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Public Relations

What is Reputation Management and How Does it Work?

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In the business-to-business (B2B) world, what people think of you matters. It affects the number of customers, the quality of your sales and ultimately your bottom line. Your reputation both on and offline makes a huge difference for your company. But what is B2B reputation management and how does it work? We’ll answer these questions in this blog post.

Brand reputation is never fully under your control. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Reputation management is the act of improving and protecting the reputation of a company, product or service.

SEO is an important tool in reputation management. It grows sales, and it helps you appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO also pushes positive content above negative content in search results. For good SEO, you should regularly update your company blog using targeted keywords. Link building is another important component of SEO, which you can achieve by guest blogging on other websites and linking back to your website. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can also boost your online reputation in addition to SEO.

Testimonials are another key component of B2B reputation management. You want to have real, genuine, up-to-date testimonials on your website painting your company in a positive light. Detailed case studies can also boost your reputation. Actively solicit feedback from customers to build your cache of testimonials. Of course, negative reviews are hard to avoid. You should respond to negative comments, or any comments, quickly and without getting defensive. You also need to monitor any mentions of your brand online using a service such as Google Alerts, so you can respond to any feedback at a moment’s notice.  

Being active on social media can boost your company’s reputation. You will also want to invest in content marketing to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Having a strong public relations program can help in this area. PR representatives can generate positive press, inform customer opinions, improve brand perception and increase your web presence.

Leveraging your employees as brand advocates can help with reputation management. Make sure you monitor your employees’ social media accounts and online content to make sure they are presenting your company in the best possible light. You will also highlight how your company benefits society. Having a strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) program can do wonders for your reputation.

Are you looking to better manage your B2B company’s reputation? Turn to the Borenstein Group, a Top DC marketing agency. We can help manage your reputation to boost your bottom line.

What to Do For B2B Crisis Communications

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No business is immune to a crisis. Big or small, your B2B organization will likely face a crisis at some point in time. The question is what is B2B crisis communication and what should you do when a crisis strikes. This blog post will answer these questions to help you prepare for the worst.

What is a crisis? A crisis is an unexpected threat that requires serious attention. It threatens your operations, and its consequences relate to life, reputation, property and/or stock value. If not handled properly, a crisis can hurt your reputation as well as cause you to lose customers and revenue. You may also lose the respect of suppliers, customers, stakeholders, communities, employees and government officials.

Some examples of crises include workplace accidents, natural disasters, employee grievances, product defects, federal investigations, and cyber attacks. B2B crisis communication involves proactive engagement to protect or enhance your corporate reputation during a crisis.

The best way to tackle a crisis is to prepare for one before it strikes. You need to plan for crises at the C-Suite level, as direction needs to come from the top of your organization. Have a crisis response plan and social media crisis management plan in place well before disaster hits. Create and publicize your internal crisis plan ahead of time. Conduct regular crisis simulations to prepare for difficult circumstances in advance of actual nightmares.

Build a crisis response team ahead of time as well. This should include HR team members, legal counsel, media coordinators, spokespeople and members of your C-Suite. Spokespeople should have experience dealing with the media including local, regional, national, print and online publications. Conduct media training and coaching before a crisis occurs, so your spokespeople are prepared to speak publicly on behalf of your company.  

You can also have pre-written template statements before crises happen. Have your legal team review these templates to ensure you are not in any legal jeopardy.

Social media monitoring is essential during a crisis. Make sure you respond quickly to comments when appropriate. Pause all regularly scheduled social media posts to focus solely on the crisis at hand and avoid any promotional or overly positive posts.

Keeping lines of communication open is vital during a crisis. Never say no comment. Do not shut down communication even if your legal team advises you to do so because public opinion will fill information vacuums with damaging conjecture. Keep employees informed during the crisis, as they are your biggest advocates to the public.

It’s important to take responsibility for what went wrong and avoid blaming others. Always tell the truth. Be transparent and show compassion for those affected by the crisis.

