Marketing your pest control company is one thing, building up and maintaining your reputation, quite another. It doesn’t matter that you’re offering the best pest control services in town if people don’t have a great impression of your company. After all, a brand is only as good as people think it is, right?
The other day I was thinking about the time I needed to purchase a pair of shoes and decided to look for one online. After hours of going through every possible color, design, and fit, I finally found shoes that I thought would be suitable. However, just as I was about to add the product to my cart, I spied the reviews section and decided to take a look. Well, it’s a good thing I did because the reviews were abysmal!
If I hadn’t decided to read the reviews, I might have bought myself a pair of shoes that were unsatisfactory, despite my hours of painstakingly going through dozens of pairs. This was a few years ago when online shopping was still cementing its place in the retail world. Fast forward to now when it’s difficult to imagine buying anything without reading reviews on it first.
Now you know why so many companies pay people to take surveys and post positive reviews online – it works! Information gathered directly from authentic users gives potential customers a fair idea of what they can expect from your brand and services. This is not unlike reading movie or book reviews and basing your expectations on them. In highlighting the best and worst of what you have to offer, user-based reviews essentially build up your brand image.
This is why reputation management is important. It influences how audiences view your brand and what you can do to change that view. You may think the service you’re offering people is top-notch since you’ve poured considerable effort and resources into crafting it. However, the catch here is that it’s not about what you think, it’s about what your audiences think.
What seems to escape many companies is that brand image can be influenced by the brands themselves. How? With Reputation Management Services. These services entail gathering information on what users are saying and how they’re feeling about your brand and subtly influence such reviews. In other words, they deal with maintaining a good image for your brand which in turn can help you bring in more sales.
This is of the utmost importance simply because it’s difficult to imagine anyone would trust a service that suffers from a bad reputation. In the case of a service that’s routinely required like pest control, it’s all the more significant. All said and done, no one would entrust their living spaces to be rid of a pest infestation unless they know such a service to be reliable. When we’re considering products and services that rely on taste like clothes and beauty-related services, we can make allowances for subjectivity.
After all, every dress, pair of shoes, or hairdresser is bound to have a few negative reviews simply because everyone has different preferences with these. The same cannot be said for essential services such as pest control. You either get rid of pests thoroughly or you don’t – no subjectivity, it’s as simple as that. Therefore, when people read negative reviews on a pest control company, they’re far more likely to steer clear of it than they are with, say, apparel companies.
With the right kind of reputation management, you could allow customers to view your brand how you wish they would – offering high quality, reliable services. The ways in which reputation management services work are subtle, they aren’t overly trying to promote your business, just ensuring that it receives the right kind of responses from audiences. For example, these services sometimes entail encouraging loyal customers to write you positive reviews.
Over time, such reviews will boost your ratings online and ensure that those who are introduced to your brand will have a favorable impression of you. Moreover, you don’t want fake reviews, most people can tell the difference between these and genuine reviews. Besides, publishing such reviews online can only end up hurting your brand image in the long run. Think about it, why should anyone trust your brand if they realize that you have to pay people to say nice things about it?
Therefore, coaxing positive comments out of genuine customers is a far more effective method of improving your reputation and thereby expanding your consumer base. The best part about this is that it doesn’t all have to be online – more often than not if your brand enjoys a good reputation word-of-mouth helps promote it as well. Since pest control services generally operate in specific geographic areas, positive word-of-mouth can be especially useful for them.
Another advantage of using reputation management services is that it compels you to read user reviews online. These reviews are usually adept at pointing out what improvements your services could do with and applauding what you’ve been doing right. In other words, it’s nice to read these reviews both as a morale booster and as feedback on your service.
At the end of the day, it’s all about how people perceive your brand. With the right tools in your arsenal, you could influence your brand image online to suit your purposes. The aim is to find out how people feel about your services and seek to improve upon that. If you think you’re offering the highest quality services you possibly can, then the only way to improve your brand image is through reputation management.
