First Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

Today, we launched our first direct mail marketing campaign in Akron, OH.

Although our sample size was a little small--167 mailers--we hope that it will have some impact and generate new leads.

In our mailer we included:
--An individualized marketing report card for each business
--A letter from our President of Sales, Steven Milcinovic
--A quick info sheet explaining online marketing and reputation management

To the wider blogging community: have any of you done a direct mail marketing campaign before? What seemed to work for you and what did not?

Three Online Reputation Management Tools

One of the keys to Reputation Management is being able to monitor what people are saying about you. This can be particularly challenging today if your name or brand is discussed often and on multiple different website.

Managing your online reputation if you’re an individual rather than a business is just as challenging. How do you sift through the search results and pull up just the new info that pertains to you?

Since this is a definite need on the Internet to monitor your name/brand, there’s several tools available to help you track what others are saying about you. Spanning from social media search engines to daily alerts, we’ve picked three of the most useful tools out there for online reputation management.

Yasni.com—This is a great place to look up your name and see every mention of you as an individual. Typical Google Search results mix names with news and businesses. If you're looking to find yourself, this is the place to do it.

The search results are also grouped by type and place of mention to make it easier to scan and the most recent results are towards the top.

SocialMention.com--This tool really helps you monitor the social networking communities of blogs, tweets, and other social mentions. Although the searches themselves are a little slow, bear with it and you'll find this tool really helpful.

You can break down the search by blogs, tweets, news articles, and video. You can also sort by most post rank and most recent. You can also see an overview of how many mentions are positive, negative, and neutral, as well as the frequency of mentions.

Google Alerts--Although this is a little overkill for doing research on yourself, it doesn't hurt to set up a couple news alerts, which are emailed to you daily regarding your specified search term. Be careful to put in a fairly limited search criteria otherwise you will be flooded with search results.

Try entering all your search criteria in quotes. For example, if you want to hear all news about reputation management in Cleveland, Ohio, set the alert up as “reputation management Cleveland ohio” and try a couple variations such as “online reputation management in Cleveland ohio.”

So, those are the best tools. Use them regularly to check upon your online reputation.

How to Improve Your Online Reputation

Improving your online reputation is often a labor intensive undertaking, but it can yield great results. Chief among them is the fact that the better you look online, the more likely customers will trust you enough to do business with you.

In general, you should take care to do the following:

Watch Your Online Reputation--the first step to improving your online reputation is to monitor it. This means Googling yourself regularly and reading what people have to say about you.

Claim Your Listing--quite simply, if you claim your business listings, then people will be less likely to write negative reviews about you. Just like if you're standing beside your car, vandals are less likely to mess with it. In a way, the Internet can be a dangerous neighborhood to leave your metaphorical car, but it can also be a wonderful one too where happy customers praise your business and you rise to the top of local listings because everyone loves you.

Respond to Negative Feedback--it's important to reply to negative feedback instead of letting it stand. This means being professional and answering the concerns raised by the online reviewers. Seek to mediate a solution to their issue and personally reach out to them online. By doing this, you show people you are aware of what the concerns are and that you're responsible about making sure customer complaints are dealt with.

Ask Your Happy Customers to Go Online--it's inadvisable to go online yourself and write good things about your business. Lying on the Internet is very transparent and to do so makes you look shady. But there's nothing wrong with contacting your loyal, happy customers and asking them to write good things about you. After all, why wouldn't they want to support the business they love?

To learn more, visit Mr. Good Name's website. Also, you can check out our five-phase plan that gets small businesses on the Internet.

Five Things to Know About Online Marketing

Online Marketing can have some enormous benefits to your business. Unlike traditional means of marketing, such as newspaper or radio ads, Online Marketing relies on the customer seeking you out and judging you based on the merits of your Online Reputation.

In order to fully optimize your Online Marketing efforts, we've compiled a list of five things you must know about Online Marketing.

1. Visibility = Business--The more visible you are, the more customers you will likely have. That means that you need to go "all in" in order to become visible. In the beginning, this is a lot of work. This means not only listing yourself in ALL of the directories, but also maintaining a blog and a social media presence.

2. Don't Spam--Unlike traditional marketing techniques of flooding a pool of audience with generic, repetitive advertisements, Online Marketing requires customers seeking you out. Once customers have sought you out, it's important to keep up a constant stream of contact and communication, but it's just as important not to annoy them with over contact. As such, don't spam your potential customers with untargeted advertisements like you might if they were a TV audience.

3. Constant Contact--While you don't want to spam your prospective customers, you do want to keep up a constant contact with them and be ready to address their questions or concerns. Also, since people interact with so many other businesses online, it's important to remind people who you are and why they should buy from you.

4. Secure Your Reputation--Since so much of online decision making revolves around the credibility of the company in question, it's important to tend to your online reputation. Make sure that you're responding to any online criticism and taking proactive steps to get happy customers to say good things about you.

5. Use Free--In the online world, so much stuff is free that it's hard to even approach customers without freebies. Luckily, free doesn't have to cost you that much. Often, simply by offering information you're connecting with you audience and giving them a free product. Use your expertise to develop a blog or set of online articles that share your knowledge with the world. This will establish your credentials and in turn make people more likely to purchase your goods/services.

For more info about how Online Marketing can help your business, go to our website and check out our five-stage plan for getting businesses established on the Internet.

Opening the Door to New Customers

Today is our official start day, and we're very excited to meet prospective customers.

Our President of Sales, Steven Milcinovic, hit the streets armed with 36 leads.

If you were one of the lucky businesses he visited today, let us know if you're interested in a free consultation or learning more about online marketing and reputation management. We're happy to sit down and talk with you.

If you've stumbled upon this by some chance, check out our website at MrGoodName.com.

Mr. Good Name is Online

Mr. Good Name is a reputation management and online marketing business that services small businesses and professional organizations in Ohio. We manage client's online presence and employ online marketing strategies to keep new referrals coming their way.

Locally owned and operated, we are a small enterprise that believes no business is too small or too old to be online. Furthermore, no business should try to ignore the Internet and pretend it's going to go away.

With affordable prices and personable representatives, we guide technically disinclined or inexperienced businesses to the web so they can get get as much attention online as they deserve.

We also battle unfair, false, and misleading reviews by getting loyal customers to go online and write about the businesses they love.

Interested in what we might have to offer you? Contact us online or go to MrGoodName.com for more information.