, extending your reach in a very cost-effective manner.
Knowing how to grow a brand is vital for success. There are some methods that are quite obvious, and others that are more unexpected.
Online reviews are a vital part of local reputation marketing. Up to 95% of consumers read reviews before shopping with a company, so ensuring you have strong reviews will have a huge impact. This statistic is similar for B2B consumers too, so it’s something that all businesses should bear in mind.
Reviews can be an incredibly important part of your reputation management. You can look through reviews that customers give you to get a better insight into people’s feelings about your brand.
From this, you can see what people like and don’t like. Analyzing the information you find will make it easier for you to make business decisions moving forward. This is one of the best ways to improve upon areas of weakness and focus on areas of strength.
There are certain things you can do to get the most out of your reviews.
Customers generally have no issue with leaving reviews, but it’s something that’s easily forgotten, or people simply don’t bother with. You can have reminders after your customer completes a purchase, or send email reminders several days later after a customer has received their product.
You can further encourage reviews by offering incentives. For example, having a prize draw for everyone that leaves a review within a certain period, or having some kind of points/reward system. This will help generate a lot more reviews, giving you plenty of feedback to work with.
Don’t just look at reviews once or twice when you’re working on your marketing strategy – you should monitor them regularly. Keep an eye on what people are saying so that you can act on things quickly. If someone leaves a negative review, you may be able to address the issue immediately so that future customers don’t have the same problem.
Ideally, you’ll get a lot of positive reviews, and very few negative ones. With both types, responding can often be very beneficial.
With positive reviews, it’s a good way to let customers know that you appreciate their feedback. This interaction also makes customers feel more valued and helps to create stronger relationships, further establishing brand loyalty. When it comes to negative reviews, you need to be a bit more tactful.
Maintain composure and avoid negative words. It’s always helpful if you can address the issue – and let the customer know that you’re doing so. If a customer has a bad experience, they’ll likely turn to your competitors next time, but responding in this way could actually change their viewpoint and they may well come back to you.
You want to build up a solid base of positive reviews, and once you do you can show them off. Some businesses simply rely on external review sites. While this is fine, you could also showcase them on your own website.
Doing this will show your audience that you’re confident in your results and what your customers have to say about your brand. It also makes it easier for people to find your reviews so they won’t have to go searching on Google. There are plenty of plugins that allow this so it’s easy to implement and could prove very beneficial.
Developing an initial local reputation marketing strategy is a good start, but it’s something that you should always be working to improve. It’s an ongoing process, so you should always monitor it, and be open to making changes when necessary. There are several business marketing ideas you can implement that will help make your strategy more effective.
Social media has become one of the most effective business tools in today’s world. About 4.8 billion people use social media worldwide, so it’s a great way to reach a wider audience.
To get the most out of social media, you should be strategic. There’s no point in spending time and effort on a platform that none of your customers use. Determine which platforms your target audience is most active on, and focus on these.
You can easily interact with your customers to help build stronger bonds. It’s also one of the most cost-effective marketing approaches available.
You’ll find several local business directories and review listing sites online. You should add your business to the most popular of these so your customers can more easily find your business and write/read reviews.
Ideally, you want to achieve honest, positive reviews across these platforms. Doing so will result in more people finding your business and gaining a good first impression.
More and more businesses are collaborating with social media influencers these days. They can help you spread the word about your business and reach a much wider audience.
When doing this, you should look for influencers who have a similar target audience to you. If their followers are likely to be interested in your business, you’ll get better results from the collaboration.
The Google My Business platform is a great way to interact with potential customers. Doing so can help to establish your brand, and opening an account is free. This is another platform where obtaining honest reviews can be very helpful – you can create and share a link to leave reviews in your emails as a reminder for customers.
Make sure you optimize your Goole My Business profile to get the most out of it. Include important details such as:
Ensure you keep this information up to date. Make changes as and when they happen so you don’t have incorrect information that could cause confusion. You can also post updates and announcements to keep your audience informed and show that you’re active and responsive.
SEO is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic to your website, and local SEO specifically is ideal for a local business. Work on targeting specific keywords that your audience is searching online. Improving your ranking can also help to push negative reviews down which will help when people are first looking into your brand.
