Negosentro.com | Online or digital reputation is essential to achieve a successful startup business. A solid online presence makes your business visible to your target audience. Whether you want to promote your business to young professionals or older adults, there are so many online channels you can use to make a significant impact on your startup or established business. Some good examples include social media platforms, review sites, and directly through your website.
In this post, you’ll learn how your online reputation can affect your business, so you can make better business decisions to achieve your business goals.
Increases People’s Brand Awareness
Your online presence has a great impact on your brand visibility and people’s awareness of your business. Consumers can seek review sites, like Google Reviews and Angie’s List or community forums, like Quora, as well as social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, to find information about your company. Whether positive or negative feedback or comment, the mere fact that people are talking about your business is a good indicator that your business exists.
But of course, you want to establish a good online reputation to increase people’s awareness about how great your products and services are, giving them good reasons to do business with you. So, how can your business increase brand awareness and make an impact on consumers?
Here are some tips to increase brand awareness and establish a good online reputation:
- Be Responsive: Whether you have received good or bad comments about your business, it’s important to be responsive to your target audience. Show appreciation to those who admire and promote your brand, and show concern to those who complain about your products and services.
- Resolve: Take every negative feedback as an opportunity to improve your products and services, and don’t take it personally. Instead, reach out to your customers and ask some helpful suggestions to improve your business. By doing so, you’ll reach out to a win-win solution.
- Be Active: Show your target customers that you’re always active online by regularly posting helpful and engaging content on your website or social media fan page. Your consistent presence will be reciprocated over time, increasing your brand visibility and boosting your digital presence.
Increases Your Credibility and Trust Rating
How can you trust someone you rarely see, feel, or notice, right? It also holds the same with an online presence. Consumers should be able to access information about your company easily, not only through your website but also other online channels.
For instance, claiming your business listing ensures that your most important business information (like business name, physical address, and contact information) is correct. It increases your credibility and trust rating because of good user experience brought about by easy access every time a user tries to call you on your business phone number.
Here’s how to claim a business listing to help improve your online reputation:
- Go to Google My Business or business.google.com/add.
- Enter your business’s name and physical address.
- Search your business from the search results. Nest, click ‘Continue,’ and a message will appear, saying that someone else has verified the business profile.
- You can claim and confirm the business profile if it shows that it hasn’t claimed yet.
- After that, you can click on ‘Request access.’
- Fill out the form and click ‘Submit.’
Note: The existing profile owner ill be notified and asked to contact you. After this, you’ll be receiving a confirmation email. Since claiming back your business listings can take time, the only way to have control over what’s happening online is by hiring a reputation management specialist. In that way, you can safeguard your online reputation and your business.
Boosts Your Marketing Efforts
Your online identity reflects your brand, and having a great digital presence can help improve your marketing efforts. If more people are aware of your business, it will be easier for you to market your products and services. That’s why you need to earn online reviews.
Positive reviews would mean good products and excellent services, and more consumers will be more attracted to your brand. On the other hand, negative reviews would mean needing areas of improvement, such as packaging, content ingredients, or customer service. Both positive and negative reviews are crucial to making business decisions to improve and make your business more successful.
Here are some examples of digital marketing strategies and how your online reputation can boost these marketing efforts:
- Social Media Influence: The more active you are in social media, the more people will notice you. You can take advantage of Facebook Ads to direct ads or send messages to your target audience, specifically to those who already browsed your website or viewed your ads.
- Video Marketing: Your online presence can benefit your number of views because the more followers you have on your social media fan page or the more loyal customers you have, the more people you can attract to watch your videos on YouTube and other video marketing platforms.
- Email Marketing: Because of improved online presence, sending emails to your target audience is a lot easier. Of course, expect a higher subscription rate to your newsletters and improved email responsiveness.
Thrive and Become More Competitive
Whether you have a startup or an established business, having a good online presence will help you thrive and become more competitive. When people are talking about you, it’s a good sign that they are aware of your existence. However, you don’t want your online presence to be ruined because of plenty of negative reviews.
More than the tools, managing your online reputation entails technical knowledge and expertise. That’s why if you want your business to maintain a good online presence, consulting a reputation management consultant is a good idea. By doing so, you’ll be helped in managing positive and negative reviews, like review response, modification, and removal.
Conclusion
Having a great online reputation will help you increase people’s awareness of your brand. Also, it helps increase your credibility and trust rating so more people will avail of your products and services. Most importantly, a good online presence will help you attain your business goals because of improved marketing efforts. Lastly, having a good online presence will help you secure your spot in the competitive world of business and your target audience’s hearts and minds.
