Gain Clarity In Your Business To Drive Revenue Growth – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of gaining clarity on your vision, mission and guiding principles and aligning your branding to showcase them. If you missed it, you can check it out here before reading on!

The next layer of defining how you want people to feel about your company includes your community involvement, social media presence and overall reputation. These elements are hard to separate because of today’s technology and the easy access to share information and opinions about anything and everything in seconds. Many companies – large and small – underestimate the impact that this connected community can have on a business’s image.

People appreciate a pleasant experience when interacting with your business, but they are far more likely to share a bad one. It is up to you as the business owner to control the dialogue as much as you can to showcase your strengths and how you bring value to your community. You do this by developing a strategy ahead of time based on your vision, mission and guiding principles on how your business will interact in these areas. Be careful to make sure your employees understand that they represent you when they are posting on social media, participating in community events and interacting with your network. Even if they are not on the clock, one mistake can harm your business very quickly.

Community Involvement

There are many things that you can do to strengthen your relationship with your community. Your business could sponsor fundraising events, promote charities you support on your website, and encourage your employees to volunteer. Some companies offer paid volunteer time to make it easier for their employees to spend time with their favorite organizations or organize teams to participate in walks, runs and bike rides to raise money. Others publicly pledge to donate a percentage of profits to local charities. All of these activities show that your business is serious about helping the community and contribute to building lasting relationships.

Share your activities on your website and across your social media platforms. Encourage your network to join you at events and help with fundraising. Engagement is important. If your customers and prospects don’t know that you are involved in helping the community, you won’t receive the added benefit of building your brand. You could ask them to recommend organizations that need assistance – there are so many people that need help and the smaller organizations can sometimes be lost in the mix.

Social Media Presence

Social media is a powerful tool to tell your story. If you have someone on staff that is passionate about social media, ask them to help build your company’s image online. If you don’t, you can do it on your own if you are comfortable or work with someone who specializes in social media marketing. Share who you are, why you do what you do. Post about company events, community involvement, and celebrate your employees. Build a conversation online with your community. Ask your customers for online testimonials. Share your customers’ events and successes if that fits into their policies to do so. Respond quickly to comments on your posts or about your company, especially if you receive a negative one.

If you receive a bad review, use it as an opportunity to show how your company works hard to make things right. Do not ignore it, do not delete it (unless it includes offensive content, then you might do so). How you handle these situations online will have a strong impact on your reputation because it is so easy for people to see it. You can even prepare scenarios ahead of time so you know what to do and can respond quickly and consistently when something happens. This holds true on social media and more traditional means of communication like phone calls and emails. Having a response plan is critical.

Reputation

Your reputation is a mix of everything we have already discussed and other factors related to your performance, including customer service, on-time delivery, quality, legal issues and your payment history. People need to trust you to do business with you. Every interaction with your customer can build trust or destroy it. As mentioned before, people are far more likely to talk about something bad that happened, so how you handle those issues is critical. Is it easy to do business with you? Are your employees friendly and eager to help? Whether you provide a service or sell products, your ability to deliver when you say you will and deliver with superior quality is expected. If something happens to negatively impact delivery or quality, it must be corrected quickly and in a professional manner to keep the trust your customer has in you.

Any kind of legal action that your company is involved in – whether you are the defendant or accuser – can affect your reputation. Managing how these things are handled is very important. People have very strong opinions about things and managing information and communication is critical to protecting your reputation. It may be beneficial to work with a media relations expert if you find yourself in a legal action.

Another factor that could affect your reputation is your payment history with vendors. Your credit is a part of who you are. If you have ongoing difficulty with cash flow and slow pay your vendors, this affects your credit and your ability to work with new partners.

Be aware of how all these factors work together. Having a plan and a consistent message on how you will manage each facet will help your business tremendously.
In our next post, we will discuss how your products & services, employees, customers and vendors are all a part of how your business is seen in your community. See you soon!

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