<![CDATA[GURU MARKETING TIPS - Reputation Management]]>Tue, 14 Sep 2021 18:13:06 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[How to Get Flattering Customer Reviews]]>Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:26:13 GMThttp://gurumarketingtips.com/reputation-management/how-to-get-flattering-customer-reviews
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Yes You Need More Glowing Reviews For Your Business!
By Stu Leventhal ~ Guru Marketing Editor

People are checking online review sites now-a-days before they buy or hire. Most companies; realtors, restaurants, bars, barbershops, appliance stores, grocery stores…do not even know what people are saying about their business online. One bad review can and will hurt your business! You need to counter that bad review fast, as soon as possible, so it does not go on killing your brand image and deterring potential new clients and customers from hiring you and buying from you.

Online posts can stay online for months and years. The question is, are your reviews doing your company damage or helping you gain new business?

When was the last time you checked the relevant business review sites covering your industry to hear what folks are saying about your company? Do you reply to the good reviews, thanking the reviewer? Do you reply to the bad reviews you have gotten saying you appreciate hearing about the bad incident and you are glad that they brought this problem to your attention? You should comment! Make it clear to anyone who reads a bad review that you and your company listen to your customers and are taking steps to fix the problem? Invite people to come in and see for themselves the improvements that you have made on the issue. Tell great reviews and bad reviewers that you appreciate their business and hope to same them again soon.

Your goal with commenting on a review is to convince people that you are professional and interested in being the best in your field. Yours is a brand worth doing business with!

The good news is that you can improve your business by listening to what your customers have to say about the service they received when frequenting your establishment. Good or bad a review alerts management to problems and tells you what your customers are seeking from you. Good reviews tell you where you are winning and beating your competition so you can do more of those things. You should improve you marketing pitches so you are talking about the things that are being brought up in your reviews. These are the things by which people are judging your company and the criteria with which they are comparing you to your competition. Your ads will do better by focusing on what is being discussed in your reviews and your competitions reviews.  

I know it makes you mad when a customer trashes your company, products and services online. You should get upset when you hear a customer, client or vendor was treated badly by one of your employees.

The thing to remember is that now you know about the problem. The bad review alerted you to a situation that may have gone on for many more months before you became aware of it. You can now fix the problem. Now comes the challenge though; do you  have a dedicated employee actually making it a priority to go online and check out these reviews sites that are popular for your industry. If you are not checking these sites every few days minimum then a bad review may be posted that is doing you and your company harm, costing you customers, orders and losing you clients and you have no idea the post is live online.

On the flip side, when you get a great review, praising your crew members, you can use that review to further market your company and to build your brand image up. But again if you are not privy to the good stuff people are saying about you then you cannot optimize and capitalize on all the positive effect that a great review can have on your company. Yes, when your team earns a great five start review online, you should be sharing the great news with your crew. This alone can get your team to preform even better for your customers.

Your employees are in control of the type of reviews your customers leave online. Share the importance of reviews and do not just tell them when they get a bad review. Positive feedback tells your team that they are heading in the right direction and that their extra efforts are working, being noticed and are appreciated. A good review will improve employee morale and happy employees; smile, greet and make sure your customers have a great time while doing business with your company.

Reviews good or bad are always good for management and the team. Reviews are like your report card; customers get to grade you on how your company is doing. Customers are always right, so you need to improve your service when you get a bad review and you need to call a team meeting to discuss how we can get some great company reviews on this review site.

Did you know that reviews about your company will help your website, webpages, articles and posts go up in the search engine rankings? That is correct, the more people that are discussing you and your company all over cyberspace helps your popularity with search engines like Google. Your authority in your industry, especially if yours is a local based business, rises in stature because your company is being mentioned by others all over the net. Now it is common sense that you want to get mostly good reviews if not only good reviews.

So, is it hard to control what folks are saying about your company online? Ideally, you and your crew should be able to just give great service and you would get a lot of great people shouting your praise. But, we know that does not always happen. The companies that consistently get great reviews online, are actively going out of their way to strategize how to accomplish getting those great reviews. Yes, they make a plan to gain more favorable reviews and they target getting those great reviews onto, particularly, the most influential platforms that their potential customers are known to frequent. Your reviews need to be in front of eyes that want to read about your company and what you provide.

