January 2020

Build Your Online Reputation To Gain Prospective Clients Want to get clients? Build a great online reputation. People search on Google before, after, and during connecting with you to see what kind of experience you have and if you can solve their problem. Having a strong web presence generates trust, leading to converting prospective clients into paying ones. If the first page of Google searches is full of positive articles and links, prospective clients see you as trustworthy. This helps close the deal. However, if something negative appears, potential customers just move on to someone else–a competitor. Almost as importantly, if minimal information shows up in searches, you might appear unreliable or not real, also causing prospects to move on. Understand Your Client An online reputation should resonate and align with your clients’. But in order to do so, you need to know precisely who your prospective customers are. Research them thoroughly. Without an ideal customer composite, it’s difficult or nearly impossible to know where to start building an online reputation that resonates with clients. Understand who to target, think about what drives them, then present clear solutions that help. To completely grasp your clients’ needs, analyze them by drafting a detailed and comprehensive profile. This persona drives all content creation, marketing messages, and sales conversations. Gathering and sharing this targeted content allows you to speak directly to the wants, needs, and desires of your ideal buyer. Also, it crystallizes the kind of companies you like working with and what their pain points are. You can then craft the exact solution that they need. For example, if your prospective clients are a professional urban New York-area couple in their 30s and have a joint salary of $300K, then your reputation approach needs to appeal directly to them. Deliver Trust and Solutions Potential clients seek out a business that seems trustworthy, effective, and fixes their problem. An accomplished online reputation draws in prospects naturally and turns them into paying customers. Businesses often neglect to align their offers with what their clients really need the most and instead focus on what they want to sell. You should deliver solutions that your clients really need. Many times, however, clients think they need one solution but you, as the expert, know they need another. Be ready to explain the advantages of your approach. This continues to build trust. Continually building a positive reputation is key to reaching new customers. Once you have a comfortable connection, educate them on recognizing the superior value of your service. Overdeliver For All Clients, Especially the Best Ones Do really great work, naturally. This earns referrals and builds a reputation of excellence. Craft well-researched strategies, offer pinpointed analysis, answer questions immediately, give effective solutions, and be extremely professional–always. Very satisfied clients generate positive feedback that influences and encourages others to use your business. Existing clients bring business partners, friends, neighbors, or even their own professionals that they deal with (dentists, accountants, etc.). These satisfied clients can–and should–be used as a part of your reputation marketing strategy. Since nearly eighty percent of most business income comes from about twenty percent of their clients, this all makes sense. That’s why keeping current clients happy matters so much for building a positive reputation. Excelling for every single client all the time, while admirable, is not realistic or productive, however. Over-deliver for those best customers, but focus on delivering extraordinary service to the twenty percent that brings in the most business. Focusing on your best consumers results in retaining them, generating excellent recommendations, and most importantly, builds strong online and offline integrity. Blog Like Crazy What is one of the best ways to build or boost your reputation? Write. One of the best tools in your online toolkit is crafting well-made blogs. Writing great pieces not only brings eyeballs online to draw in potential customers, but it also highlights you as an industry expert in your niche. Everyone is looking for solutions on Google. For you to be discovered in search results requires the creation of truly exceptional work. Writing excellent blogs increases the chance of being found on the first page of Google, which leads to visibility, more clients, and a trustworthy reputation. Think of it like this: if a prospective client is searching for your business online and sees the first page filled with positive articles and links, they probably would pick you over a competitor who has minimal (or negative) information. The key is drafting the best blog possible. But a blog can be nearly anything: articles, audio recordings, videos, presentations, white papers, photos, infographics, graphs, and even memes. Another powerful feature of blog posts is that they generate “backlinks” or ties that connect to your content, which Google considers as an important page-ranking signal. Each time a new blog post is published, a new searchable article–and backlink–can point back to your website. If a blog piece is published every few weeks, that means several dozen new links potentially create many new ways to be found, leading to new sales opportunities, and more chances that you’ll be seen as an expert. But while frequent publishing is important, paramount is producing high-quality content. Have a Search Engine Optimization Strategy Being on the top of Google search results means business. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps drive prospective clients to your website and is a crucial part of an online reputation strategy. Since about 95% of clicks occur on the first page of searches, having a presence there builds trust and substantially helps in closing deals. High-quality content along with leveraging SEO builds an online reputation that strongly increases the chance of being seen first on Google, which leads to visibility, more clients, and additional online confidence. Google uses many ways to determine where to rank a website. While this is a massive topic in itself, to be found predominantly in search results requires the creation of exceptional work, such as high-quality blogs and some behind-the-scenes technical work, such as backlink creation