Reputation marketing is a fairly new concept to many home inspectors, especially if they’ve never had to rely on technology before to boost their customer base. The practice involves capitalizing off satisfied customers in order to generate new happy clients. It’s one of the best ways to maintain and grow your business from the inside out, so learn more about these reputation marketing solutions and how to make use of it.
Note the Trouble
The first tactic is identifying where the problems lie when it comes to your reputation management. If there are routine complaints from customers about billing practices, inspection techniques, or customer service claims, you’ll need to fix these problems before doing anything else.
Tackle the Negativity
From formally registering a complaint with the BBB to mentioning a dissatisfaction to a friend, customers have a number of channels available to alter a home inspector’s reputation. Responding to legitimate complaints and (politely) explaining your side of the story to illegitimate complaints can go a long way for potential clients trying to decide about your business.
Create Additional Online Resources
Customers aren’t likely to search through more than a few websites to find out more about you. Home inspection marketing needs to include a professional website as well as social media pages so it’s easy for customers to get a sense of your business. A solid online presence not only increases your legitimacy, it also creates more positive information to put on the first page of the search results.
Find Your Customers
Reaching your customers is all about appealing to the right audience, so it’s time to find out where your customers are. In some communities, they may be turning to Facebook to find answers. In others, they may be discussing their experiences on Yelp or Twitter. Once you know the traditions in the community, you can focus on those platforms to increase your reach.
Be Yourself
Reputation marketing is all about creating a persona, both in person and online. It should be professional, but it should also be realistic. Forcing yourself to hide your personality will be exhausting, and it’s unlikely your customers will be fooled anyway.
Start a Blog
Blogging gives you a chance to really speak to your customers about the very real issues they face and an ideal reputation marketing solution. A professional blog will not only boost your search engine rankings, it will also give you something to promote on your social media pages. Talk to your customers about their biggest challenges, and concentrate on content that is as helpful as it is honest.
Build Professional Relationships
A home inspector has to be a people-person in order to be recommended by homeowners and real estate agents, so it may be time to drop a few friendly messages to people you haven’t heard from in a while. Concentrate on adding value to their business or interests instead of asking for a favor. The key is to develop a natural association both online and in-person.
Hopefully, it’s clear that both reputation management and reputation marketing is a matter of being as proactive as possible. By taking an active role in the conversation, home inspectors have a way to control what is being said and how it’s being communicated.
We at The Savvy Inspector wants you to succeed in every aspect of your home inspection business and a huge part of that is leveraging on reputation marketing.