Bear in mind, potential new customers that are considering hiring you or buying from you, will value an independent person’s review of your company much higher than they will believe your own company’s claims that you are the best. You can pay to put up a billboard or run a commercial or take out ads online or in the local newspaper but your competitors are all saying the same thing you are in their ads. We will trust another person’s review before we trust a company tooting its own horn.

Make sure you have a place for satisfied customers to leave their praising reviews right on your company website. Your website needs to highlight the best reviews you get. By highlight I mean blow up the font so it is big on the webpage and stands out! You can also post your great reviews on top of an eye catching photo! Publish your commendable and flattering reviews on your about page to reinforce your messaging. Next; post (pin) your photo with your review on it, onto your Pinterest board. That pin is a clickable link that brings people from Pinterest to your website about page! That photo review can also be shared on all of your other social media accounts too just add a title and a few lines like; here is what our customers are saying about us.

Posting your reviews artistically gets you likes and shares on social media platforms; those links raise your standing with Google search and other search engines too!

You must ask frequently for reviews to keep getting current reviews. Direct folks to your social accounts, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Twitter… and ask them to tell your members and followers about their wonderful experiences with your company and employees. When a certain platform, like Yelp or Angie’s list posts a few bad reviews, counter that negativity by asking your loyal customers to go to yelp and leave a positive review for you.

One way to court reviews of course is to offer incentives for reviewing. Yes, you can give customers a coupon or free consultation for leaving a review on your site or when reviewing on any other review site in cyberspace. Just tell them to notify you of the review once it is up and live online and you will send them their reward. This helps you two-fold because they have to give you their name and email address to receive their rewards. Now with their contact info in hand, you can converse and communicate to them more directly and more often in the future. Via well-crafted email marketing campaigns you can easily supply each of them with the information that is of more specific interest to each individual.

Make sure you poll your customers to ask what review sites they frequent and what review bloggers they trust. You want your flattering reviews to appear in the most popular online places. Places your particular type of customers hang out!
]]><![CDATA[Managing Your Company's Reputation Is Easy]]>Fri, 23 Jan 2015 14:15:13 GMThttp://gurumarketingtips.com/reputation-management/managing-your-companys-reputation-is-easy
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You and your company love great PR. Bad press coverage can do a lot of damage to your brand. Word of mouth advertising is the strongest most effective marketing one can get...whether it is good flattery or bad gossip.

Good publicity management requires actively planning to shape the public's view of you and your company in a positive way. You want people to like you, your company, your employees as well as liking your products and or services that you provide for purchase.

Many publicists will tell you that everything that you and anyone working for your company says or does affects public relations. But remember, your customers too can alter how the public views your company and your brand's image.

With so much online conversation going on now-a-days you have to find out what is being said about your brand. Who is tweeting and why? What are the industry bloggers saying? Counter the bad press and amplify the good remarks and praise!

You should also be planning some events that you know will make people feel good about doing business with your company. When you host an event make sure you have people circulating around photographing and video recording so you get as much mileage out of the party you throw. The idea is to post happy images all over cyberspace so people relate happy thoughts and having fun with your brand.

Many companies host charity events or donate things to charities to raise the perception of their brand. Businesses that make a profit are often judged as being cold and calculating and caring only about money making. You need to show that your company is much more than just about making more and more money! People do not like greedy companies unless they are stockholders partaking in the profits.

The more images you publish and post online the more notoriety your company gets. You want to show photos and videos of your employees being humans so customers can relate better to them.

What the public thinks of your brand is like your report card, telling you how your company is doing overall. The thing to keep in mind is that publicity should not be you tooting your own horn; you want others saying how wonderful you are!

Ideally you want to create reasons for newspaper reporters and TV and radio news shows to cover something positive about your company or entice the news media to speak highly of something that your company does. Often to get the news industry's attention requires sending a press release to many news organizations telling them all about the thing or incident that you seek notoriety for.

