Manage Your Online Reputation with These Reputation Marketing Insights

In today’s wired world, it’s vital for businesses and business owners to maintain a clean online reputation. In the past, most business owners could count on news traveling slowly, which gave them ample time to formulate a plan to counteract negative publicity.

These days, however, anyone can post negative reviews, comments, and other unsavory content about you and your business, which could negatively impact your reputation and bottom line. Fortunately, reputation marketing news sites like Marketing Digest can arm you with the insights and tactics you’ll need to counteract negative publicity.

Amanda Clark, writing for Business 2 Community (@B2Community), notes that in a world dominated by the Internet, computers, and smartphones, you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of your leads and prospects are going to Google you. “People want to know that they’re spending their hard-earned money on something reliable. And for better or worse, they trust Google to tell them that,’ noted Clark.

Consequentially, the information about you and your business that shows up on the first page of Google matters a lot. Since people rarely look beyond the first page of the SERPs, as much as possible you need to ensure that positive information about you and your business shows up on the first page of Google.

Another article written by Anton Koekemoer for Memeburn (@memeburn) offers more actionable reputation marketing insights. He suggests performing a simple search about your brand on Google and other search engines to give you a general impression of your online reputation. What stood out about your brand on the search results? Was the information up-to-date and accurate? Based on the information found on the search results, would you patronize your business if you were a prospect?

While you cannot exactly control the information that shows up on the search results (though you can ask webmasters to take down defamatory blog posts, comments, and similar content), you can counteract negative publicity by publishing positive content about your brand and yourself.

Online reputation management is not an isolated discipline, as it blends elements of traditional marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, public relations, and other digital marketing tactics to improve the positive reputation of your brand.

You need to create plenty of great content—in the form of blog posts, press releases, articles, and others—to ensure that the various online channels and search results are flooded with positive content about your brand. While you cannot always remove negative content about yourself and your brand online, you can ensure that the positive content about you outweighs the negative content. This way, you can shape the way leads, prospects, and existing customers regard you and your business.

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