Social media has made brand management a real-time concern. With alerts that can be delivered to your mail box, and analytics data you can gather on your website, you have more control over the kind of content you serve to your users.
Creating a system that remains responsive to customer concerns, especially during times of crisis, is a real challenge any budding business faces. Rather than waiting for things to happen, and charting customer concerns across platforms, be more proactive and take control of your brand’s presence in search and social media.
Blogging and Guest Blogging
SEO, or the practice of optimizing your site for search, is how Brand.com and other reputation management companies help protect brands organically. With news items and location data likely to pop up that could hurt a brand, SEO strategies steer the conversation on the search page in the direction that you want by ranking your pages higher than the competition. Whats better PPC or SEO? Companies are steering more towards the use of SEO being cost effective, whereas PPC is an expensive process for a business to undertake. Opening a company blog and writing keyword rich posts that guide the conversation where you want is one way to accomplish this, more so now with the assistance of specialists just like NGP Integrated Marketing Communications. Growing and establishing your brand is not impossible, or else no one would have been able to make this achievable. There are many routes you can go down to create a successful blog for your business. You can also establish yourself as an expert by guest posting around the web or offer some valuable content to other bloggers and place in-content links to your work. If you think that this is something that you might struggle with by yourself then you can always check out these search engine optimization experts here.
Author box links will also work, but in-content links will provide a much stronger citation.
Press Releases
A newsworthy press release can help put your keyword rich content on the blogs of others looking for news stories. The key is in how you frame your ideas. For instance, offering a new service as a freelancer can be a newsworthy item if you bag your first large client or the service is unique for your niche. Press Releases are less targeted than paying for traffic, but press releases are easy to index. It does cost to distribute a press release, but it’s a fairly cost-efficient way to get your keyword rich content spread around the Web.
Citing and Quoting
Citing is not aiding your competition, if someone else phrases it better use their words and attribute to them. Your audience will appreciate that you took the time to attribute the work to the original owner. In addition to your integrity, you will also probably start a conversation on your Facebook page or blog. If the ideas of others still get your customers talking, you win.
Be Courteous
Conan O’Brien’s motto is “work hard, be kind,” but you could apply it anywhere outside of Hollywood and get the same effect. Courtesy means shelving the knee-jerk responses to customer complaints and coming up with a sound strategy to handle your social media responses. Microsoft Xbox uses multiple people managing the same account to answer customer concerns, providing a different perspective for each customer concern. Large issues are often addressed via blog posts or video announcements, and further feedback comes from surveys and data gathered from how customers use Microsoft products.
It’s on you to devise the best ways to receive feedback from your audience. Get constructive. Look at the analytical data you have access to, in addition to any surveys or email campaigns you might be running. What ways can you improve the customer experience? How can you be more transparent? What can you offer the customer that will be valuable to his or her experience?
Establish a Persona
ThinkGeek uses a nerdy, sarcastic approach to dealing with customers and get frequent retweets. The moral is that you should let your audience know there is a real person behind your social media account, and spread around the word of others before your own ideas. It’s ok to joke around with customers too, but know when to be serious. Facebook and Twitter also incorporate hashtags in their conversations, so search for terms and common hashtags for more conversations you can jump into.
Engage your audience frequently with questions and interesting content. Listen to their comments and improve your campaigns.
