Reputation Management Builds Better Brands
It’s a strange phenomenon, but unfortunately, when customers have a negative experience, they’re 21% more likely to talk about it than when they have a positive experience.
Your company’s brand is only as strong as its reputation. That’s why you need a reputation management company like Incite Creative.
How can we help you?
Think about when you found a bedbug in your hotel room or a product you purchased online took two months to arrive and came broken.
At a minimum, you complained about it to your immediate family. If you wanted some consolation from the service provider, you contacted the customer service manager. And if you were upset, you went online and posted a negative review. Any of these word-of-mouth scenarios will negatively impact the company’s reputation.
Now let’s look at the opposite situation. What if you arrived at your hotel room to find a personalized welcome package and flowers? Or after your product arrived in the mail, you received an email from the owner asking if everything arrived on time and intact? You may be inclined to share the experience with a travel companion or housemate. Still, you may not feel motivated to jump on a social media platform to share your endorsement.
Our Reputation Management Plan
At Incite Creative, we work with our clients to develop reputation management strategies that minimize the damage to their brand when there is negative content and maximize benefits when there is positive content.
Our process includes understanding the buyer’s journey and their rational and emotional expectations. We also discuss what happens when those expectations aren’t met, and negative feedback ensues — the response to be given and how to deescalate a situation.
Effectively managing your online reputation involves juggling and managing the types of content that can be found about your brand online. Our marketing strategy includes a combination of owned, paid, and earned media.
- Owned Media: is what you own and control, such as your website and social media platforms
- Paid Media: is advertising you have paid a third party for, such as Google AdWords, on websites or social media
- Earned Media: is made up of reviews that people write about you, articles that are written about you without any money changing hands, or comments on your content — and people trust it more so because it’s a form of social proof. Social proof is the idea that consumers will adapt their behavior according to what other people are doing, saying, thinking, and feeling about a brand, product, or service.
Reputation Management Technology
We have had the pleasure of working with clients across several different industries.
As a CMO, we have conducted thorough assessments of numerous industry-specific reputation management tools to monitor and manage online reviews. Although most of them work similarly, some are better than others, and some have a better understanding of the customer journey per industry.
Let’s take hospitality, for instance. The goal is to listen to, learn from, and earn from your guests. And the quicker you can be made aware of feedback, the better chance you have to address it before it escalates. That’s where being proactive is beneficial.
Conduct Surveys
The use of surveys can help you understand the guest experience from their perspective. In their own words, they can tell you what’s working and what isn’t so you can make the right operational decisions.
Survey feedback will also give you a pulse on that particular guest’s thoughts, feelings, needs, and wants to help guide future personalization tactics. Additionally, you can determine from the survey if that guest is ready to leave a positive review. If your team has some making up to do, best to do so as quickly as possible until the guest is satisfied with the resolution, then ask for a review. That simple interim step likely pushed you from a 2-star review to a 4-star review.
And the more reviews, the better. Why? Because more (positive) reviews + better management responses = more trust + more revenue.
Online Reputation Management Dashboard
Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily obtain more online reviews and have them all collected, analyzed, and optimized in a single dashboard?
Fortunately, you can. However, not all dashboards are created equally. That’s one of the many areas Incite Creative’s CMO services to benefit our clients.
We have experience with several different dashboards, and some are better suited for specific industries. Why spend your valuable time demoing countless technology solutions when we’ve already done the work for you?
Some dashboards also come with additional features such as:
- Sentiment analysis: See at a glance how many of your guests left positive, negative or neutral reviews online
- Easy responses: Respond quickly and efficiently to reviews with links straight from your dashboard
- Competitor benchmarking: Benchmark your performance against that of your competitors
How Review Sites Impacts Search Results
According to the Moz Search Ranking Factors Survey, online reviews make up 13% of the search engine decision-making process.
When factoring online reviews into algorithms, metrics such as the number of reviews, the velocity, and the diversity of reviews, are all taken into account. Think of online reviews as crowd-sourced recommendations – a four- or five-star review tells search engines they can confidently show your company’s website or other SEO’d content in a high-visibility location.
That’s why it’s essential to have a CMO like Incite Creative provide social media monitoring and reputation management services on a proactive, consistent basis.
The CMO team at Incite Creative helps clients manage their brand reputation.
We accomplish this by setting up a reputation management system that includes monitoring, Google alerts, and a protocol for how we’ll communicate with our clients, and in turn, how they’ll interact with customers in response.
