Marketing is reputation management played out. Marketing practices build and maintain your business’s reputation. And your reputation is your business currency. It is the reason prospects contact you. It is why clients hire you. It is why they stay with you. In fact, many businesses have reputations by accident – they just happen.
To be successful, an organization has to:
- Build their reputation on their own terms
- Enhance their reputation to keep it relevant and vital
- Defend their reputation in a crisis.
An enduring reputation is rooted in the intersection of what you want to say about your organization and what those outside the organization believe about it. Our Strategic Marketing Audit Research Technique (SMART) process helps you find and make the most of that intersection. It produces a 360° view of your organization’s position in the marketplace. It is based on how your key people see the organization, as well as the way your customers perceive you.
It includes:
- Goals
- Expectations
- Current situation
- Tactics to support your business objectives.
Without a marketing plan, your reputation develops over time without a clear direction. Communications are haphazard. They may or may not enhance your reputation because you’re not involved in the conversation. Our job is to avoid that. We solidify and reinforce our clients’ reputations with every piece of communications we produce for them. We do that by making the most of all available communications tactics – both traditional and contemporary.
There is no magic marketing bullet. Websites alone don’t do it. Facebook pages and blogs alone don’t do it. Print and electronic media exposure alone doesn’t do it. It’s the combination of them all that reinforces a company’s brand; building a reputation that brings customers back over and over.
