5 Ways to Boost Your Lead Generation with Strategic Online Reputation Management

Lead generation or online reputation—what would you choose to have your business engine running? Tricky question, right?

The first step to generating sales for your business is lead generation—the reason why you can’t neglect leads. But if you ignore your online reputation, you’ll lose both your credibility and lead generation.

With online reputation management, brands can deal with negative reviews and get valuable feedback on their product. This ultimately impacts the buyer’s buying decision. This means if you have a bad reputation online, you’ll lose leads—and eventually a potential customer.

However, using social listening tools like Mention can help you manage your online reputation and improve your lead generation. But how?

Enhance Your Online Presence

Think about this: your friend suggests two different options for email marketing platforms: Convertkit and Kirim.

• ConvertKit has 15K followers on LinkedIn, and its founder has built a personal brand on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Kirim has merely 1K followers on LinkedIn and can’t be found on any other social platform.

Which brand are you likely to trust more? Convertkit, right? Why?

Because the brand consistently shows up on different social media platforms and Convertkit users are constantly talking positively about the product and brand.

When you have an active online presence—on social media and Google—it increases your brand’s visibility with potential leads. Besides increasing the chances of being seen by your prospective customers, it generates demand for your products.

And how can you establish such visibility without compromising your brand image?

First, use consistent brand assets on each social platform—brand colors, logos, and headlines.

Next, develop a policy documentation and hand it over to each team member at your company. Ideally, this documentation should include the following:

• Who is in charge of which social media channel?—clearly define it.
• Are there brand ambassadors, influencers, and partners your team should know about? If so, create a list of these people along with their social media links and a brief description.
• Are there any specific trolls you don’t respond to? Mention what these trolls are and why you have decided to ignore them.

Now, create communication guidelines to identify the issues you need to prioritize and respond to first.

• Urgent issues: Reviews from customers on review websites, by influencers and industry experts, and emotional and negative reviews. These issues need an immediate response.
• Non-urgent issues: Thank you reviews and minor issues that can be resolved by exchanging a few messages.

Finally, establish a tone of voice and share the guidelines with everyone (on your team) who talks directly with your customers and creates content. Then, develop a tone of voice template.

To build this template, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my brand communicate with slang and emojis?
• Are there words and phrases that my brand should avoid using?
• Should the communication be formal or casual?

Pro tip: Leverage Mention’s monitoring capabilities that can help you track brand mentions across the web and ensure you can quickly enhance your online presence.

Leverage Customer Reviews

Imagine a customer is searching for a nearby restaurant on Google and notices the bad reviews. They go through all the reviews to find context and see the images. They find 7 out of 8 reviews to be negative—and decide to shop from somewhere else. A customer lost within a fraction of seconds.

50% of consumers trust customer reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. If your business fails to prove its credibility through customer reviews, it won’t generate leads and will ultimately suffer.

But what if a customer shares a negative review or posts one on social channels?

Here’s how you can deal with it:

Respond promptly

Get back to customers with a response within 24-48 hours. The more time you take to respond, the more frustrated and undervalued the customers feel—making them distrust your brand.

For example, ClickUp responded within a day to a (frustrated) customer who mentioned them in a tweet and raised the issue.

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Review monitoring can help your team identify negative reviews and respond faster

Offer a solution

Identify their frustrations. Are they not satisfied with the product, or is it the customer service experience? Understand their issue and acknowledge your mistake.

Use phrases like “We understand your frustration” and provide them with a quick resolution. This could be a refund or replacement for the product or being transparent about the next steps to rectify the problem.

Ask customers how to improve your products and services

Collect customer feedback directly using a feedback tab on your website, Slack channel, and Reddit, as well as embedding a feedback form in your email campaigns.

For example, when you uninstall Grammarly’s Chrome extension, it asks its customers why and embeds a textbox for them to add ways in which the brand can improve its product.

Ask the reviewer to modify the review

Once you have resolved the issue and the customer is happy about it—request them to update their negative review and turn it into positive.

Or, ask them to modify their review with the improved customer service they received in resolving the issue.

Note: This approach works only when the customer is pleased with your response and the resolution.

Keep things public

When you keep your reviews public, respond promptly, and provide the resolution—it showcases that you acknowledge your customers’ issues and go the extra mile to solve them. This builds trust in other customers who have shared negative reviews.

But imagine handling customer reviews on multiple social channels—say 10 such customer reviews. It’s quite challenging to manage them all at once.

With Mention’s Engage feature, you can engage with your community on social media. Here are two ways you can do it:

• You get a unified inbox connected to all your social media channels. This helps you centralize the DMs from your customers and address them without fail.
• You can respond to your customers’ comments on social media.

This helps you stay on top of negative reviews your customers send you via DMs and comments—and you can easily address them without having to juggle between different platforms.

Create and Share Valuable Content

To build your online reputation, you need to emphasize credibility and earn the trust of your audience.

This doesn’t *just* involve creating educational content but content that highlights customer success stories, case studies, and testimonials. These content assets showcase:

• how your product has been able to solve your customers’ pain points
• how your brand has been delivering great customer experience.

So, how can you create such result-focused content? Here are a few ways to do so:

Get customers to share their feedback on social media

When a customer speaks positively about your brand on social media, repost it on your company page. And if this feedback comes from an influencer or an industry expert, you can even use it as an endorsement.

Here’s how Todoist did this when their user tweeted about their product.

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Create infographics

When a customer gives you a testimonial, turn them into interactive graphics and share them on your website and social media platforms.

