Digital marketing as a strategy has been around for quite some time, tracing back to the 1990s. Since then, the market has been growing, with global digital ad spending projected to reach $701.22 billion in 2023.
Knowing where to focus your ad spend, however, is crucial to any digital marketing campaign, which relies heavily on understanding your target audience and how they view your brand.
But before we delve into how to create digital marketing campaigns to boost your reputation and build trust, we’ll look at:
- What is online reputation marketing?
- How can you make reputation-focused campaigns?
- Should you pivot towards these strategies?
Let’s dive in.
What Is an Online Reputation Marketing Strategy and What Are Reputation-Focused Campaigns?
First, we need to answer the question: What is online reputation marketing?
An online reputation marketing strategy is an exercise where you’ll send “email and SMS to get better reviews or customer survey results,” said Tim Clarke, Rize Reviews’ Senior Reputation Manager.
Online reputation marketing is an integral part of digital marketing that focuses on building and maintaining a positive online presence.
It involves creating, curating and managing content to shape public opinion about you or your business.
The goal is to create an up-to-date, professional profile that accurately reflects your brand and its values.
Reputation-focused digital marketing campaigns take this one step further by proactively influencing customers’ perceptions of your brand.
These campaigns can promote positive customer experiences, highlight product features and benefits and more.
Reputation-focused digital marketing campaigns focus on the following:
- Optimizing your website’s content and structure.
- Developing a comprehensive approach to social media engagement.
- Using paid advertising and influencer marketing campaigns to reach new audiences.
- Creating content that positions you as an authority in your industry.
Clarke said you’ll leverage customer emails, SMS and surveys to ask for reviews in these campaigns and then use those reviews to craft a marketing message.
These campaigns can be used to target specific audiences or, more generally, boost brand reputation.
Why You Need Reputation Management as Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy
You might be wondering why brand reputation management is so vital for your marketing campaigns.
The answer is simple.
People’s perceptions of your brand directly impact their purchasing decisions.
If you manage brand reputation by creating positive customer experiences and building a strong, reliable online presence, you can increase trust in your business and improve customer satisfaction.
1. Increase Your Credibility in Campaigns
To manage brand reputation is to build trust with potential customers so they feel comfortable buying your product or service.
You can build credibility and increase consumer confidence in your brand by showcasing real-life examples of how your product or service has helped others.
This can massively improve customer satisfaction and sales since people are more likely to purchase from companies they trust.
2. Gain Better Insights Into What Your Customers Want
Another benefit of having a good reputation management strategy in place is that it gives you better insights and “business intelligence. Reputation-focused campaigns will help businesses “understand all the customer issues better,” Clarke said.
Through listening to feedback and monitoring conversations around your brand, you can better understand what people like about your product or service.
This information can shape future strategies and campaigns, allowing you to improve online reputation by delivering a quality customer experience.
3. Protects Your Brand Against Negative Reviews and Criticism
No one likes hearing criticism, especially when it comes from an unhappy customer who was disappointed with the product or service they received from your business.
While not all criticism is valid (and some might even be malicious), handling it correctly is critical to maintaining a good relationship with existing and potential customers.
Responding quickly and professionally to complaints shows potential customers that you care about their experience, which helps maintain trust in your brand even when things don’t go perfectly every time.
4. Establish Trust With Potential and Current Customers
You can improve online reputation and establish trust between you and your customers by demonstrating that you care about their opinions and experiences.
People are more likely to buy from brands they trust.
Suppose they know that their feedback will be taken seriously and addressed promptly. In that case, they’re even more likely to choose them over competitors who don’t offer this level of engagement or responsiveness.
Examples of Digital Marketing Campaigns That Leveraged Reputation Marketing
Now, let’s look at some good examples of digital marketing campaigns that successfully use an online reputation marketing strategy.
Paramount (ViacomCBS)
Seeing potential in using customer reviews and feedback as a springboard for improved advertising strategies, Paramount (ViacomCBS) took an interesting approach to understand their U.K. market.
By scouring 20 different review sites, they gathered data from over 4,000 products, allowing their leadership team to create new campaign strategies based on the insights derived from customer experiences.
