With the speed at which information travels online these days, it is no wonder that managing a company's reputation can be challenging and time-consuming. Social media and many popular review sites have put customers in the driver's seat when it comes to a business trying to develop a positive impression, since it is the customer's input that others will rely upon when deciding to do business with a company. So it is always going to be a wise choice to use reputation marketing to create a company's best impression. If there is more good to be said than bad, this will certainly have a positive impact on a company - and increased sales can be seen thanks to the free marketing current customers can provide.

Strategy Development - Generating and Preserving A Good Reputation

Basically, developing a strategy for marketing and monitoring reputation is simply coming up with an ordered list of action to be initially taken as well as a list of actions to maintain what is achieved. Naturally, the first item on any list is to give customers excellent service and products - basically, something to positively talk about. The rest is then all about getting good reviews and testimonials.

Every business can experience an occasional bad review; the focus should be on collecting the most positive reviews as possible to promote and significantly outweigh the bad. The best way to get the most reviews is to ask for them, whether it is with a feedback link on a website, a poll, or an emailed survey that is sent to customers asking for opinions about the product, service, etc. - just get as many as possible. All good ones that are received should then be visible to the rest of the public on the company's website in a prominent location such as Testimonials; they can also be posted on other websites that handle such reviews.

There is nothing wrong with directing happy customers to some of the popular review sites and asking them to post a review there, maybe offering some free product or service in return. This will require companies to claim ownership of their business on these sites in order for such reviews to have the greatest impact, a fact that is unknown to most companies. Go to those websites, claim ownership of the company's profile by providing all possible accurate information, then publicize such internet review locations. Some can be claimed free while others may require a small fee; however, it does add an element of control to all marketing efforts.

Practice Good Intervention When Necessary

After a steady stream of positive reviews has been established and testimonials have been included on the company website, monitoring for poor reviews must become the main concern. Actually, monitoring for poor reviews should start from Day 1; however, watching regularly for such comments is essential. Great ways to find them include regularly visiting review sites, following back links to other websites, and setting up alerts within Google to have a notification sent whenever that company's name appears online.

After a marketing strategy has begun, the other step is to find any negative reviews as suggested above, review them, and then decide how to proceed. Some customers can be appeased by being contacted, listening to their problem, and then making some kind of effort to fix the problem. Other times, it may be wisest to ignore a benign comment that can easily be buried behind more good ones. Just be sure to use every negative review as a learning experience so that such negative reviews will gradually disappear.

In a nutshell, the basic relationship between increased sales and reputation are simple: good service and happy customers will always equal more publicity and more sales. One is directly related to the others; by starting the whole process with good business practices and reputation marketing, the last part of the process can be reached more quickly than might be perceived!