You can find various reputation management tools online which could help your business. Google Alerts is a popular example that you can use to monitor reviews and take action sooner. Using these tools will help improve efficiency, leading to a better overall business reputation.
You might offer the best products or services available, but this won’t help much if you don’t provide quality service to your customers. 61% of people say that they’ve switched to a competitor after receiving bad customer service.
When people are facing issues, they want them dealt with quickly. If they have to wait, it will only make things worse. You should try to make it as easy as possible for customers to reach your support team.
Ensure you have sufficient support staff to deal with all customer queries quickly and efficiently. You also want to make sure they’re polite and patient with customers as this will help to prevent any escalation of what might already be a bad situation.
This is something that’s relatively rare, but it can do wonders for your local reputation. You can give back to the local community in a range of ways, such as:
When it comes to local reputation, showing you care about the local community can make a world of difference. Not only will this build trust and loyalty among your customers, but you may later receive more support from the local community when you need it.
You may not have been as proactive as you should have over the years or may have run into an undesirable crisis. Various things can damage your local business reputation, but that doesn’t mean all is lost.
It’s important to take the time to assess what’s caused the drop in reputation. You can then develop a plan that will help amend things and get your business back on track. There are several approaches that you may be able to take to fix your local reputation if it’s broken.
This is often the best way to resolve things. All kinds of experiences can leave customers disgruntled or unimpressed.
If this happens, you can do two things; forget about it, or fix it. You can just accept that a customer is unhappy with your business – after all, what’s one customer? The problem with this is that it can have a knock-on effect.
An unhappy customer is far more likely to leave a negative review, and we’ve already discussed how important reviews are. On top of that, there’s a good chance they’ll talk to their friends and family about your business, and they won’t be presenting it in a good light. People are very trusting of the opinions of people they know, so what was just one customer lost can quickly turn into many more.
By responding to unhappy customers, you may be able to prevent this. It’s easy enough to apologize, and you can let them know that you’re going to work to remedy whatever issue they experienced.
If you reassure them that the problem will be dealt with it could alter their negative viewpoint. This may lead to a positive review, and they’ll be more likely to recommend your business to the people around them.
Transparency is something that consumers have come to value incredibly highly these days. It shows that your brand is open and honest, which will go a long way towards building trust among your customer base.
If your company makes a mistake, don’t try to bury or ignore it. Be honest about it, accept it, and apologize. You can then start taking steps to fix the issue, and let people know how you intend to do so.
This attitude shows a high level of integrity and lets people know that your company is always working to be better. It’s also a great way to win customers’ hearts and trust.
Customer loyalty is a great way to keep people coming back. It gives your customer base more value from your brand and shows that you appreciate them.
There are plenty of ways that companies do this. A points reward scheme is a common option, where customers get points based on how much they spend, and can then redeem these points later. Simple loyalty cards are another option, such as a coffee shop that gives a stamp for every purchase, and a customer can get a free coffee once they have 10 stamps.
Even with a bad experience, offering customers rewards can soften the blow. For those who have a good experience, it acts as the icing on the cake.
This is something that some businesses have been known to do. It may initially seem like a good idea, but it can be very bad for your reputation.
Most of the time, it’s obvious your reviews are fake. When someone is looking for a product or service and they come across a company, seeing a list of fake reviews will immediately put them off.
It may seem like a cost-effective way to get ahead of the competition, but odds are it will do more harm than good. It will take some time to build up a collection of positive reviews, but it’s the best way to approach things. Be patient and stick to your plan if you want to get the best results.
As we’ve already mentioned, social media can be incredibly helpful if you utilize it well. It’s one of the best ways to promote your business in a range of ways.
You can talk about your achievements or any positive media stories that show your brand is improving. Encouraging your followers to share your content is also a good idea.
If you want to run a successful business, you should never ignore local reputation marketing. Making sure you put in the effort to connect with your audience and provide the best experience will have a huge impact on your business.
Ensure you’re always paying attention to what your customers think. Capitalize on what people like, and improve on things they don’t. Always be open to making changes that could benefit your brand and your customers.
If you’re interested in growth, SMBHub can help. Our tools are dedicated to improving reach and sales and can be tailored to your organization and business goals. To get started, sign up for our free trial today.
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