Is Your Online Brand What You Want It To Be?
Monitor search engine results and update your information to promote a positive brand.
By Amy Hoppenrath
According to AC Nielsen, more than 94 percent of prospective buyers search the Internet before purchasing a product or service. Searching the Internet for information quickly becomes a pivotal point where someone will decide whether they want to continue looking at a specific vendor.
It’s easy to forget the impact a Google search can have in establishing credibility and building trust with prospects. What someone reads about you in a search is integral to demonstrating your brand to clients, prospects and referral sources.
When was the last time you checked out your online brand by Googling your company and your name? Did you like what you saw? Was your brand clearly communicated online?
Control Your Online Brand, Or It Will Be Controlled For You
You can easily manage your online brand the way you want. Here are six steps to ensure your brand is clearly communicated:
- Google yourself and your company.// Search engines are constantly crawling social media sites for updated information. That’s why it’s so important to strategically write content so your business or pages rank higher on basic searches.
- Review your search results.// After you search on your name or company name, print out the first two pages of the search results. The printout serves as your virtual roadmap for how you are presented on the net. Are you connected with the best sites to promote your services or products? Are there sites you do not want to be connected with?
- Update profiles.// Revise your personal and company profiles to make any factual changes and edit your summary sections to clearly communicate your key message points.
- Delete or cancel subscriptions.// Remove social networking sites that don’t support your brand or your marketing/business development plan.
- Add a Google profile. (www.google.com/profiles/me )// You can control how you appear in Google by creating a personal profile. It will appear almost immediately on the results page when people do Web searches for your name.
- Monitor your brand.// Set up a Google Alert (www.google.com/alerts ) for both your company and your name. Google Alerts are e-mail updates of the latest relevant Google results (e.g., Web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Set a quarterly reminder on your calendar to do an online search of your name and company brand. Adding new employees or major changes in your company are great trigger points to update your social media sites.
With these few easy steps, you can impact your online brand in order to build credibility and trust, and, most importantly, keep the sales process moving forward.
Amy Hoppenrath is a principal at AccelerAction, the only agency in Kansas City dedicated to fueling successful professional services firms by creating powerful branding messages, developing strategic lead generation campaigns and driving business development programs. www.AccelerAction.com
