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Why Online Reputation Management Is Essential In 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Reputation Management|Why Online Reputation Management Is Essential In 2021The past year has seen our world truly catapulted into the digital era, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Online shopping for groceries, clothes and other essentials has become more prevalent than ever, and remote working with the help of technology is more widespread increasingly widespread.

Most businesses these days have an online presence, whether that is an e-commerce store or social media accounts, to grow their brand recognition. The internet also allows consumers to provide feedback on your goods or services and have the potential to be viewed by thousands of consumers.

The feedback that your business gets online is crucial to how people see you and your company. No business can forgo this in 2021. Fortunately, there are ways that you can manage your online reputation to ensure that it remains positive and a true reflection of your business.

What Is Your Online Reputation?

Your online reputation is made up of reviews and feedback from customers online. It is also impacted by the content you put out and interactions you have on social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There are many moving parts that contribute to a business’s overall online reputation. Given that the reviews on sites like Google and Trustpilot are often beyond your control, it can be challenging for a company to ensure that its online reputation remains stellar.

Fortunately, there are a number of tools available to help businesses manage and improve their online reputation. You could consider using a combination of these tools to decide which works best for you.

Review Your Online Reputation

The first step to a positive online reputation is to review what is being said about you online. You can do this simply by searching for your business on Google and seeing what kind of results appear.

Regularly monitoring what is being said about you online will help ensure that you can clearly see where your business’s positive and negative feedback is coming from. It may take some time, but you should do your best to review all of the feedback you can find on as many review sites as possible. Make notes of criticism and praise to see if they have any common themes. Learning from criticism, not silencing it, is essential for a positive online reputation.

Stay In The Know

You will need to take steps to know what is being said about your business in the long-term. There are many places online that you may need to keep track of to ensure you are in the loop and up to date on business feedback. You could consider making use of tools like Google Alert. This tool allows you to set specific search term alerts that will notify you when anything mentioning these terms comes up in searches. This can be an excellent way to ensure you are notified of any criticism or negative reviews as soon as possible and puts you in an ideal position to respond promptly.

Decide What You Want Your Reputation To Be

It can help when considering online reputation management to have an idea of what you want your online reputation to look like. For instance, do you want to be seen as experts, as a fun company or down to earth? Take some time to consider how you want to be perceived online, and then make a plan of how you will make that a reality.

Ensure That You Have Control Over Your Online Branding

It would help if you ensure that you have control over any domain names related to your business. Ideally, you should do this as soon as you form a company to protect your brand and ensure that you have access to all domain names you may need in the future.

It is worth securing domain names even on social media sites you don’t envision yourself using. This can ensure that no one else can use them. Third parties using domain names associated with your business can sully the water and create confusion among consumers. It also prevents any potential nefarious activity from being posted under the name of your business.

Get Noticed

You need to be noticed if you want to grow your online reputation. Having little online chatter about your business can often be as off-putting to potential customers as pages and pages of negative reviews.

To gain an online reputation, you will need to focus on reviews and ensuring that they are positive as much as possible. There are many ways to do this, including sending follow-up emails to ask customers to rate their experience and requesting reviews on social media.

You can also use specialist services and tools that can help to cultivate and grow positive reviews. Online review management is an essential service for any business wanting to get noticed among the crowd of today’s digital landscape. If you’d like to know more about the resources available, you can see this tool for an idea of the quality of services out there. Signpost is an industry leader in online review management and is ideal for helping your business gain the recognition it deserves.

Addressing Criticism

Criticism is a natural part of operating in business. You will never be able to satisfy every customer fully, and sometimes mistakes are made. The important thing is not to ignore or try to hide criticism but instead address it head-on. You should do your best to be open and honest when discussing criticism online and provide clear answers to any questions raised.

You can use online criticism as a way to show consumers that you are learning and growing. Demonstrating that you are taking criticism on board will show them that their feedback matters to them and will show you in a better light. Never respond to customer complaints in the heat of the moment. What goes online seldom can be removed permanently, so your response will be there to be read by anyone searching for your business in the future, so you should ensure that it is calm and measured.

Gaining Credibility And Trust

Credibility is essential to any business’s success, and this is particularly true for companies operating online. People entering brick and mortar shops know the person they are dealing with because they can see them face to face. This is not the case online, so you will need to take other measures to gain consumers’ trust and show that you are a credible and reliable business to deal with.

