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.
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 brand reputation 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 a 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 reputation management tools
You can get started by monitoring your brand 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.
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 work to build your personal brand online, 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. To begin, you want to explore the best reputation marketing solutions and proactively incorporate the one that works for your business into your content marketing plan. By doing so, you can own Google Page 1 for your brand which can help to keep potential bad reviews off of Google Page 1. If you end up needing a reputation management program to deal with posted bad reviews, it can become an expensive project. The Brand Velocity Program can help you to establish a strong personal brand online, as well as help you to build rapport online with potential customers. You can also visit the Brand Velocity training page to explore the course modules.
Key Takeaways
- Even one bad review can have a negative impact on your personal brand. To combat this, you need to have an effective online reputation management strategy. It’s become essential for building a successful personal brand online.
- Your brand reputation refers to how people perceive your personal brand. This includes potential customers, business partners, investors, and even the media. Information posted online can be seen for years, so your personal brand and reputation are at risk when anyone can post a bad review online.
- Brand Reputation Management is comprised of both reputation marketing and reputation management. Reputation marketing is a proactive approach to building your brand online through content marketing activities. Reputation management helps to restore and sustain your reputation if bad reviews are ranking and visible to potential customers.
- A good reputation management strategy includes monitoring your brand online, proactively and incorporating an effective reputation marketing plan. This helps to build a solid online personal brand. Also, it’s important to garner customer reviews.
- There are free online tools including Google Alerts and Talkwalker. They will monitor your brand mentions based on the keywords and URLs you provide.
- When responding to negative reviews it’s important to be professional and not be argumentative. You should read the negative review objectively and if true, provide the corrective action that you did to fix the issue. If you don’t recognize the person(s) who posted the review, indicate this in your response and ask them to contact you offline to discuss it. You should make it a regular practice to encourage customers to post positive reviews and showcase them on your website.
FAQs
Reputation matters because it impacts how people perceive and interact with you or your personal brand. A positive reputation can lead to increased trust, customer loyalty, and business growth, while a negative reputation can hurt your business.
Brand reputation marketing focuses specifically on building and promoting a positive reputation for your brand. This involves actively engaging in a content marketing plan while monitoring and responding to customer feedback. Additionally, it involves addressing negative reviews, and highlighting your positive reviews.
Reputation management is important because it helps to maintain or improves the perception people have about your personal brand. It’s important to monitor what’s being posted online about you including reviews. You need to proactively address anything negative that’s posted, and promote the positive feedback you receive to ensure there’s a positive view of your reputation.
Reputation management in social media involves monitoring and managing your personal brand’s online reputation on your associated social media platforms. This includes responding to posted comments and reviews. You need to proactively and professionally respond to negative feedback, and share your positive reviews on your social media profiles.
Reputation marketing focuses on proactively building a positive reputation through a content marketing and promotion plan. Reputation management involves actively managing and maintaining your reputation online and dealing with posted negative reviews and comments that can hurt your brand and business.
A reputation marketing campaign is a marketing activity designed to promote a positive reputation for your personal brand. This can include content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.
Online reputation management involves monitoring your personal brand’s online mentions and reviews. It also proactively addresses any posted negative feedback and promotes your positive experiences to ensure a positive online reputation. This can include a combination of activities such as search engine optimization, social media promotion, and online review management.