Marketing is a vast subject – and impacts on every area in your organisation no matter how big or small. Reputation marketing is a small part of it.
So what is reputation marketing exactly?
It’s taking control of your online profile (and equally your offline profile, but that’s another blog) so you build the reputation you want.
It’s a process of educating people on your area of expertise – sharing your knowledge in a way that creates belief in your status as an authority in your industry.
It’s about making sure that your message is consistent and frequent so you are highly visible to the people that you most want to reach.
It’s offering value, quality and support freely to build your reputation as a generous expert.
What’s the best way to do this?
Identify your ideal clients – know what’s important to them and what they want and target the benefits they can experience in relation to those things. If you know who you can help and how you can help them you can offer them something of real value.
Make sure your message is clear, consistent and easy to understand – and this applies to your website, your blog, social media, newsletters and marketing material.
Think benefits; how does what you do help your clients? In other words ‘what’s in it for me?’ People aren’t interested in what you do, they’re interested in what they get and buy on emotional triggers, not on ‘nice to have’.
Don’t try to be all things to all people, be a specialist for your target market. If you have several different services think how they can be brought under a single heading as a package. It’s tempting to be drawn into the ‘We could do that for other types of business’ mindset, but you’ll get a lot more higher paying business if you’re positioned as a niche expert.
Use short cuts
This doesn’t mean short-changing the client – but it does mean that one piece of marketing material can be repurposed to save reinventing the wheel.
The people who read your blog are not the same people as those on your newsletter list, or those who you’re connected up to on social media. Even if they do see the same information in more than one place it’s likely that they will see it as consistency and be pleased that they’re one step ahead of the rest by having read it already!
A blog can become a newsletter and also broken up into social media posts – linked back to your website, of course.
Several blogs on a subject can become a report or free giveaway document – or a chapter of your first ebook!
It’s all about working smarter, not harder. Create a strategy, put the plan in place and get that great reputation that people RAVE about.