A great way to gain credibility is to show that you have the endorsement of other trusted entities. This could be by displaying accreditation or trustmarks from well-known organizations such as McAfee or PayPal. Trustmarks are given to businesses that pass specific criteria with the provider, so having these displayed on your website or social media profiles can help to instill trust with consumers.

Credibility and trust are crucial factors that customer use to decide if they are willing to purchase a product. You should do what you can to promote your credibility and trustworthiness, which will help to ensure business success.

Content

Content is crucial to business success in 2021. It is one of the best ways to get your brand noticed and ensure that you rank highly in search engines. Content is also a fantastic way to allow your audience and potential customer to get to know you and your business, enabling them to effectively engage and connect with you.

You should ensure that the content you put out is high quality and consistent with your company’s overall tone. It should be relevant and engaging to your target audience. For instance, if your target demographic is teenage girls, you will need an entirely different tone than if you are producing content aimed at middle-aged mechanics.

It would be best if you tried to have a broad range of content for customers to consume. This should include blog posts, photos, videos and tutorials, depending on the products or services your business provides.

Social Media

Social media can be an excellent way to grow your online reputation. This should be approached with caution, however, as social media users can be notoriously fickle. It can be hard to predict the response to social media campaigns, and for as many positive viral corporate Tweets, there are many more negatively received posts.

Social media interactions should always be polite, friendly and straightforward. Depending on your business’s size and resources, you could consider employing someone to be dedicated to social media outreach. If you decide to do this, you should ensure that this person or team knows how you wish your business to be perceived and fully understand the tone that they should approach social media interactions with. You can use humor in your social media interactions, but it should be done carefully and never at a prospective customer’s expense.

Use Partnerships

As with the use of accreditation and trustmarks, you could consider making strategic partnerships as an excellent way to promote and manage your online reputation. There are many options to choose from when considering a partnership, and who you choose will largely depend on your business and target demographic.

Partnering with influencers can be a great place to start. Influencers are social media users with large followings that use this fanbase to promote and discuss products and services. The most well-known influencers are for beauty, fashion and tech, but there are also influencers that specialize in science, sports and almost any topic you can think of.

Experts are another excellent option for business partnerships. The backing of an expert in your business’s industry can do a lot to increase trust in your brand among consumers.

Continuous Improvement

Changing, growing and improving is crucial for any business to succeed. Focusing your attention on your online reputation can help to foster innovation and bring new ideas to the table. Online feedback is an invaluable tool in business growth and development, and when used well, can ensure that you remain at the top of your game.

It could help to take note of the various criticisms or less positive feedback that you get. You can evaluate these and see if there are any ways that you can change the way your business operates or make improvements to your products. For instance, if you receive a lot of less positive feedback about a specific feature or part of a product, you can take this on board and make improvements.

Recruitment

Another advantage of good online reputation management is that having a positive reputation will make your company a highly attractive place to work for potential candidates.

For many job hunters, the first thing they do when considering a role is to do a Google search of the company. Like potential customers, you will want the results to be positive if you are to attract the best talent.

The best talent is crucial for the success of any business, and showcasing an excellent online reputation can be a vital deciding factor for many candidates. You should ensure that your online presence shines, not only to attract customers but also the best and brightest minds that can help you grow and prosper.

Conclusion

A business’s online reputation is crucial to its success in 2021. The online arena is increasingly crowded, with different companies vying for the attention of consumers. An excellent online reputation is vital to ensure that you stand out among the pack. There are many steps that you can take to manage and optimize your business reputation and ensure that it is healthy and positive.

A clear policy for your tone online is crucial to ensuring that you gain a positive online reputation. You should also ensure that you address criticism calmly, professionally and politely. Where possible, showing that you have learned from customer feedback can do a lot to ensure an excellent online reputation.

It may help to enlist the services of professional online reputation management organizations. This can ensure that your online reputation is in the best hands and that you have the advantage of their knowledge and expertise to grow your reputation. If you decide to use professionals, you should ensure that you do your research and choose a company that can provide you with the best chances of success.

Determining Your Objectives In Digital Marketing

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Determining Your Objectives In Digital MarketingThe world of digital marketing is full of terms, some that may sound completely alien to those who are not used to the jargon of this world (such as, for example, KPI). Others may come from everyday language. If you personally saw a phrase like “SEO Austin,” you would know right away that it has something to do with digital marketing. However, you may think everyone knows what they mean, but many people don’t really understand it completely. This can lead not only to misunderstandings in conversation, but also totally wrong communication policies. That is why today, we want to talk about the differences between the concepts of objectives, strategy and tactics.

