It’s getting harder and harder to ignore online reputation management. Everyone from Coca-Cola to Frank’s Hot Dog Restaurant are realizing just how important online word of mouth is for local business growth and they’re all investing their time and resources into trying to figure it out.
Unlike other forms of marketing reputation management poses a unique challenge for SMBs. Even though most social media and online review sites are “free” there are huge time costs associated with setting up profiles learning how to use these platforms and engaging with online audiences.
So here’s the issue: if constant reputation monitoring timely responses and proactive engagement are critical to building a strong online presence how can time-starved business owners find time to manage their reputations and execute successful social media strategies?
Answer: most of them can’t.
Enter Reputation Concierge VendAsta’s response to the common SMB question: “Can’t someone just do this stuff for me?”
Reputation Concierge is a software service built on top of VendAsta’s industry-leading Reputation Management platform. It takes all of a small business’ reputation information and puts it into an organized task queue which a trained Digital Analyst then responds to by certain due dates. Effectively small businesses outsource their reputation management duties to professionals for a low monthly cost.
Now when we say “outsource” we don’t mean the work is sent to a completely different continent. These analysts are usually employed by the advertisers themselves and work directly for their clients.
But how scalable is this?
Concierge is extremely scalable. Currently one of our partners is experiencing a 350:1 business to analyst ratio (meaning one full time analyst is actively managing the reputations of over 350 small businesses by themselves).
“But wait!” you cry. “That’ll never work outside analysts don’t know the ins and outs of a business!”
Well you’d be surprised what a good analyst can do — like ghostwriters sound engineers and stuntmen their job is to make someone else look awesome. Every reply post and share will be approved by the business owner so there’s no risk that a business will say something inappropriate.
VendAsta predicts that this is where the future of reputation management is heading. As digital marketing gets more and more convoluted small business owners will need affordable services to help them handle it all. If you’ve got SMB clients now is the time to start offering a service like this; it takes the hassle out of reputation management and puts your clients light-years ahead of the competition.