Know that news editors and publishers get many news releases each day, so you have to make sure that your press release stand out!   
]]><![CDATA[Online Reputation Management]]>Tue, 02 Jul 2013 12:20:00 GMThttp://gurumarketingtips.com/reputation-management/online-reputation-management
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REPAIRING AND MANAGING YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION

                    By Stu Leventhal
Online Reputation Management is about taking control of how you or your company’s reputation is being presented and perceived digitally across the internet. Many people think there is a magic way to clear negative info off of the web and Reputation Managers have a market on that magic wand. This allows reputation managers to charge an arm and a leg for their services praying on the fear and frustration of the average Joe. The harsh reality is, once damning info hits the web it can be spread in so many ways (social media etc.) that you can never squash it all. Threatening all the offending websites with lawsuits can be risky because you are throwing fuel onto the fire and may worsen the situation inciting the offenders to create even more, possibly harsher damaging stuff. But, there is still hope...
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The process of reputation management is not to try to buy all the magazines issues off all the stands as they did in the past, before the internet emerged. The technique is to out Google rank the bad stuff with good Press. First decide how you wish your company to be perceived then develop great content that you wish to outrank the bad stuff. Now, flood the search engines, targeting keywords where the negative info is popping up the most in searches. By utilizing proper SEO techniques outlined in the SEO section of this website all of your good postings will appear first when someone is searching for the company whose reputation you are repairing. So the chances of anyone seeing the bad posts is seriously reduced. Thus, the bad stuff becomes obsolete, buried in low page rank where no one sees it as well as being engulfed by a sea of good reviews, testimonials and news releases.
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http://www.anewtale.com/services is the place for FREE QUOTES on all your writing projects
Most times just saturating the keyword searches with good PR that dilutes the viewers sent to the bad PR sites will be effective enough to negate the effects of a few bad posts.

With review sites like Yelp, your goal is to get 50 quick positive yelps to push the bad yelps so far down the list that no one ever scrolls down that far to read them. With this in mind, remember, as owner or manager of an establishment being attacked online, you must read between the lines. Is there perhaps some truth to the bad reviews you are getting? What would cause someone to be so mad as to leave you a rating of zero, 1 or 2 stars? Make sure you take a long hard look at your organization and fix any internal problems going on. The best way to fix an online reputation is to start preparing way before your rep is tarnished. Insulate yourself and your business with many great reviews, tons of good PR and plenty of un-debatable content praising you your service and products from authority figures. Make yourself untouchable!
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The most important thing to remember, when trying to establish a quality reputation online is that you have to be aware that there is negative stuff posted on the information highway before you can do anything to negate it. That is the mistake most companies make. You can't afford to ignore the web. You must monitor your reputation constantly, so when negative info first appears you take care of it quickly and efficiently before the damage hits!

One of the best thing about being proactive when it comes to managing your company's online reputation is that a good reputation management program immediately informs you of any customer related problems that are happening. Thus, you can jump right on fixing those problems which is not only great for managing your online reputation but also great for the business as a whole! Therefore, investing in implementing a decent online reputation management plan will pay for itself in the long run by helping improve customer relations and reducing customer service problems as it aides the company in becoming more efficient over all.

The second best reason to invest in reputation management is because all the efforts you implement to assure your companies reputation is improved and beyond reproach, are very similar if not exactly the same as many of your advertising and marketing efforts. So, everything you do for reputation management helps sales and promotion of your brands name and contributes also to better positioning your products and services in the market place. So, despite the cost and efforts it may take to handle your company's reputation issues, you are always helping build sales and positive brand awareness at the same time!  

For an example: Making sure you have built up a strong presence on all the top social media sites; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google+, YouTube and Yelp for starters will assure that whatever negative info suddenly surfaces, it will be easy to squash. Again this is also a wise strategy for sales, marketing and promotions anyway so it is far from being wasted time and wasted money. It is time and money well spent!

*The very best reputation management tip I can give is to get in the habit of asking for testimonials from your happy loyal customers. Then post those testimonials all over the web.

If you need help with Reputation Management contact us for a quick FREE QUOTE!
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