Quantitative Objectives

The first thing to be clear about is the objectives. There are two main types of objectives; the first is ‘quantitative objectives.’ Quantitative objectives are always measurable since, as their name indicates, they are set in quantities.

  • Increase our blog traffic by 20%
  • Increase web traffic by 100,000 visits per month
  • Get 1000 followers per month on Twitter
  • Make 200 monthly conversions
  • Increase 25% in annual sales

Qualitative Objectives

Qualitative objectives are more subjective and therefore more complicated to measure. Whenever possible, set quantitative objectives (since they are easier to measure) and use qualitative ones in a complementary way.

For example:

  • Improve public perception of our brand
  • Increase brand awareness on social media
  • Improve the image of our product or service

Establishing Objectives

It is essential, to establish our objectives, to have a great knowledge of your business and its environment (the market, the potential client, and the competition). For this, it is essential to carry out an internal and external analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis).

Smart Goals

These objectives should be divided into small intermediate goals, which are known as SMART goals.

Specific: clear and concrete, all members of the team must understand and be on the same page.

Measurable: it has to be measurable, even qualitative ones. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be reached.

Achievable: if we set ourselves an unreachable goal, the team may fall into frustration.

Realistic: in addition to being achievable, it must be realistic with the means at your disposal and considering the current situation of your company.

Timely (limited in time): you have to set a deadline to reach them.

For example, if you want to reach 30,000 visits to your store per year, they could be divided into 10,000 each quarter. This makes it easier to evaluate the results and maintain or correct the course if necessary.

Conclusion

When you work with SEO and marketing professionals like MOTOZA Digital Marketing, objectives are essential to control and measure both strategy and tactical actions and allow you to achieve larger goals. For this reason, it is vital to define short, medium, and long-term objectives.

How To Make A Profit As A Small Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Small Business|How To Make A Profit As A Small BusinessStarting a small business is a fun and exciting, but an overwhelming, task. It takes a lot of patience and practice to get the business right. From the get-go, you will encounter some mistakes or delays due to lack of understanding or not enough time. For those setting up a new business, one thing that will be on your mind is how to make a profit. In this guide, you will discover the best ways to ensure your small business can make a profit.

Ask For Help

Asking for help as a small business is key to ensure you do not do everything by yourself. You will need the advice to expand your knowledge and facilitate further development of your business. Without help, you may suffer a loss by not being able to meet customer needs or know how to market your business correctly.

There are several businesses out there that focus on helping small businesses accelerate and create revenue, such as Stephen Hourigan of Elevate Ventures. Asking for help and advice is not something to be ashamed of. There are experts out there whose job it is to offer support in order to help businesses secure a financial profit.

Make A Business Plan

Market research is the core of a business plan and a business plan is your best protection against business heartbreak.

Of the many reasons to work through a business plan, the main one is this; when you’re done, you’ll know whether or not your proposed business idea can be turned into a profitable small business. When you get your business idea right and know you can stick to the plan, you will more likely stick to targets and be on track for making a profit.

Track Your Finances Regularly

Once you have systems in place for tracking things like time, expenses, and earnings, you need to keep an eye on those things regularly. Analyzing any changes can help you determine what’s working for your business and what isn’t.

Finance tracking is a startup essential that shouldn’t be overlooked. Without accounting for your incomings and outgoings, you will not know how much your business has made or spent. You will also lose track of how much more you need to earn to make a profit.

Ensure You Offer Good Service

A small business can gain a lot from spending time serving customers and meeting their needs. No matter what type of product or service you offer, providing a great experience to customers should always be a top priority. Doing so can help you build repeat business and even gain referrals, which essentially serve as free marketing.

Do everything in your power to absolutely delight your customer. Going above and beyond to deliver an amazing customer experience increases the chance of repeat bookings, and might inspire your customer to recommend your business. These are both positive levers on the unit economic model of a business.

Practicing the Spirit of the Law: Serve Your Customer Better

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Serve your Customer|Practicing the Spirit of the Law: Serve Your Customer BetterWhether through anecdotes or personal experience, we’re all familiar with business leaders who cut corners, inflate prices, make misleading product claims, slander the competition—and worse—yet sleep soundly at night. How can good people persist in bad business practices?

In conjunction with the spirit of the law is your business and personal ethics. Many people see ethics and business as separate entities. This belief is wrong. An individual’s business ethics and personal ethics must be aligned if one is to be a person of integrity. When a person of integrity does business, financial rewards follow.

