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Your financial industry business’ online reputation expands far beyond your own internal assets, and can have a significant impact on managing your brand’s reputation. Managing a financial service firm’s brand value is largely determined by people’s experiences working with and for your business, how engaged your customer success team is, and how you mitigate online reputation risk.
The challenging part of controlling your business’ online reputation is knowing how and where to start. To help your team establish an actionable plan, we’ve created a best practices checklist.
Establish a Google My Business Account
Google My Business is a free service that allows you to create a profile for customers to leave reviews, connect with and be found via search. Your customers are already googling for your services, so it’s up to your firm to be proactive about how you’re found, and what avenues customers have to connect and interact with your brand.
Google My Business provides other benefits, such as the ability to know how customers are clicking, calling and interacting with your profile and website. Google’s insights into your business’ profile, customer connections and reviews is a great starting point to knowing the value of your digital presence and where reputation risks exist.
Conduct a Social Media Audit
Social media is a bit of the Wild West of reputation risk, since there are so many channels to manage. Social media posts are designed to be engaged with and shared, and these mediums can be highly impactful – in both good and bad ways. Whether it be external tagged comments on traditional sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, or internally on your own channels, you need to have a system in place to audit your financial industry business’ mentions and interactions.
Similarly, you’ll want to conduct regular audits to ensure your own employees are following company policy about how they represent your brand on social media. Depending on the size of your organization, you may want to rely on one of the many social media alert tools. Or, plan on designating a team member to rely on the alerts provided within each of the individual social media tools. Whatever system you use, conduct regular audits to ensure brand reputation is upheld and managed at all times. Engage with both positive and negative interactions, and mitigate when necessary.
Set Up Alerts on Company Review Sites
Sites like Glassdoor and Indeed allow for current and former employees to provide reviews about working with your business. These reviews hold significant brand value as they shed light about the inner workings of your management’s style and insight into your organizational stability. Set up alerts on these sites to track when new reviews are posted and address positive and negative comments.
Customers want to work with firms where employees feel engaged in their jobs and are working diligently toward the current and future growth of the business. Negative reviews on these sites suggest instability across an organization, and can be especially jarring in the financial services industry where there are more risks. When negative reviews do arise, address them head on to see if common ground can be found.
Update Your Website Testimonials and Comments
If your business allows for customers to review products and services, these pages need to be heavily monitored. Allowing customers to interact with your site and leave feedback is a great practice, but only if you have a person assigned to manage the process.
For negative testimonials, your team should work diligently to make things right with the customer in order for negative feedback to be re-considered. Mistakes happen, but they can be remedied if managed properly. To the same extent, customers who leave positive testimonials also want to be recognized. Properly thank those customers for their honest feedback and monitor how often people are providing testimonials and comments.
Keep Your Content Up to Date
Tracking how your company is referenced across the above-mentioned channels is important, but you don’t want to forget the last step in managing your online brand reputation. Keep your content and assets up to date. Staying relevant in a digital age means having regularly updated marketing materials, refreshed sales materials, and relevant case studies/online testimonials from customers that can provide honest insight.
The easiest way to turn away a potential sales lead is by having outdated marketing content that isn’t relevant to your current offerings or the demands of the current financial services market. Conduct regular audits of your own online content to determine how you can keep your customers informed of the latest offerings, and ensure you are regularly communicating upgrades to them. Video glitches, broken links or old content on your site can make your firm appear out of touch and unprofessional. Avoid this reputation risk by knowing what type of content exists across your entire digital footprint and have a plan in place to regularly audit your digital channels.
Performance Marketing Pros is a financial industry marketing consulting and services business. We help financial businesses achieve next level growth through proven marketing strategy and tactics designed by marketers with over 20 years each of experience in the financial industry. Reach out for a free consultation.
