Fibre Marketing

Category: Brand development

6 Quick Steps to Build A Reputation Management Plan

Posted on by Chloe

With the UK economy fighting to get back on its feet after the coronavirus, there’s never been a better time to build a reputation management plan and use your customer feedback to its full potential.

Your online brand reputation is everything when it comes to growing a successful, highly profitable business. When your branding is strong, feedback is positive, and you’re seen as a business that cares about their customers, you’re more likely to make sales, grow your customer base, and stand out online.

Without further ado, here are six quick steps you should take right now to improve your brand reputation.

1. Monitor your brand reputation online

Above all else, you need to be listening to what people are saying about your business online. It’s the step that underpins every part of your brand reputation management plan and without it, your efforts will be a waste of time.

These days, reviews influence people’s buying decisions heavily. Before they make a purchase of any kind, whether this is buying an expensive camera upgrade or simply choosing which new novel to download to their Kindle, they’re almost certain to check out those reviews online.

According to Inc.com, a massive 91% of consumers take reviews into consideration before buying and as surprising 84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

With this in mind, your first mission is to find out where people leave you reviews and feedback and start monitoring them. Typical places include:

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Yelp
  • TripAdvisor
  • Trustpilot

There are also several specialist review sites such as rateragent.co.uk (for estate agents), solicitor.info (for solicitors), removalreviews.co.uk (for home moves) across numerous industries. It’s important to understand if there are similar sites in your sector and monitor them often.

Once you’ve done this, start looking at what they’re saying. Are there any points that keep being mentioned? What appear to be the strengths of your business from the eyes of your customers or clients? What could be your weaknesses?

2.  Find branded search terms and create content

Your brand reputation isn’t just built from those kinds of online reviews. There are also plenty of long-form websites, web pages and blog posts that either review your product or services and even compare them against your competitors.

Mentions of this kind can positively influence your search rankings, drive more traffic to your website and boost your brand image. But only if they’re accurate and preferably show your business in a favourable light.

So what do you do if you find branded content about your business that isn’t so great? You have two options:

1) You contact the site directly and ask them to make changes.

This feels like the easiest, most cost-efficient approach to take but this often isn’t the case.

Although most site owners are friendly and helpful, many just ignore these kinds of emails or ask that you rework and change the piece in question. This can translate to lots of extra work for you and lots of back and forth communication which takes time and money.

2) You create your own branded content and outrank them

By far, this is the most savvy option because you’ll have full control over what you publish. You’ll be reaching out directly to your audience, addressing their questions and queries in an accurate way, and sharing your brand values with them. This translates to a better buyer experience and a better reputation for you as a business.

As industry experts Content Marketing Institute says, “Because these content pieces are often focused on establishing thought leadership, raising awareness, and generating positive brand perceptions, they are more likely to be viewed as worthy of the audience’s trust and attention as compared to more product- and pitch-driven formats like digital ads.”

However, it’s important not to create content that sounds too biased or salesy. Your audience will see straight through it and you could end up unintentionally harming your brand image.

3. Plan how you will respond to negative comments

The fact is, you’re almost certain to receive at least a couple of negative reviews or comments about your product or service, even if you get 5 starts the rest of the time.

For that reason, you should devise a strategic and effective plan on how to respond so that you can take control of the situation and use it to your advantage.

Done right, those less than stellar reviews can be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to your customers and clients. Here’s how you can develop your plan.

Step 1: Decide who will be in charge of monitoring the review sites and comments.

Keep it simple- usually it’s best to choose someone from your marketing department or in customer service. Make sure this person understands what is expected of them, which sites they need to monitor, and so on.

Step 2: Decide what your response should be?

Whether you’re responding to positive or negative feedback, you should have a clear vision of what your response will be. Wherever possible, develop in-house guides that outline exactly what this should be, including template responses where necessary.

Step 3: Decide what happens if the query is out of the ordinary.

If your business is faced with a trickier issue that needs resolving, your designated person should understand what he or she needs to do. Who should they turn to for assistance? Do they have any power to resolve issues without first gaining approval from another member of the team?

Step 4: Decide who delivers the response.

Your business needs a designated person who will answer any feedback. This is likely to be the same person who monitors the feedback, but this isn’t always the case. Ensure that this person understands their responsibilities and is made aware of the overall complaint response plan.

4. Address negative comments

Many businesses feel tempted to ignore those negative comments and hope that the positive ones will push them out of sight.

Not only is this extremely hard to do (you’d need 40 positive reviews to undo the damage done by just one) you’d also be sending a subliminal message to your customers that you don’t care. In turn, this will severely impact vital branding factors such as trust and brand perception.

That’s why it’s important to acknowledge it and do what you can to fix the problem.

Yes, this can feel slightly uncomfortable. No one likes dealing with criticism.

But by acknowledging and responding to your negative feedback, you can show your listening and resolve those issues. Act quickly, use the framework you developed earlier to guide your response and above all else, be friendly, professional and polite

5. Use the positives to build your brand reputation

When you’re creating your reputation management plan, consider how your business will respond to positive feedback too. If you can do this effectively, you can make the positives work harder and give your brand reputation a well-deserved boost.

