Your reputation will make or break your brand…
As Warren Buffet once said: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." Reputation is everything when building a brand and a business. Why? When it comes to business, the most important decision-making component of a conversion or sale or recruitment is trust. Let's dive into the essential strategies for managing your brand's reputation online.
The Importance of Trust
Trust does more than create a feel-good feeling--it has an influence at each of the four stages of a sale:
- Introduction: The initial contact or awareness phase where potential customers first learn about your brand. First impressions are crucial here. Is your page/feed optimized to show that you're worth looking into further?
- Discovery: Prospective customers seek more information and assess your brand’s credibility and authority. Are there testimonials or case studies that demonstrate how your product has made your customers' lives easier?
- Evaluation: Potential customers compare your offerings against competitors to determine the best fit. Is your value proposition clear?
- Closure: The final decision-making phase, leading to a conversion, sale, or recruitment. Do your prospective customers trust you enough to give their time and money?
Trust and Reputation Go Hand in Hand
Will your product solve a problem? Will your business provide adequate support? Potential customers will look to your reputation for answers before they even reach out.
Once you establish your customer persona, you'll be able to make your customers feel seen and acknowledged through every step of the sales process. This is how you build and protect trust with your community.
How to Establish Trust Online
As a brand, you need to protect your customers' trust at all costs! Let's take a look at the different ways you can approach relationship building.
Control Your Content Distribution
You have direct control over your content, and this is your chance to show what you know. This is where you can demonstrate your expertise and knowledge of what drives your audience. The first step to building trust with your audience is to make them feel seen. Show them that you intimately understand and are equipped to solve their problems.
Leverage Content Streams:
All of your content should show that you know what you're talking about and are able to help your audience in a meaningful way. You can show this through the design, content, and the platform you chose to communicate through. Below are 3 staples you need to dial in.
- Website: This is your cornerstone. Make sure that your website is well-structured, fast-loading, and above all, industry-relevant. Keep in mind that ALL ROADS lead to your website.
- Blog Articles: Regularly publish well-researched and insightful articles that provide value to your audience. These need to be informative and not just sales driven.
- Email Campaigns: Develop targeted email campaigns that offer useful information and solutions to your audience’s problems. Then, take interaction to the next level with strategic segmentation in order to make your content extra relevant.
Engage in the Right Way on the Right Platforms
Once you know your messaging, you need to put it in front of the right people. Find the platforms where your target audience is hanging out, and then communicate in a way that shows you understand the platform.
For example, if you put out a billboard with blocks of text and a QR code, or an Instagram post with an unclickable link in the caption, you're showing your audience that you don't understand what you're doing. How can they trust you to be competent in other areas of business?
The overall goal is to make sure your content shows your understanding of your product AND your audience.
Managing External Sources
Optimize Your Google Presence
Google is often the first place potential customers will learn about your brand. Although this isn't completely in your control, there are ways that you can put your best foot forward and influence customers to have a positive interaction with your brand.
Make sure you have:
- Completed and updated your Google Business Profile
- Optimized and specify your website landing page experience
- Complete all of your Metadata fields
- Publish articles and posts that discuss the issues that your audience will be Googling
Foster the Review Process
Reviews are critical to building and maintaining trust. There's no way to cut corners here, but we are going to let you in on a little marketing secret: by taking just one extra step, you can protect your brand, foster genuine reviews, and skyrocket loyal community growth.
Create a Review Landing Page
An intermediary review landing page has two parts and purposes. Firstly, for positive reviews, include a link to your review site of choice. Easy!
And now, for the bad reviews. The 2 most likely customers to leave a review are the very satisfied and the very DISsatisfied – So what do you do?
First, let's put ourselves in the customers' shoes. They've had a disappointing experience, and now they just want to be heard. An easy way to do that is to take their grievances public. But what if you gave them another way? Not just a place to share their feedback, but to actually have their problem addressed? To rebuild the trust in your brand that they feel is broken?
We do this by adding a prompt/comment field on the “Leave a Review” landing page for complaints that gives customers an opportunity to send a complaint directly to management. This way keeps their negative reviews off of your public pages, and gives you a direct line to your customers in order to address and correct their problem.
Going this extra mile may even convert a disgruntled customer to one of your biggest supporters!
Protect Your Brand's Online Reputation
Keeping an eye on your brand’s online reputation is a journey that takes a little love and care! By thoughtfully sharing your content, exploring different channels, boosting your visibility on platforms like Google, and encouraging authentic reviews, you can nurture and safeguard the trust of your current customers and the wider community.