If you’re in the beginning stages of starting your business or organization, or even if you’ve been in business for a while, reputation is important because it’s never been easier for people to share what they feel about your business online. That information about your reputation, those feelings about your reputation and how you deliver your products and services can now spread like wildfire.

It's never been easier for potential customers to find out what others think about your business (or firm, restaurant, store, practice).

As you know, nowadays people search online before they buy. We know that people put a lot of stock in what they read online. In fact, studies show that 74 percent of U.S. consumers choose to do business based on online feedback—even when it’s from total strangers!

But reputation is much more comprehensive than just reviews. Your reputation is established by factors like your website load speed, if your site is mobile optimized, are you easy to reach and get a response from, and are you active on social media and publishing content.

As I’m sure you recognize, these are all factors that impact how you personally think about the businesses you buy from, and it is how today’s consumers are now evaluating yours as well.

Therefore, you must structure your business properly by implementing these proven systems of success to correctly start and effectively operate a thriving business:

Mobile-First Website – Did you know that most of your potential customers expect to find your business on the internet? Having a mobile optimized, fast-loading website designed to attract local customers and business to generate revenue is one of the basic foundations for having a successful business and building a good reputation.

Web Chat – this software is integrated within your website to allow a customer to chat with your business in real-time, via text messaging, to give you another opportunity to capturing leads.

Opportunity Recapture SMS – Let us turn your missed calls into opportunities. You’ll capture more opportunities immediately, provide better service, and build a database of contacts to market to all at once.

Call Tracking – We’ll assign a unique phone number to a specific advertisement or marketing campaign. This will help you track how leads find your business when they call the number.

This is the beginning of establishing a good reputation for excellence in the eyes of your customers and investors.

Now that you’ve structured your business correctly, it’s time to improve on that. We call this process, Resell.

Resell is making sure that you maximize the lifetime value, or LTV of every customer you get by continuing to resell them your products and services, to up-sell them to more expensive products and services and to cross-sell them to other complimentary products and services. McDonald’s is the classic example: ‘Do you want fries with that?’ ‘Do you want to supersize your order?’ Or, by simply making sure that you’re following up with your customers.

As they say, ‘the fortune is in the follow up’. Just about every business is sitting on a goldmine of customers that they’ve previously done business with - and that would likely gladly do business with you again - but you’ve simply lost touch.

These days there are so many cost-effective and trackable ways to follow up and bring customers back to your business - from email newsletters, to SMS campaigns, to retargeting ads - that we can utilize to make sure you’re maximizing each opportunity.

The following Systems of Success are perfect for this:

The Customer Loyalty Builder – These are campaigns to remind, reactive, and resell your existing customers to drive more sales and profitability. This service gives you a strategic, systematic approach to maximizing the value of each happy customer by following up to bring them back to your business to buy more.

The Customer Connection Revenue System – With this system, you can communicate with your customers for everything from special offers to appointment reminders. This is the fastest, most powerful and affordable way to build your list so that you can activate and reactivate your customers.

Once you've done all of the hard work of getting a customer, it’s time to grow your business. It’s time to Reach.

A business that wants to grow needs to make sure that more people know about it today than did yesterday. If you’re not meeting new people and telling them about your (product/service), you’re not developing a pipeline of potential new customers and you are going to see fewer sales in the future as a result.

Most businesses are passive about this - meaning they are hoping that referrals and word-of-mouth will do the trick. We like to say that ‘hope is not a strategy’, so we recommend a more proactive approach to getting your business more visibility that includes paid advertising and making strategically-designed offers to bring in new customers.

Reach is making sure that you’re getting in touch with more of your qualified prospects every single day. It’s pretty obvious that if you want to grow your business you need to get more of your targeted prospects to know who you are.

If they don’t know who you are they can’t buy from you, so Reach is the process and the systems you use to get in touch with more prospects and let them know about your business.

You need effective, strategic marketing techniques to help you own the attention of your ideal prospects and consistently fill your sales funnel.

When you use marketing strategically, this positions you as the preferred choice in your industry and increases profitability. This is how you grow!

By now, your customers should be impressed at the level of professionalism they are experiencing; giving them the confidence they need to work with you. This is the perfect time to Retarget them.

There is an old ‘Rule of 7’ in marketing that says that a consumer needs an average of seven impressions before a prospect remembers your business and is likely to take some sort of action.

But that rule was created decades ago when we saw an average of 500 ads each day. That number has increased over 10X now, so it’s safe to say that the ‘Rule of 7’ probably needs to get bumped up as well.

Regardless of what that specific number is, we know we need to stay in front of prospects!

Retargeting allows you to make sure that the prospects that have already demonstrated some degree of interest in doing business with you - they already visited your site - are going to continue to see your business over and over again by showing them ads over time.

Because these ads are directed at warm prospects, it’s the highest ROI advertising you’ll ever do.