This forward-thinking approach demonstrated the importance of paying attention to corporate reputation management and showcased data-driven decisions, making it one of the best examples of digital marketing campaigns.
New England Neurological Associates
When the New England Neurological Associates (NENA) wanted to generate more reviews for their business and doctors, they knew they needed to implement strategic steps.
What they did made them one of the perfect examples of digital marketing campaigns that leveraged corporate reputation management.
Over the next 294 days, NENA focused on unearthing customer experiences and collecting feedback to create an accurate representation of their medical practice.
As a result, NENA generated 121 new reviews and significantly improved the score for 12 out of their 15 doctors.
Their efforts paid off, signifying that a committed approach to reputation marketing can lead to substantial growth.
All Pro Door Repair
All Pro Door Repair recognized a need to improve its corporate reputation management and review acquisition process to increase its average star ratings and improve online reputation.
The company developed a simple yet effective solution – a review landing page.
By providing their clients with an easily accessible platform for sharing reviews, they managed to kill two birds with one stone.
Not only did the new review landing page streamline the process of collecting valuable feedback, but it also led to a considerable improvement in their star rating, jumping from an average of 3.0 to 4.6 across various review sites.
5 Tips for Developing Your Reputation-Focused Campaigns
You can use several strategies to develop an effective reputation management campaign. If you’re still starting out, here are some tips on how to build your reputation in marketing.
Tip #1: Define Your Brand Reputation Goals
Before you start building a digital marketing campaign, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of what your goals are.
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Build trust with your customers? Become an industry leader in a specific area?
Once you have clearly defined what you are trying to achieve, it will be easier to create an action plan to help you meet those goals.
Tip #2: Analyze and Monitor Your Online Presence
Another crucial part of how to build your reputation in marketing is analyzing and monitoring your online presence. This means keeping tabs on all the mentions of your brand across the Internet, including the following:
- Social media platforms
- Forums
- Review sites
Doing this regularly lets you track what people say about your brand and take appropriate action if anything negative pops up.
You should also look at how much engagement each post receives, as this will give you insights into what types of content resonate with your customers most.
Tip #3: Sending Emails and SMS to Your Customers
Utilizing online reputation management services like emails and SMS messages to your clients is an excellent way to develop credibility.
Reaching out in this manner allows you to remind customers of the products or services you offer and request feedback and reviews.
“You’ll improve your public profiles over time if this is done correctly,” Clarke said.
Leveraging these review response management tools and widgets can help you proactively deal with all sorts of customer reviews before they cause too much damage.
This is also an excellent opportunity to start meaningful conversations with your customers and improve customer satisfaction.
Tip #4: Identify Influencers and Amplifiers
Influencers and amplifiers are essential in any successful digital marketing and brand reputation management campaign.
They can help spread the word about your brand by talking positively about it or sharing related content.
Identifying influencers who already have an established following within the industry or niche related to yours is one way to get more eyes on your content and increase brand awareness quickly.
Amplifiers are also crucial since they help amplify the reach of each post by sharing them on their own networks – which can lead to even more engagement from new audiences.
Tip #5: Leverage Online Reputation Management Services and Tools
There’s no better way to protect your online reputation than to be proactive.
This means leveraging services like Rize’s review monitoring and review response management services.
These services will help you monitor what people say about your brand, alert you when there are negative comments and give you tools to respond quickly and effectively.
Being able to respond quickly to negative feedback or reviews is vital as it shows customers that you care about their experience while also giving you an opportunity to explain yourself if needed.
Enhance Your Online Reputation Marketing With Rize
There’s no need to be intimidated by the idea of reputation-focused campaigns.
With the right strategies and tools, you can easily create a successful digital marketing campaign that will help enhance your brand’s online presence and ultimately increase customer trust in your products or services.
Rize offers white-label and other comprehensive reputation management solutions that make it easy for businesses of all sizes to protect their online reputation and build lasting relationships with customers.
Our team of experts will take care of all the technical aspects, so you don’t have to worry about setting up campaigns or tracking results – we do it all for you!
Contact us today or call us at 866.325.0303 to learn more about how Rize can help grow your business.
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