Are you preparing for a crisis? Contact the pros at the Borenstein Group, a Top DC marketing agency. We can help you get ready for when a crisis strikes.

How to Produce Effective White Papers for Public Sector Marketing (B2G)

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In Business to Government marketing, the virtues of white papers are well known. Government buyers don’t buy from direct marketing campaigns. They buy based on educational materials and logical case studies that can be used as foundational concepts to build out their procurements and programs. But alas while it sounds easy, the deployment strategy too often goes off course. Many white papers become semi-sell sheets posing as white papers. When this falls short, lack measurable results are sure to follow.
A successful B2G white paper distribution strategy really only requires five steps:
1. A marketable topic that provides important content to potential buyers.
Just because your engineers are excited about a technology doesn’t mean this topic will generate enthusiastic readers. Research your topic and make sure you’re really filling a market niche and supplying needed content. If this step is not dead on, how can the program be successful?
2. Structure and content that delivers on the promise of valuable information.
This step can do one of two things. It can build on the credibility of the company that develops the white paper. Or it can damage your company’s credibility if the reader goes to the trouble to download your data, only to find the information is poorly organized, badly written, and/or hopefully week on good content. There’s a middle ground in there too, but that falls short of motivating the prospect to do business with you.
3. Visual appeal that contributes to the positive perception the reader has of the company.
White papers are marketing pieces and should fit with the overall corporate brand. Charts, graphs, screen captures and other visual depictions should be handled by an experienced graphic designer, as should all parts of the white paper. Not everyone who can design a white paper should design a white paper. After all, you want this document to be read by your audience. Visuals are important.
4. A distribution strategy of reaching potential buyers, customers, etc.
Writing the white paper is the easy part. Really. As difficult as it can be to extract important information out of your subject matter experts and convince your C-suite and peers that you’re not giving away trade secrets at every turn, the most difficult part of any white paper strategy is distribution. Take the time and allocate the budget to do this step properly. Before you embark on developing the white papers, research white paper search and syndication services, as well as more niche-focused services.
Also, determine how you will continue to nurture those leads once they are in your pipeline.
5. Benchmarking and measurement methods to determine and define success.
Before you begin, determine what success looks like. Realistically. Is it the number of qualified downloads, qualified additions to your social media, marketing database, inbound leads, search engine optimization, synergy with a PR program, etc.?
Want to learn more? Contact The Borenstein team to learn how to make your white papers a strategic marketing asset.

Are You a Trusted Partner or Vendor?

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As the CEO of a digital branding agency, I get the extraordinary opportunity to often meet with many executive managers in Corporate America’s boardrooms. My favorite part is identifying perception gaps that exist between internal and external forces (such as customer vs employees), so I get to interview many key managers that lead operations, delivery and development within both product and service organizations with the goal of identifying their current brand value and name equity for new business, existing business, or when they seek to expand. I work hard to be a trusted partner. What does this mean?

The one question, that seems to consistently impact a company’s brand equity and valuation, is whether the company is thought of as a Vendor or a Trusted Partner?

What my experience has shown me time and time again is, that often, if you want to know if your company will be your client’s partner next year, simply deconstruct the above question and ask, ‘Are we our clients’ vendor/supplier or are we their trusted partner?’ And to be honest, most of us think of ourselves as trusted partners. But are we really? Consider this.

Many of us, in the professional business community, tend to think myopically about our narrow field of service within the giant conglomeration of a service contract or the delivery of a system or products. We count on quality assurance reports, customer satisfaction surveys, and follow-up calls and questionnaires that are supposed to tell us whether the mission set has been accomplished.

I find that often those KPIs are inherently disconnected from what truly matters to buyers when they categorize you between Vendor and Partner. But if you really want to probe and find out, ask yourself or your management team to answer these five self-probing questions. It might hurt a little, but the ultimate gain will be great.

