We all know how important positioning is for marketing your brand.
Don't just cross your fingers and hope.
If we are smart, we position ourselves in the mind of our audience as knowledgeable, trustworthy and authoritative, in an effort to get people to buy our services.
In the old days (pre-social networking) this often involved public speaking and advertising, both suggesting that you were indeed the expert in your field.
Now, with the explosion of social networking and instant online reviews, it’s different. You can position yourself all you like – but you have to follow through. It’s no longer you telling them – it’s a two way conversation with you telling your audience, and them checking it out, before agreeing or disagreeing with you (and they are more vocal when disagreeing than when agreeing!) There are so many ways for people to check you and your business out – but many businesses remain blind to this either totally unaware or sticking their head in the sand and pretending that bad reviews won’t happen to them.
If you’re one of them, you need to open your eyes: the information is out there, and easy to get hold of.
To illustrate – yesterday I checked out a business that had positioned itself as social media experts – I found that they hadn’t updated their twitter account for a month, and their Facebook page is full of articles from other experts. Would I trust them to do social media marketing for me? Hell, no!
So make sure that your positioning is congruent with what you do. You can no longer tell, you must show as well. Make sure you are the expert that you are positioning yourself as.
And here’s a tip: check your reputation online by googling your business name and seeing what comes up, what people are saying about you. Do this weekly, and respond to comments, positive and negative.