Major changes have occurred within the past 12 to 18 months in the online world, particularly if you own a local business that draws your customers, clients, or patients within 5 to 10 miles of your physical location.

And these changes, if you’re not on top of them (and your competitors are), can drastically affect your ability to grow your business. At the same time, if you understand the changes and proactively act now, you can develop a sustainable competitive advantage such that your competitors will have an almost impossible chance of catching you.

It’s really up to you.

In today’s business environment, no matter what business you’re in, your potential customers, clients, and patients are looking for solutions to their problems. And the basic question they are asking is, “Who should I do business with?” They ask their friends and acquaintances for their recommendations. A 2012 study done by Neilsen shows that consumers trust personal recommendations 90% of the time.

Recent studies also show that, even with personal recommendations, 90% of prospective customers, clients, or patients still go online to “check you out,” maybe just to get your phone number or driving locations to your locations.

And that’s where your challenge comes front and center.

Google now shows your online reputation (in the form of a 5 star rating system) so that when a prospect types in your business name and city, it is displayed for them to see. Along with that, a number of other “review websites” (think Yelp, Insider Pages, Merchant Circle, etc.) do the same thing.

So even if you have good local ranking, if you don’t have a stellar 5 star reputation, prospects will see that and, in many cases, choose to do business with a competitor that does have a 5 star reputation.

And it’s a lot more complicated than just “managing your online reputation.” As former traditional business owners, we both know that we never increased our business revenues by improving our “management”. We always increased our revenues by improving our marketing.

It’s the same thing with your online reputation. We understand, proven by working with hundreds of clients just like you, that reputation management is an antiquated term that, by itself, just doesn’t work anymore.

That’s why we’ve developed a Reputation Marketing system to proactively help local businesses like yours develop a 5 star local online reputation and then market that reputation into more customers, clients, and patients.

If you’re looking to increase the number of customers, clients, and patients for your business and are serious about becoming the market leader in your local market, we should talk.

Call and schedule a 15 minute complimentary consultation with us. This will not be a sales call; it’s an exploratory call to see if we need to talk further, for us to determine if we believe we can help you and if we mutually believe we’ll be a fit for each other.