Develop a 5-Star Reputation for your Personal Brand Online
Having an effective online reputation management strategy is critical to building a successful personal or company brand. Even a single posted bad review that ranks on Google Page 1 or on social media can have a negative impact on your brand. This can make potential customers reluctant to hire you. It can diminish trust.
What is brand reputation?
The meaning of brand reputation pertains to how potential clients, business partners, investors, and the media perceive your brand. Incorporating an online reputation management strategy need to be part of your content marketing plan.
When they conduct research, what they see ranking in Google, or posted on social media or a business directory is your brand reputation. You need your brand reputation to make people feel good about you and your business.
Why is an online brand reputation strategy important?
Anything posted on the Internet can live for years. Brand and reputation risk is real when anyone, even a competitor, can post a bad review.
The stronger your reputation is displayed online; the more people will trust working with you.
Additionally, happy customers can provide positive reviews and testimonials, as well as become an advocate for your brand. This can lead to ongoing referral business.
The difference between reputation marketing and reputation management
The reputation topic is usually referred to as reputation management. However, reputation is comprised of two different areas:
Reputation Marketing
Reputation Marketing is a proactive approach to building your brand online. This includes incorporating ongoing social media and content marketing plans that communicate your expertise and authority.
It helps to build trust and rapport online. This approach can dominate Google Page 1 for your brand. It can also make it more challenging for negative reviews to gain page 1 rankings.
A strong branded digital entity can make people more forgiving if a poor review is posted. It’s advisable to professionally respond if a poor review is posted.
Reputation Management
Reputation Management helps to restore and sustain your reputation. Google, for example, usually incorporates an effective SEO plan to push the bad review site to page 2 or three.
Depending on the bad review site’s trust factor with Google, it can take several months to rank above the site. For example, a personal blog post is easier to move off page 1 than a New Your Times news item.
Reputation Management also uses tools to monitor your online reputation. These tools monitor the Internet for your brand and report review activity. You then know what’s being said and can professionally reply, as well as take corrective action, if necessary.
What is an online reputation management strategy?
A good strategy is to make monitoring your brand online a priority for your business.
It’s also advisable to incorporate an effective reputation marketing plan that includes a content marketing strategy that helps you to control Google Page 1 for your brand.
This can help prevent bad reviews from ranking on page 1. Having only a website and a couple of social media profiles is no longer enough. Building a solid brand online is the best offense. Additionally, you need to encourage customer reviews.
This is third-party validation from your actual customers. Conversions usually increase because potential customers trust reviews more than advertising and marketing activity.
The Brand Velocity Program includes reputation marketing as part of its content marketing plan.
It can affordably help you to proactively build a solid online brand while helping you to build authority and trust with both Google and potential customers.
It also covers how to obtain third-party validation for your personal brand.
Free online brand reputation monitoring tools
You can get started by monitoring your personal brand reputation mentions for free. You can use Google Alerts and Talkwalker.
Keep an eye on your competitors
Setting up alerts for your competitors allows you to track their activity. You can see what sites are sharing or linking back to their website. You can then reach out to those sites to obtain backlinks for your site. Additionally, you can acquire business intelligence about their products or services, as well as their customer feedback. This ensures that you are not falling behind with your offerings or determine if you have a competitive advantage.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts offers configuration options, such as how often you wish to receive alerts. It searches for associated keyword phrases. A tip is to put multiple-word phrases into quotation marks for more accurate reporting.
For example, Brand Velocity as two words will return mentions of both Brand and Velocity, as well as the phrase. “Brand Velocity” in quotes will return more accurate results.
Also, add your Website URL as another alert and any other pertinent phrases. You can even add your competitors to see their activity.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a Google Alerts alternative and provides two different alerts:
Talkwalker Alerts is a free alerts system that follows your digital footprint across the internet and Twitter!
Social Search Monitor
Talkwalker’s social search monitors every conversation about your brand, hashtags, and competition on social media. It’s a paid service with a trial.
How to respond to negative reviews
Receiving a poor review, especially if it seems unfair, can cause you to want to retaliate. Do not do this. Sleep on it and deal with it the next day. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts.
Do:
-
Read the negative review objectively. Is it true? If so, draft a response.
- Indicate the corrective action that you did to fix the issue.
- Ask the person to contact you so you can further discuss the situation offline.
- If it’s a general negative comment and you do not recognize the name, indicate that they were not in your customer database and to please contact you. This sends the message to potential customers that it’s potentially a fake review.
- Encourage customers to post positive reviews. Having a volume of positive reviews is a good defense against an occasional bad review. Ensure the reviews are specific and not general. For example, “Brand Velocity helped me to build my personal brand and own Google Page 1. I highly recommend the program.” As opposed to, “Brand Velocity is a great company and provides an awesome service.”
- Showcase the positive reviews on your website and link to the actual review for credibility. The Brand Velocity program offers a bonus training module on how to get customers enthusiastic about providing you with positive video testimonials.
Do Not
- Respond in anger and post a negative reply. It makes you look unprofessional and immature, as well as defensive.
- Publicly offer something for free as restitution. This can attract more negative reviews from those looking for a freebie.
- Avoid responding to negative reviews. This sends a message to potential customers that the negative review must be true, or you don’t care.
People are more motivated to post bad reviews, as opposed to good reviews. It’s important that you include a proactive online reputation marketing strategy in your personal online branding content plan.
As part of your online reputation management strategy, obtaining good customer reviews and testimonials are third-party validation that helps to build authority and trust with potential customers.
Conclusion
With it being so easy for people to post negative comments and reviews online, you need to create and build an online reputation management strategy, as well as monitor for anything negative that can hurt your brand. Even competitors have been known to post negative comments trying to hurt their competition. These negative reviews can hurt your reputation online and impact your revenue. Potential customers rely on reviews when deciding which businesses to trust and hire. You need to be viewed as an authority in your niche, as well as a trusted business.
Having an effective reputation marketing strategy, and monitoring the Internet for brand mentions is the best way to protect your personal brand.
from Brand Velocity https://brandvelocity.io/online-reputation-management-strategy/
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