Now it has become a practice for the people to search for a brand which they want to purchase on offline and online. Whenever I want to purchase a certain item I always refer Google to get the exact specs and the brands that are being presently marketed. Recently when I wanted to purchased a laptop I searched a number of Sri Lanka sites to get the names of the companies who are marketing the particular brand which I wanted to buy. This helped me find the company which marketed the exact brand I preferred to purchase and I must say I really succeeded in buying one to my satisfaction.
In Sri Lanka online business is not a big hassle because only few companies provide online service. Also I would like to point out that very rarely customers in our country search for information o n online. In order to promote a brand it is always important to get the opinion of the customers regarding the product which they have purchased online or offline. Although it is difficult for an organization to have a track on offline purchases word of mouth, it is easy to have a track on online buzz about the brand. It is possible to get the views of the customers through online but there is also danger in same as well. For e.g. if there are more negative results posted by unsatisfied customers regarding a particular brand, the company tends to lose 70% of the business made online. In order to overcome this, the company should have a proper strategy to manage the online reputation.
As a marketing manager of a company you will be happy to view positive comments regarding the products marketed by your company, but at the same time you will be very much disappointed when you see negative results in Google search results. If you come across a situation like this, you can implement the following tactics in order to overcome this problem and in the long term this will give you good results.
1 – If you have a site try creating some of the subdomain to get listed in the search results. Make sure you do some link building activities in order to increase the popularity of the sub domains.
2 – Create other domains that represents your brand name. Eg- If your brand name is genuine.com then think of registering other domain pointers like genuine.net, genuine.org, genuine.info and add some valuable content.
If the .com site is transactional then .info to tell something about your brand such as new releases , new features, press room, corporate information etc.
3 – Create blogs and optimize it related to your brand name. According to my experience a well written wordpress.com blog is well picked up by the search engines. Eg- genuine.wordpress.com. Add some good content and update it regularly. So once the search engines identified your blog as a useful one it will show up your brand keyword. You also can try the same for blogger.
After creating blogs representing your brand name now submit it to blog communities. Blogged.com, mybloglog.com, blogcatalog.com are some of the good communities where you can submit. Make sure you create the usernames represent the brand name.
Eg – http://www.blogged.com/profile/yourbrandname
4 – Try creating social networking profile to represent your name. Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Dailymotion are some of the good sites. Try to avoid using nicknames instead use your brand name.
5 – Create company profiles in Linkdin, which will also highly valued content by search engines. Don’t you have a company profile in Linkdin, What you can do is create an employee profile and then add your company name. Once one entry is added you can see a page created for your brand. In Naymz you can also claim your company identity.
6 – Create a sample site in Webnode. It is a free web site creation tool but high search engine friendly. The inbuilt options give you the way to set up site maps, optimize the site. You can have some related content in the site and have some bookmarking.
7 – If there are blog, forum sites contains your negative comments, request them nicely to remove the posts. Just explain them the situation that you are in. In general sites wont remove those because it can be a breach of independent opinion. But you can have a try.
8 – If you see some good result in the second page try to get those pages up by doing some optimization activities.
9 – Do press leases and find out good PR sites to distribute it. These will be crawled quickly and get listed.
10 – If you can create widgets use widgetbox.com to create and submit. This will be also get listed quickly in search results.
11- Do some bookmarking as well
Just do the above by having an action plan. It will get you positive results after few months and you will realize most of the negative results gone down. For your brand keywords if the search results are not competitive then your job will be more easy. You can see the results very quickly.
Ragulan Tharmakulasingam 