How Reputation Management Can Play a Big Role in a Company’s Marketing Strategy

Business owners and executives will often associate reputation management with crisis management, meaning they don’t have to address it until there’s already a problem.

However, in today’s world with consumers having immediate and total access to information, it changes how businesses should approach their reputation and online presence.

Reputation, as it represents the sum of all comments, mentions, recommendations and reviews across an increasing number of online platforms, shouldn’t be viewed as a problem centre, but an added value centre for businesses. The online reputation on a personal or professional level heavily impacts almost every side of our lives.

Increasingly, brands and business owners recognize this fact: every day, their reputation is bringing opportunities to their doorstep or diverting them to their competitors.

As a result, it’s no longer sufficient to think about reputation management like we think about crisis management. Reputations have become a competitive advantage for any business that does it properly and is an asset that generates growth and long term sustainability. It’s as if reputation management is transforming into reputation marketing.

Transitioning Reputation Management into Marketing

It is somewhat untypical to think about reputation as a marketing channel. A brand’s reputation generally stems from what others say about it. The “voice of the consumer” however is not something you can buy or control.

Since the appearance of advertising, marketers have used customer word of mouth strategies to achieve better results. The novelty nowadays is how the digital world provides the power of the word of mouth technique a hundred-fold amplification.

Yes, you might have already heard you have to be on social media and in the search engine results pages, but this transformation can go beyond this. Online review sites like Google, Yelp, Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Angel’s List have become go-to platforms for consumers seeking to discover and evaluate companies, products and services. Consumers will place their trust more often in what other consumers like themselves have to say, than they would place in a promotional ad or other marketing material.

Therefore online reviews have a huge impact on customers’ perception and buying behaviour. So if you want to leverage your reputation for marketing purposes, start with customer reviews: that’s where your efforts will provide your business with the most impactful results.