So you’re ready to take control of your reputation management strategy. Great! But before you tell yourself that responding to negative reviews online and posting good reviews from customers on your website is easy, hold your reservations. In fact, maintaining an active reputation management program is perhaps the hardest part. But as long as you keep up with it, you’ll reap in the rewards exponentially.

Execution is the key to successful reputation management. To ensure that your strategy doesn’t fall to the side, it’s important to have a plan that is both concrete and flexible. This means a strategy you can refer to each week as well as one that can evolve easily to accommodate changes as your company grows.

As the owner of a remodeling business, you’re bound to get pulled in different directions, leaving your attention divided and putting your plan at risk of failure. This is why it’s important to keep your staff informed of the strategy and assign team members to appropriate tasks. For example, the person in charge of managing your social media outlets should also be the one responsible for responding to off-site reviews. And your customer care specialist who worked with a client who left a negative on-site review should be the one to contact them to mediate the situation, and hopefully get the review changed to a more positive note.

Your reputation management process should take the form of a daily checklist or even a calendar of tasks to keep your staff organized and on target. It’s also important to remember that managing your reputation is more than maintaining a good report, it’s also about cultivation. Be sure to set aside a process to send review requests to happy clients as well and a set schedule for sending follow-up requests. And most importantly, use analytics to track your leads, conversions, and any other stats to help you gauge your growth over time.

And finally, your reputation management program should be a labor of love! While the hardest part may be setting up your schedule and finding a process that works for your company, eventually the flow of reviews will help write themselves. The process will become easier and as you grow you can add additional tasks to create a more effective reputation management program.

Consider how these results could shape your company: one of our remodeling clients saw a 129% increase in traffic over 6 months and a 96% increase in conversion rate after implementing their reputation management tool and program. This explosive growth was due to their consistent use of our new software. If you’ve got what it takes to keep up with reputation management, then a good, consistent reviews strategy can yield these positive results for you as well.