“…high-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.” agrees the Google team on their support page.

Here are a few tips that can help:

  • Decide on your response to positive feedback. This doesn’t have to be anything overly complex. Just thank your customer for their kind words and make your response as unique as you can.
  • Ask your customers for feedback as often as possible and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Added incentives for reviews can also be highly effective.
  • Monitor the review sites frequently. The faster you can be with your response, the better your business will appear.

6. Track your results

Monitor your online presence and keep an eye on the ranking of your branded content once you’ve put your reputation management plan into place.

Track any changes as they happen and schedule regular reviews so you can assess whether you need to tweak your approach. If you’ve done your homework, your star ratings should improve, you should see more positive feedback and your brand reputation should see significant improvements.

Plan-respond-track

Building an effective reputation management plan does require careful consideration and you need to be willing to actively engage with your customers to get optimum results.

Be friendly, be willing to listen, be willing to adapt and improve your offerings and you will create a stronger, more profitable brand.

How To Future-Proof Your Website Against Black Friday Mayhem

Posted on by Ella

Black Friday has become increasingly popular in the UK over recent years and the number of consumers partaking in the furore of discounts and sales grows year on year. In fact, sales are expected to top £7 billion this year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the UK alone. What’s more, e-commerce platforms generate 300% more sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday than on an average day in November. No business can afford to miss out on this incredible opportunity to boost sales and maximise profits ahead of the new year lull.

The Black Friday event provides every business with the chance to enhance profitability and revenue potential. However, high volumes of traffic can put significant amounts of pressure on websites, rendering them more susceptible to problems such as poor user load times, crashes, and so on. This can lead to a high bounce-back rate and lost sales, which will negatively impact your profits. Particularly considering the fact that purchases made during November and December account for around 20% of the retail industry’s average annual sales. For that reason, retailers must utilise SEO to leverage this traffic, avoid site issues from occurring, and capitalise on sales. Below, we have compiled the ultimate optimisation checklist to help your business get the most out this Black Friday.

1. Don’t disarm a ‘sold out’ product page

Disabling a product page once it has sold out can harm sales for several reasons. Firstly, you are less likely to be able to sell customers an alternative product once they land on a 404 page. Often, potential customers will just leave your site after seeing this. Secondly, disabling the product page without implementing a redirect for the user will impede the link equity of respective backlinks to your site. Backlinks that point to a 404 page ruin the user experience and will affect your SEO. Hence why you must have an SEO strategy in place to manage out of stock products efficiently.

2. Use the same URL every year for Black Friday

It may seem like a good idea to create a few new web pages in the lead up to Black Friday, however this can have a detrimental effect on your success during the event. In particular, newly built pages often take longer to rank than older, more established ones. This means newer pages are less likely to perform as well in the SERPs as a page that’s been attracting quality backlinks

and visitors for many years. Avoid this common mistake by using the same URL every year on Black Friday.

3. Optimise the page months before and months after

Research shows that consumers start looking for the best Black Friday deals as early as September. You should, therefore, optimise your website as early as possible. Get creative with your content and use marketing strategies like discounts and exclusive access to deals, to entice customers to make early purchases. You should also keep your Black Friday page running for a few months after the event. Remember that many consumers continue to look for deals after Black Friday, so don’t miss out on this opportunity to capitalise on sales.

4. Optimise your search for the term ‘Black Friday’

It is extremely important that you optimise your site’s search for the term ‘Black Friday.’ Make sure that you direct your visitors to the right places when they search for terms relating to Black Friday, instead of just showing a ‘no results found’ page. Otherwise, you risk customers abandoning your site as they can’t locate any information on Black Friday deals.

5. Optimise landing pages and structure them correctly

Remember that shoppers will enter your site from different pages. For that reason, you must optimise all of your Black Friday pages, not just the main landing page. This will help ensure that all visitors have the best experience possible. Furthermore, try to limit the number of clicks necessary for your user to get to their desired product page (AKA your link depth), to avoid shoppers becoming frustrated.

6. Have an omnichannel strategy and optimise for mobile

More and more consumers are using smart devices to browse the internet and make purchases online. In fact, nearly 40% of all Black Friday sales came from mobile devices in 2017. This statistic is a clear reminder of how essential it is for retailers to optimise their website to fit the smaller screens of mobile phones and other smart devices. This helps ensures that all customers have a positive experience while using your site.

7. Improve page load time

If your website has a low page load time, then shoppers are likely to become frustrated and abandon your site. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to improve your page load time by

optimising your code, file compression, reducing redirects, and upgrading to a faster server, for example.

8. Set tags for the pages

Setting tags is a great way to group related pages together and make it easier for shoppers to find the content they’re looking for. Tags will allow visitors to quickly narrow down your content and focus on just your Black Friday deals. Make sure that you install the right buttons to take shoppers to pages quicker.

