There are 3 elements to success in today’s internet marketing. All three work together to increase the likelihood of your website earning positive reviews.
Internet Marketing Your success is directly related to the quality of your internet marketing. 99% of businesses who claim that internet marketing doesn’t work hire ‘marketing’ companies that work for pennies an hour, and follow 5 year old strategies they copied from e-books. There is more to internet marketing than SEO. Think of marketing as a tier. The success of each level is dependent on every tier below it. Any weaknesses effect all the tiers above. The filter also works backwards. One bad customer experience can undermine the Reputation Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and the company’s future growth.
Sales, Revenue, Business Growth
- Reputation Marketing, Your Reputation
- Customer Service, Business’s Engagement
- SEO, Local, Media, Mobile – Controlling Ranking
- Analytics, Data, and Ranking – Google Knowledge base
- Website Design, Responsive Templates, functional Platform
- Company, Business Growth and Strength, Product Quality and Branding
You’ll notice that the second tier to the top is reputation marketing. This tier depends on good customer reviews.
1. Reputation
Any type of online marketing that doesn’t filter down to the company’s reputation is flawed. There are several catch phrases and terms that encompass the task of building your company’s reputation.
- Reputation Marketing
- Branding
- Trending
- Accountability
- Social Influencers and Crowd-sourcing
- Brand Behavior
- Customer Service
It doesn’t matter where you start, or what elements of this list you focus on, the end result will have a direct impact on your company’s reputation, and in turn, sales.
2. Customer Focus
This is the most important factor. Good customer experiences will earn your company good reviews, but giving customers a good experience is only part of the task. After you work hard to make sure your customers are happy then it is time to encourage them to leave a review – without being intrusive.
It isn’t a secret that customers who are happy are less likely to leave a review than customers who are unhappy. This is why it is good to discuss methods of ‘none intrusive’ ways to make it easy for customers to leave a review.
Even stronger than a review is to engage in an online conversation with consumers. Accepting the fact that most business owners understand the importance of good reviews, it is surprising that so few websites make it easy to leave a review.
3. Retain Customers
It is cheaper to resell, or up sell to a current customer than it is to find and engage a new customer. If websites that make it easy to leave reviews are rare, then sites that have tools to retain customers are even rarer.
One of the easiest ways to retain customers is to offer customer loyalty incentives. Not only will offering a customer loyalty plan improve the opportunities to make a sale in the future, they increase the opportunity to encourage consumers to leave a good review.