When we build an ethical reputation, we will increase our profits.There is a positive relationship between business ethics and profitability. Our employees will be more dedicated to doing their jobs efficiently, and our customers will be more satisfied with our products and service. Loyal customers buy more products and give customer referrals.

Human beings are placed on Earth to grow spiritually, and honesty in business provides this challenge. The marketplace is a perfect testing ground for ethics. When this challenge is met, you can take satisfaction in your accomplishments and your legacy. You corrected your unethical behavior and embraced honest, transparent, and trustworthy business practices. Ethics is now taught to the next generation of businesspeople.

The Spirit of the Law

Of course, the letter of the law must always be met. But we should use a higher purpose in business decision-making—the guiding principle of the spirit of the law. A person may act in a way which is perfectly legal but not ethical. The key is to determine if a person’s deeds go beyond the letter of the law and reach the higher ethical standards of the spirit of the law.

After my salespeople learn the foundation of honest selling, I teach the higher levels of ethical selling, to go beyond the letter of the law. One of my favorite teaching examples is a time-honored story about the first offer.

Biblical and Contemporary Examples

It happened that a righteous businessman had some very fine wine for sale and a potential buyer came to him while he was in the middle of his morning prayers. The customer said, “Sell me this wine for such and such price.” The businessman did not answer, so as not to interrupt his prayers. The customer assumed that the businessman was unwilling to settle for the price offered, so the customer increased his original offer and said, “Sell me this wine for such and such price.” Still the businessman did not answer. This cycle was repeated with ever-escalating prices. Upon finishing his prayers, the businessman said, “From the time you made your first offer, I resolved in my mind to sell the wine to you. Therefore, I may take no greater amount than your first offer.”

The sages made this parable an example of proper ethical behavior, stating, “There would have been no question if he had said verbally, ‘I will sell you this for the price you offer,’ but even if he merely resolved silently in his mind to sell his product for the offered price, even if he did not articulate it, he must not go back on that resolution.”

This decision embodies the concept of ‘going beyond the letter of the law,’ to instead conduct your business within the greater spirit of the law, an ideal everyone should strive to emulate. The sages laud the righteous businessman for his exemplary behavior and proclaim the verse ‘speaks truth in his heart.’ The businessman ‘agreed in his heart’ to the original price; his silence was simply misconstrued by the buyer. Of course, making up one’s mind without verbalizing it does not constitute a binding agreement, but resolving to do so demonstrates an unusually high level of ethical behavior.

Two thousand years later in the twentieth century, the owner of a scrap metal business had a policy to always close his business for the Sabbath. The day after the Sabbath, he listened to numerous voice messages from a government agent offering to buy all the scrap metal in his possession for an urgent building project. Each of the buyer’s successive and obviously urgent messages increased the price because the government agent thought the initial offerings must have been too low. When the owner reviewed all the messages, he contacted the agent and explained that he would have accepted the first offer; he had neglected to answer the initial call, as well as all the subsequent calls, only because it was the Sabbath. He then indicated that he was prepared to let the government have all his scrap metal at the price of the first offer. The agent was so impressed by the owner’s ethical behavior that he made the firm extremely wealthy as the government’s main supplier of building materials.

Another example, what would you consider an advertorial? It’s an advertisement camouflaged to appear as a feature article. Is an advertorial legal—yes. But is it ethical?—no! By typesetting and carefully writing an advertisement as an unbiased opinion, the reader is misled, deceived into believing that the content is not commercial.

Print and Website Decision-making

Management should make business decisions based on delivering reader value. Beyond what is legal, does the magazine present promotional material as regular content? Is the ad-to-content ratio correct so the reader is delivered proper value? Does management investigate their advertisers to ensure that they have business integrity, and their product offerings are honest? Even an advertisement that has a negative reference to a competitor can harm your magazine’s or website’s reputation.

In today’s difficult financial times, is it wise to turn away companies willing to place expensive advertisements? Yes—if it is unethical.

When these types of questions factor into your decision-making, you are practicing the spirit of the law. Then, you will enjoy profitable long-term relationships with your readers and advertisers.