Alternatively, you can pick parts of the case study to turn them into infographics—and share them in all the relevant places.

Leverage LinkedIn recommendations

Add your customers to your LinkedIn connection list and ask them for a LinkedIn recommendation. If they agree, send them a LinkedIn recommendation request.

Once they send you the recommendation—take a screenshot and share it on your social media channels and website.

💡Pro tip: Add the LinkedIn recommendations to the featured section on each employee’s and founder’s LinkedIn profile.

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Maximize tools to collect testimonials

If you find it hard to collect testimonials and create case studies, you can automate the entire process using tools like Senja.io and Videoask.

Using such tools, you can curate testimonials in different formats, share a form to collect them, and embed them everywhere—on social channels or your website.

Here’s how to import customer tweets into tools like Senja and convert them into testimonials.

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Use the case studies in blog posts

Visitors are most likely to land on your website after reading a blog post they found while searching for a keyword on Google.

Blog posts are discoverable and get more eyeballs when they rank on SERPs. That’s why embedding case studies into your blog posts while educating the readers on a specific topic is a great way to move the readers down the funnel.

For example, Storylane wrote a MOFU blog and hyperlinked their case study.

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Include them in your newsletters

If you have an active email subscriber list—a company and individual newsletter both—you can embed case studies and success stories into the email. Here’s how you can do it:

• Add an image with a testimonial
• Add a link to the case study or success story
• Use an action button and link the case study
• Create an entire newsletter dedicated to the case study

Collaborate with influencers

Having an influencer endorse your product validates its credibility and brand. People trust recommendations by influencers, so they are likely to check out your products and services if they like it.

For example, ButterDocs, a writing app, collaborated with Jimmy Dales who runs the Superpath newsletter to let people know about its product.

💡Pro tip: Use Mention’s Monitor feature and identify trending topics and influencers to collaborate with.

But how can you partner with influencers without their contact information? You can always use an email finder tool to find an influencer’s valid email address.

Once you get the influencer’s email address, add them to a cold email tool to send personalized email campaigns.

Next, draft your email—add the subject line and write your email pitch for collaboration.

Once you have drafted the email, add a follow-up email—the recipient will receive this email a few days after you have sent the first email (depending on the duration you have set up for the follow-up email).

You can create as many follow-up emails as you want and send the campaign to the relevant influencers—and even track the performance.

Actively Monitor Your Online Reputation

When you monitor what is being said about your brand online, it helps you understand your audience’s sentiment. Do they perceive your brand positively or negatively? If they perceive it negatively, why so? Once you start monitoring your brand online, you’ll get to know about every conversation that includes your brand name.

This is not only a great opportunity to find out why people are talking negatively about your brand but also to identify what people like about your brand.

For example, if someone mentions your brand in LinkedIn comments (without tagging you) and praises your product—you won’t get to know about it unless you use a monitoring tool.

Let’s say, a Qwotd user praises their product in their conversation on LinkedIn comments which sparked people’s interest in using the tool. To find this mention, Qwotd ideally used a social monitoring tool.

But how to use a social monitoring tool to track brand mentions?

Step1: Set up alerts

First, pick a social media monitoring tool and set up your keywords. For example, if you want to monitor your brand mentions, you’ll use the variations of your brand name.

Step 2: Analyze customer sentiment

Once the social monitoring tool notifies you of the branded mentions, you’ll be able to see customers’ sentiment—what they’re talking about your brand and how they perceive it.

For example, if the tool notifies you about the brand mentions where a customer is praising your product and highlighting the benefits of your product—it emphasizes positive sentiment.

Track reviews and feedback

After setting the monitoring tool for alerts, review the results regularly.

Are the customers expressing their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the product? Are the complaints about your product consistent? Are different customers highlighting the same issue again and again, say slow customer support? By reviewing these patterns, you’ll be able to improve your product and service and offer a seamless customer experience.

💡Pro tip: Use Mention’s Monitor feature to track and monitor online mentions related to a specific keyword, phrase, or topic, stay ahead of any potential issues, and maintain a positive brand image that attracts leads.

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Engage with Your Audience

Imagine your audience sharing reviews about your product and their overall experience—and all you hear is—radio silence. Would they trust your brand? Would they purchase from you again? No.

In fact, they will talk negatively about your brand and products with their friends and colleagues. That’s why it is important to engage with your audience through prompt responses.

Doing so, you show your audience that you value their feedback and are committed to their satisfaction—by resolving their issues.

When you send timely responses to their feedback—usually within 24-48 hours—it indicates that your brand cares to build meaningful relationships with its audience. This leads to a positive experience.

To ensure timely and meaningful interactions, do the following:

• Track conversations about your brand on social media and respond to the comments by your audience
• Use a social inbox to organize the comments from your audience across all the platforms in one place—and respond.
• Direct them to your customer support and mention the time period during which the customer support agent will contact them over email.

In fact, you can level up your audience engagement using Mention—it helps you track conversations about your brand, and engages with your audience. This further enhanced lead generation and positive interactions.

Level up your online reputation with Mention

Truth be told: managing your online reputation is hard. One mistake by your brand and your entire reputation comes crashing off in seconds.

This is why it’s important to stay on top of conversations happening about your brand.

How? With Mention, you can track brand mentions and organize your social media comments and messages in one place. This helps you in two ways:

• You can jump into conversations, engage with your audience and address their objections.
• You can see the social feedback from customers in one place and respond to them.

Want to see this in action? Book a demo with Mention and see how it works.