Do you know what is being said about your business and products or services online? If the answer is no, this blog post is for you!
Monitoring what is said about your business online is important for many reasons, and can also be very valuable for your small business. To help you understand the value of listening, let’s list out the top reasons why we think you should be listening:
Manage your brand reputation. This is an extremely important point, because your brand will develop whether you take the lead in establishing your reputation or not. If you proactively monitor and are involved in social networking sites, you can take control of your brand reputation, instead of allowing it to be established based on what your competitors, customers, and prospects claim it is.
Establish exceptional customer service. This goes hand in hand with managing your brand reputation, but lots of people now take to social media sites to express their unhappiness with companies. Monitoring what is being said allows you to solve problems for unhappy customers BEFORE it escalates into something ugly. Bad news travels fast, so you want to make sure you respond quickly and turn an unhappy customer into a happy and (very important) repeat customer!
Build relationships with current and potential customers. Small businesses have so much competition these days, it’s very important to not only get new customers, but keep them and turn them into repeat customers. To do this, it’s important to build relationships with them, and provide them with reasons why they need to keep coming back to YOUR business, and not the competition’s.
Stay on top of competitors and industry trends. Of course you want to know what your competitors are doing. Companies and industries evolve on a daily basis now. Don’t get caught off guard by not listening and staying up to speed!
Listen and learn. Monitoring your small business online can help you determine what is working and what isn’t, what your customers like and don’t like. You can use social media to implement surveys, ask questions, and basically do market research for a whole lot cheaper than traditional R&D!
There you have it. Have we convinced you that you need to be listening to what is said about your small business online?
