In the marketing world, there’s this invisible hand that is either lifting or tearing down your brand, and this is your reputation.
How powerful could your reputation be? What can you do to ensure that this invisible hand – your reputation – is building up your brand?
Let’s find out!
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Why Online Reputation Matters
Your reputation is what people say about your business, whether you’re around or not.
It is what people feel after giving you their hard-earned money. That reputation either compounds in positive or negative ways. And you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the spectrum.
Think about this.
More than half of everything that’s purchased online happens through Amazon. And Amazon has crafted a unique system where they can shift buyer psychology.
So usually, I search for what I want on Amazon. Then I look at who has the highest and most reviews. Take this – that’s like 80% of my decision-making process, and the price is secondary to that.
Like other avid Amazon shoppers, I don’t start my search by sorting out who’s got the lowest price because if they’ve got a low price and got 1 out of 5 stars, it’s not even worth risking my money.
Most people would prefer to purchase from someone with an established reputation. And when you take care of that part of your business, guess who’s getting all those orders?
The same goes with brick and mortar businesses.
No matter how good your food is when you have that 1 star for your service, it changes the game.
How many times have you seen a review which goes like this, “I called, and they were rude to me on the phone. So I decided not to do business with them.”.
That person has yet to taste the food, but that 1 star certainly hurts your online reputation. When people look up your restaurant’s name and see that review, they might have second thoughts about booking a reservation with you.
And imagine if you rack up more reviews like that that have nothing to do with your product.
The Law of Reciprocity
In a typical customer journey, the customer goes into a four-point journey…
– a stranger to prospect
– prospect to customer
– customer to promoter
However, Hubspot came out with the term flywheel. Instead of customers going into a four-point journey – popularly known as a funnel – instead, customers undergo a complete revolution.
In plain English, your prospects can send more strangers that could become prospects, that could become customers, and that could become promoters.
But what turns a stranger or a customer into a promoter?
It comes down to what we call the Law of Reciprocity. As humans, we are programmed to return whatever we’ve received.
Hence, if you open the door for me, I’m going to want to open the door for you. If you loan me ten bucks, I will also loan you ten bucks. Or some do it preemptively, like, I’m going to save you from the woolly mammoth because you might save me from it, too. See where I’m going here?
It’s what most moms would tell their kids – that if someone’s good to you, you should be good to them.
How does this apply in the business sense?
Following Hubspot’s flywheel model, how do you let strangers cut the customer journey short and turn into promoters?
It all comes down to delivering outsized value to your audience such that they feel compelled to want to buy from you.
If you make them feel that you’ve been giving away value-loaded content without expecting anything in return, the human nature in them that’s programmed to reciprocate will either pull out their money to buy your product/service or promote your product as their way of saying thank you.
That’s how you get customers, and that’s how you get evergreen referrals through online reviews.
Now that we’ve gone digital, if someone leaves you a five-star rating, it becomes an evergreen referral – forever cemented on the internet as an endorsement.
So, how do you get more of those evergreen referrals? How do you hack that system?
Listen to or watch this week’s episode HERE to find out the answer.
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Marketing with Matt is a podcast dedicated to entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for more margin in their business through marketing and sales and eventually profit more and work less.
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