Ethical business is smart business. If you’re pondering what to do in difficult sales situation, and you’re unsure about whether it’s your responsibility to provide full disclosure by informing or warning the customer about a product’s limitations, then err on the side of caution, fairness, and goodness—go beyond the letter of the law. It may not be your responsibility legally, but it honors the spirit of the law.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Joel MalkoffJoel Malkoff, a.k.a. the Ethics Giver, demonstrates that ethical business decision-making isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s the profitable thing to do. Over the course of his 45-year career as a business executive and entrepreneur, he has generated more than half a billion dollars in sales. A writer and speaker on ethical business practices and principles, he serves as general manager and vice president of a corporation that manufactures and sells medical and scientific research products worldwide. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lives in Avon, Connecticut, with his wife, Lynn. Selling Ethically: A Business Parable Connecting Integrity with Profits is his debut book. Learn more at https://theethicsgiver.com/selling-ethically and https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Ethically-Business-Connecting-Integrity-ebook/dp/B08KSB9HY3.

What Is The Role Of SEO In Getting Top Page Ranking?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Top Page Ranking|What Is The Role Of SEO In Getting Top Page Ranking?There is continuous competition among different pages online to get a higher page ranking. Different strategies are applied every day after some crucial changes only to get a higher rank than the competitor in the online marketplace.

Those working on their website for a very long period are well known for the SEO and its strategies, due to which they are ranking higher consistently, but newcomers face the issue.

They keep on thinking that the possible reason is that their page is unable to rank. To such people, the answer is SEO. The element missing in their online campaign is the SEO, a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization.

It is important that if you want to rank the website, then it should be properly optimized. If you cannot optimize it, it will be nearly impossible for you to rank your website.

If we take an overview, search engine optimization is just making some changes to your website to increase its visibility and ranking. If we see its importance, it plays an important role in the blog and business ranking online.

Some of the roles are described below in detail.

It Bring The Organic Traffic To The Website

The very first role of the optimization is to bring organic traffic to the website. If a person is looking for some organic growth and wants that their webpage gets some traffic automatically without sending any money, they should go for SEO.

Now there must be a question in your mind that SEO will increase the organic traffic reach, then the answer to this is simple. When a person inserts some keywords in their website as part of SEO, people will search from those words you have inserted in your website.

As they will search than Google start doing its work and see over millions of website. The pages where Google sees the same word as the visitor searched are shown in the Search Engine Result Page. That is why it is said that if your webpage is optimized, then there are high chances that your page shows up on the first page of SERP.

Due To SEO Crawler Will Be Able To Notice The Page Better

The crawler is the device that is used by Google to search among millions of websites published. It is a very simple concept that when a person searches online, then there are many websites out of which the crawler has to find the best content. Now the crawler has categorized the website. It will always ignore the website that has not done its proper SEO. If it is not done, how can good material be expected from such a website?

If your page has informative information, then it is also a waste as the crawler will not read it. It will select some page that has done its proper SEO no matter its information is as good as yours or not. That is why it is important to set it accordingly if you want your page to be noticed by a crawler.

Helps In Proper Advertisement

If you want to advertise your page, you must do SEO of your website; otherwise, the money you are about to invest will waste. People will invest money in advertisement copy but forget that they have to land the customer at their blog at last. That is why if the it is not good, then your first impression will not matter.

That is why it is said that if you want to advertise, get the SEO done first. It will work like a funnel, and every step needs to be smooth in the transition of advertisement to making that viewer a customer in which optimization of blog in the middle portion. You will notice the difference in return on investment with and without the SEO of the website.

It Plays A Major Role In Search Advertisement Ranking

All the marketers must be very well aware that when a page is willing to run a search advertisement, only the money paid is not important. With the bid, they place the score of the page must be high. If the score is low, then if you place a higher bid, you will not get the first position in search advertisement.

That is why to improve the score of the website; there is a requirement for proper SEO. You can contact the Just SEO company to get the optimization done. Now the website’s score will increase, and you will notice that you will get a good position with less money.

It Will Improve The Working Of Your Backlinks

The performance of the backlinks that you form on other websites is also dependable on the SEO that you will do. When you do the off-page SEO, then you add the backlinks to other websites. Now people will come to your website from the third party website. Now there can be two scenarios:-

  • If you have done the proper SEO, then the person who came will become your customer and regularly visit your blog afterward. He will notice that you have done some great work on your blog and are adding value to their life, which is very important for the page’s ranking.
  • The second scenario can be that after reading the backlink article, they get impressed and come to your website. Now, if the optimization is not done, then there will no mean of impression. It will ruin, and they will jump off, due to which the ranking of the site decreases.

Now it is your choice that which is the way you want to chooses for your site. But if you are smart enough, then you should go for the option of SEO. All you need to do is discuss the requirements and goals of yours from the online blog with the service provider, and they will help you make a strategy. After that, you will notice that how the rank of the it will boost up.