One of the best ways to manage your company’s online reputation is by taking proactive steps to regulate it before any problems even arise. This can be accomplished by simple planning: figuring out your brand’s mission and message, establishing a target audience, and keeping your content consistent to your strategy.
Consistency matters when trying to build up a reputation for your company. A consistent message across all platforms (website, social, email, etc.) will allow you to stay on track not only during the good times, but also in the face of negative reviews.
One of the best ways to create consistency is by establishing a set of guidelines for all team members to follow. These guidelines allow your team members to hear your brand voice and message and use that to communicate with all customers and other individuals.
We’ve listed a few areas to focus on when determining guidelines for your online reputation:
Consistent Brand Visuals and Voice
You should already have a set logo and color scheme you use across all website and print. Be sure to use this in all your other channels such as social and email. This will create a sense of visual consistency.
Consistency of voice is just as important as visual consistency. While it is understandable that you have multiple team members producing content and writing, they still should be presenting the same overall voice in their work.
Try to come up with adjectives that describe your brand. Think BOLD, PLAYFUL, or EDUCATIONAL. By writing with these adjectives in mind, you team members should be able to produce consistency with the voice they use to create content.
Consistency matters in these areas because you want to be recognizable across all platforms. You want someone to be able to visit your website, social accounts, or read an email and be able to recognize they all came from the same company. Staying on top of this will show professionalism and go a long way towards creating a positive reputation for your company.
Consistent Posting and Responses
We’ve talked about the importance of a content calendar to keep your updates, posts, and email on track. Use your calendar to consistently be posting on all your platforms. By doing this, you stay present in people’s minds as a valuable source of information for your industry, which creates a positive reputation.
Staying active, whether it be on social media, emails, or blogs, is another huge part of staying on top of your online reputation. Being active does not just mean posting frequently. It also means responding and interacting with customers and followers on your accounts - not just for negative comments, but also positive comments.
By staying consistent with your responses and your posts, you will be able to establish a positive reputation as a brand that provides valuable information. Not only that, but you will also be able to be thought of as a company that values customers’ comments and replies and uses them to better themselves as a company.
Consistent Topics and Message
A final area of consistency to consider is staying true to your brand message through the topics you choose to write about and the content you create. This doesn’t mean you have to write about the same thing all the time or your stance on things can’t change over time.
Instead it means you as a company are trying to prove yourself as a valuable and educational source of content online. You want to establish a positive online reputation. To do this, you must be consistent with your topic choice as it relates to your industry.
Just because something is popular does not mean you have to talk about it or create content around it if it is not true to your brand message. Being consistent with your topics and your message will build a positive reputation around your brand and the content you produce.
Final Thoughts
If you take the time to build up a positive reputation for yourself online through consistency across the board, it will be much easier for you to defend yourself when the negative reviews do come.
You will be on record as a positive and consistent company rather than a company who is inconsistent with their voice, message, or posting. Because the groundwork has already been laid, you will be able to manage your online reputation with ease.
Quality marketing strategies are a key component to creating a positive online reputation. Our Marketing Metrics Calculator can help you determine the business value of your marketing efforts. Download it here:
