How is your company perceived by the customers it wants to attract? Accurately answer that question and you’re describing your firm’s reputation.

How did it come to have that reputation, and what part has your content marketing strategy played in the process?

Your created content wears lots of hats to do many jobs, from making sales to giving customers information on product use or service options. This blog looks at one of the most important, one you may not have given much thought to: reputation building.

So, how can all your content, including customer reviews, be used to develop and keep a positive public impression of your company?

Managing Your Reputation Through Strategic Content Marketing

Reputation management is giving active attention to forming and maintaining the public’s—especially your public’s—opinion of your brand, what it offers, and how well it serves its customers.

An indispensable piece of reputation management is using your firm’s online content to stay in control of public perceptions of your business.

Here are some content marketing examples—some ways you can use content as part of an overall content strategy or campaign to build and maintain a great reputation:

• Use your website and its blog to build a reputation for thought leadership in your field.
• Publish newsletter articles with photos that show you’re: a) on the cutting edge of your industry; b) making customer needs and wants your top priority; and c) valuing the connections you have with your customers.
• Post to social media. Do some research first to find your customers’ favorite digital social spots to discuss what you offer. Post—often and informatively—and reply to customer posts. Never miss replying when a poster mentions your company or product, but also be ready to jump in and make valuable contributions to other discussions.
• Grab ahold of topics that are trending within your industry onsocial media and write about them in your blog and newsletter.
• Write press releases. They’re all about building reputation. Make them timely and attention-worthy, so they’ll get published.
• Publish e-books and downloadable brochures, then offer them in your newsletter, blogs, or on your webpages as another way to build a reputation for thought leadership.
• Use influencers, where appropriate. Putting a positive face and a personality on your brand’s content makes it memorable. Choose carefully, as your reputation will be linked to the influencer’s reputation and the quality of their content.
• Build in links to your other forms of content throughout your content. Example: If you have a great online product manual, let that be known in social media posts.
• Make each piece of content SEO-friendly by ensuring it is unique, valuable, and contains the keywords your customers use when they’re searching.
• Ensure smooth and enjoyable customer experiences with your online content. Be sure it captures their attention, that they don’t have to wait for your pages to load, and that they know you prioritize their privacy and security.
• Plan and advertise a loyalty program that lets customers earn discounts or benefits. These can go a long way toward building your reputation.

This next point deserves a paragraph of its own:

Your potential customers care—a lot—about what your current customers think, making user-generated content some of your most effective content. So, look for opportunities across all your content to insert positive quotes from customer reviews and social media posts.

Since reviews can be so vital to your business’s reputation, let’s talk about them next.

Reviews as Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

It’s hard to overstate the part that reviews play in forming your company’s reputation. They’re so powerful, they can make or break your business.

As noted in a 2024 consumer review survey, “the percentage of consumers ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ reading online reviews has held fast over the last three years,” hovering around 75%, and only 3% of consumers never read online reviews.

So, reviews hold a lot of sway over the way customers view your company, AKA your reputation.

Search engines, including the most powerful, Google, where 81% of searches were done in 2024), rate you based on the reviews you receive. Lots of recent reviews equal great ratings and, therefore, great search rankings.

So, there’s really no ignoring bad or outdated reviews and their consequences. And if you don’t have enough reviews that can be seen, it’s hard to build your reputation online.

To help bring in a steady flow of reviews, be sure to ask your customers to leave reviews after each transaction, on each website where you do business.

And be sure to thank them abundantly for doing so, each time.

If yours is an in-person service business, you can make it simple for customers to leave a quick rating or review by offering a scannable QR code that takes them straight to the review platform you choose.

Reviews and Comments: The Good, the Bad, and What To Do About Them

It’s good practice to Google your business regularly. When you do that, you’re looking at it the way most potential customers do. You may be surprised to find comments in places you didn’t know your company was mentioned: review sites, social media platforms, industry articles, and more.

Good reviews are great candidates to turn into content on your website, in social media posts, your newsletter, printable brochures, and more.

Replying to all reviews is a must, because 2024 statistics show that 88% of consumers are open to using a business that replies to every review it gets. People are impressed that you’re taking the time to do that.

Be sure NOT to pay for positive reviews; searchers can smell out those paid reviews. Once discovered, they do more harm than good for your reputation.

Instead of resenting negative reviews from customers, use them as opportunities to iron out complaints or misunderstandings or improve your products or systems. Build bridges, not walls.

Think about negative reviews this way: The reviewer is actually doing you a favor—giving you valuable advice—even if they don’t do it nicely.

And if you get repeat negative reviews of the same type, you know that something you’re doing or making needs to change to earn the excellent reputation you want.

Quick, truthful, constructive responses, especially to negative reviews, are key to keeping the public’s good opinion. They show that your company is on top of its customer service game and cares about what its customers think. For lengthy discussions, you may want to give the customer your email address and hold those talks out of the public eye.

Your Google My Business listing is one area where your business could be vulnerable to bad reviews. Whether they’re justified or not, they can create uncertainty in the minds of potential customers. Besides replying to them positively, there is also a chance you can have them removed.

Google has rules about which business reviews they are willing to take down. Some that are eligible for removal are those that are irrelevant, illegal, fraudulent, or obscene. For complete information on Google review removals, see this video.

Here is where to find removal information for some other popular review sites:

• Trustpilot
• Yelp
• Facebook
• Yellow pages

If your periodic Google search for your business turns up a review or comment that’s truly inaccurate and you can’t remove it, it’s possible, in some cases, to ask the owner of the site to do so.

It’s also possible that, by creating enough positive, informative, SEO-friendly content yourself, you will relegate any negative search results to the second page or beyond—out of most searchers’ sight.

There’s another type of negative review—one that comes from a former employee with an axe to grind. This person may want to damage your business. Your replies should be respectful and avoid defensiveness, but you may also wish to flag the review. (Keeping your staff happy to begin with helps to prevent this situation and does wonders for your reputation.)

To keep on top of your reviews, especially if yours is a large firm, you need a system for monitoring them and consistently answering each one.

Using Content Marketing Services for Reputation Management

If there’s no room on your to-do list for creating the positive content you want new customers to find online, or for monitoring and responding to customer reviews and comments, consider hiring content writers who understand reputation building.

The content marketing services that employ these writers know how to:

• Help you zero in on your target audience.
• Analyze the effectiveness of your current content.
• Set objectives for content-based reputation improvement.
• Help determine the types of additional or updated content that will optimize your reputation.
• Create all the content that’s needed to show your expertise, stay connected with customers, boost your ratings and rankings, and show off those numbers once achieved.
• Stay on top of all your reviews and expertly reply to each one.

Helping you get a reputation that’s head and shoulders above other companies in your industry isn’t a sideline for content marketing services. It’s the main objective.