Final thoughts

Black Friday can be a massive opportunity for your business to make the most of consumer spend. All retailers should take advantage of the fact that an increasing number of UK consumers are getting involved in the Black Friday event each year. However, you must be prepared to handle the Black Friday spike in sales. Use the above tips to optimise your website, maximise sales, meet customer expectations, and get the most out of this Black Friday!

SEO, what it is and why businesses need it

Posted on by Fibre Agency

What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a way to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website via organic results from online search engines.

Both technical and creative elements are incorporated in SEO work, as a way to drive traffic to your website and ensure you are visible to your target audience in an extremely saturated market:

Content Quality – Not only should content on your website use keywords that are relevant to your audience, it should also be totally original and user friendly.

Internal Links – A tactic used to push traffic around your site, lowering your bounce rate and consequentially improving your relationship with search engines.

Clean Website – A clear, concise, easily navigated website with relevant content is an SEO essential and can make a real difference to your organic search traffic.

Meta Descriptions and Tags – These very simple practices are designed to succinctly explain what your website and its content is about.

Domain Names – Selecting the appropriate domain name for your website is also an essential for Search Engine Optimization. Choosing a domain with too many hyphens or an irrelevant title will leave you a lot of work to do before search engines notice your website.

Community Engagement – Interacting with your users, either by way of a comments section or a contact page will not only ensure returning users but will also demonstrate to search engines that you are a consistently active website.

Headlines – Finding the perfect balance between a succinct title that is descriptive enough to reach your target audience is a tough ask but can be mightily rewarding for SEO purposes.

Reading Guidelines – Google and Yahoo!, the two most frequently used search engines on the web have best practices guidelines that will help you to specify and prioritize the elements needed for a superior search ranking.

Why Do Websites Need SEO?

While social media, print and online advertising are all satisfactory marketing tools to generate visits to your site, the primary method of internet browsing for users is through search engines, whatever your sites content may be. Research has shown that investing in SEO has unrivalled return in publicity, exposure and most importantly, revenue.

Search engines provide targeted traffic to your site; they direct consumers to your product. If your website’s SEO is not up to par with competitors, you will be lost amongst the everlasting pages of search engine results.

Nearly 100% of established online websites will have an SEO specialist or consultant that are constantly updating site content and exploring new ways to ensure full search engine optimization. A specialist employee of this type is now essential to most companies who wish to establish themselves in the market. Without a constant focus on SEO, competition will have the edge on your audience base.

Considering the way search engines are developing, it is unlikely that SEO will cease to be effective in the foreseeable future. Even the growing market of video based content requires SEO to gain enough exposure. That is why it must be a priority for any website that has yet to discover the wonders of Search Engine Optimization to explore its benefits immediately.

 

Websites online presence and why you need to be active!

Posted on by Fibre Agency

In the current information age, having an online presence is of paramount importance for pretty much anyone. If your business primarily consists of physical products or you find most of customers through word of mouth you may not think that an online presence is relevant to you, but I’m here today to tell you that you’re wrong.

As I’ve written ad nauseum before, being visible online through search engine optimization and so on brings a variety of benefits, the most obvious of which are more traffic and therefore many more potential customers. However, merely being visible is not enough. Your website may be very easy to find, and may even be in top two or three ranked sites for certain search terms, but if your business’ online presence isn’t strong enough, then it’s not going to reach its’ full potential. Being visible is just one piece of the broader challenge of having an excellent online presence.

The first step is to create a top-notch website. Although it’s fairly easy these days for anyone with an old computer and an internet connection to build a rudimentary site, it’s well worth investing in a professional web design service to do this for you. The difference is absolutely huge, not to mention the amount of time it saves from not having to learn how to operate all the various plugins and other accoutrements.services-conversion-rate-optimization

Just think about how much more inclined you are to stick around on a website if it looks slick and has an intuitive interface, compared to a random blog someone threw together on WordPress where half the links don’t work and the background picture doesn’t align properly. Again, your website may be easily found by a search engine, but if it’s lacking in design no one is going to stick around long enough to want to pay for your services.

The next step is to make sure that you have high-quality content on your site apart from the basic services that you have on offer. You don’t want a site that merely looks and feels good, so the more great articles and blog posts you have, the better. This is beneficial in two ways.

First, people are more likely to stick around your site, revisit it and pay for your services if there is content worth reading.

Second, having high-quality content makes for superior link building, and your site is far more likely to be shared on social media, blogs, forums and so on. This means more people with similar interests visiting (thus more likely to be paying customers), and since search engines use the number of links as a factor in ranking sites, you’ll get more traffic through that route as well. To keep customers intrigued, you’ll have to make sure that there is always more fresh content to keep them coming back.

It’s all too easy to negate the importance of an active presence, a tangible experience which customers and readers will remember and relate to, however given the rise of social media and the fact that every individual has a web-based personality, no matter your business this strategy is absolutely crucial to success.

We’re Fibre Marketing and we offer affordable SEO agency services, contact us today if you need to build your online presence.