1. Is your company indispensable to your customer?

Many IT companies assume that because they have a legacy system in place that requires a fork-lift, the cost of removal makes them indispensable. Just imagine how many of them went out of business because of Cloud migration and Software as Service providers, which simply disconnected one cable and migrated entire databases to the cloud. Indispensable means that when your customer is thinking of a change, material or cosmetic, they call you to consult. If they don’t, you’re a vendor.

2. Is your company product-agnostic or product-centric?

Especially in the services industry, many companies tend to rely on one relationship with a major credible supplier such as Staples, Amazon, or Xerox (just examples). But if you are unable to offer your clients the choice of other platforms, solutions, software, and ideas that fit their requirements, chances are that you are a vendor. Yes, maybe the margins are higher in the short term, but long term any disruptive technology, process or system will displace you overnight. Just look at how CRM transformed sales to the embedded base and customer satisfaction again and again, and how Amazon went from selling books to selling data centers, invading the space of large data companies that don’t sell books! In my opinion, if you are a trusted partner, choosing which platform you use is secondary to what your client objectives are. It also shows and presents you as a renaissance and evolved thinker that truly looks out for their client’s interests.

3. Does your company provide its clients with customized education or canned teleprompter demos about ‘what’s next’?

Not everyone can afford producing their own training, but imagine what your client or customers feel like when they receive a canned presentation with a slap-on logo for your company. The CEO is thinking, “You’re a vendor…. you didn’t customize it to my needs.” Or, maybe she’s thinking, “65% isn’t relevant to me.” A trusted partner takes the time to at least edit that product video or PowerPoint presentation and show how relevant it is to the target audience in mind.

4. Does your company truly appreciate its customers or does it hold food-rich customer appreciation days?

Let me be clear – taking a client to lunch or inviting them to an open house where free beer flows, beef burgundy, and Mexican guacamole are plentiful does not equate to providing meaningful value. Yet, in many user conferences, it appears that the food is more valuable than the presentations. A true partner invests in making their customer the subject matter expert by being their shadowed mentor.

5. Does Your Company Say, “YES”, before truly analyzing and understanding the client requirements?

I have interviewed many buyers of products and services that tell me that they test their vendors for a measure of trust by often throwing an impossible-to-fill scenario their way, just to see how they approach their answer. I am not talking about a fake requirement but a real-life simulation of something they really need. A vendor jumps in and responds with, “No problem, how many do you need”; but a partner thinks first and asks why, how, and when they need it and most importantly, does it really make sense given who they are as a customer? There is a lot that a true partner considers before giving a well thought-out response. It can be the budget, it can be the technology, it can be anything. Just don’t say, “YES” and “How many do you need?” because then you lose your license to be their true partner.

The bottom line: Every executive in the role of production, customer satisfaction, or sales and marketing struggles to balance the monthly goals against investing additional time to develop a trusted partnership with their client. It may be a longer-cycle marketing process, but in my experience of surveying and working with hundreds of successful companies, that extra time invested will lead you in the right direction to become your client’s true partner… instead of just their vendor.

About the Author: Mr. Gal Borenstein is a recognized expert and strategist in digital branding, marketing, social media, advertising, online reputation management and public relations matters. He is the founder and CEO of the Borenstein Group, a top digital marketing communications firm in the Washington DC metropolitan area that serves clients locally and globally. He is the author of new business leadership book, ACTIVATE! How to Power Up Your Brand to Dominate Your Market, Crush Your Competition & Win in the Digital Age, available in premiere bookstores and on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and Apple’s iBooks. Gal has published his first business leadership book What Really Counts for CEOs in 2009. Since then, Borenstein has been featured as a guest commentator on CNN and Fox Business News on strategic marketing and branding issues, as well as, been one of the top digital content contributors to influential business leadership social media networks such as LinkedIn, PR Week’s The Hub, Advertising Age’s BtoB magazine, HR.Com, Smart CEO Magazine, DuctTapeMarketing.com and others. He can be reached at 703-385-8178×28 or email at gal@borensteingroup.com or @galborenstein on Twitter.

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