One of the most important things a business can have is its name. Just think – you might have the best product in the world, but if everyone talks about it like it’s the worst, no one will know that it’s really as great as it is.
In fact, name is so important it’s quantified as goodwill on balance sheets, and it’s the main reason Nike and Under Armour can charge what they do for their products. This is why reputation management is significant. Imagine offering the nation’s greatest shoe, but being thought the world’s worst shoemaker: The fact of excellence doesn’t matter if everyone’s talking bad about you.
While people tend to skip over positive reviews of products, they really focus on the negative ones. The thing is, people like to assume what they’re buying is good, or else they wouldn’t buy it, so they don’t need others to tell them that it is.
If someone tells them that it’s not, however, they get wary, and this is why just one negative review can suck lots and lots of business away from you, and why it’s important to make sure those negative reviews are answered, or better, invisible.
While it sounds dramatic, the same thing happens every day to small companies around the globe, and even to established ones. BP posted a 66% loss in profit after the negative posts made in the blogosphere about the company after the oil spills a few years back, and many a local shop has been run out of business because of negative word of mouth on local search engines.
If this can happen to big businesses, it can happen to your operation – just imagine the lost business you could suffer because of just a few bad reviews or negative comments next to your search results.
These examples illustrate the need for strong, proactive reputation management. What is reputation management? Ultimately, exactly what it sounds like – a way to ensure your reputation is as it should be, through a variety of methods used to respond to and rebut negativity.
But it’s more than this, as well: Reputation management means more money, more customers, more consumer loyalty, and an easier to run, easier to market business.
Managing reputation by cleaning up bad reviews or refuting negative feedback is the only way to make sure customers know who you really are and are inclined to purchase your products and services. While this sounds good in theory, online reputation management can be difficult to do in your own, which is why it’s necessary to look into reputation management services to do the dirty work for you.
What do reputation management services do? Well, just about everything you’d need them to. The first step is to optimize all of the web pages you’ve published yourself, so that these will pop up first on any searches people might run.
After that, they seek out any and all negative feedback for your organization left by others, and employ a variety of methods to minimize its visibility, and refute, rebut, and respond to it.
This helps people looking for your products and services to find primarily the relevant information you’ve published, and to see both sides of the coin when they come across something negative someone else has published.
This has a number of effects on your customers, both potential and current. In the event that current customers come across negative feedback qualified with a response, they’ll just become more and more loyal to your operation; they know and trust you, and the presence of a response gives them something to latch onto and side with.
That means they’ll be more likely to purchase from you in the future, thus boosting your revenue, and are more likely to spread the word about your business.
In the event that the customers are potential, well-executed online reputation management keeps them away from misplaced negativity and steers them to what they need to see as customers. In the event they do find bad reviews or feedback, they’ll be able to evaluate it in the context they should, so they’ll still be more likely to go to you for goods and services. In either case, reputation management means profits – period.
Reputation management is one of the most overlooked things businesses can do for themselves. It’s important to have good services, but if no one knows your services are great, it doesn’t matter how good they are – so make sure to consider fixing up and maintaining your firm’s reputation as soon as possible.
Doing so will bring it a lot of extra revenue, which means more capital, more profits, and more success – it’s more than worth every penny you’ll spend on a good reputation management service.
