This is “The Fourth Step: Maximize—Evolve Your Strategy”, section 11.5 from the book Online Marketing Essentials (v. 1.0). For details on it (including licensing), click here.

For more information on the source of this book, or why it is available for free, please see the project's home page. You can browse or download additional books there. To download a .zip file containing this book to use offline, simply click here.

Has this book helped you? Consider passing it on:
Help Creative Commons
Creative Commons supports free culture from music to education. Their licenses helped make this book available to you.
Help a Public School
DonorsChoose.org helps people like you help teachers fund their classroom projects, from art supplies to books to calculators.

11.5 The Fourth Step: Maximize—Evolve Your Strategy

Learning Objective

  1. Understand the importance of constantly evolving your strategy.

Online reputation management (ORM) should not simply be seen as a tool in the measurement and engagement arsenal. It provides a great deal more insight that can be applied to many other elements of the business to maximize results.

Within the marketing realm, ORM provides key insights into how particular tactics are performing and how it impacts the overall marketing strategy. By measuring how your stakeholders respond to particular activities (be it marketing, communications, or branding) it becomes possible to learn through each campaign and mold the tactic based on empirical data to maximize returns. This provides a great way for both offline and online campaigns to constantly improve and stay relevant to stakeholders’ needs.

These same outputs can also be shared with other departments, such as human resources (HR), to provide additional ways to impact the internal workings of your company. In HR’s case, a measure might be of how staff view the company itself.

Similarly, these insights can be applied to the overall business strategy to assist both with data collection and providing early insights on competitor and environmental changes that may drive strategic decision making. The Internet is the largest focus group, and if it’s looked at from a market research perspective, there is a huge opportunity to apply “wisdom of the crowd” and evolve business to be more aligned with your stakeholders’ needs.

Key Takeaways

  • ORM provides key insights into how particular tactics are performing and how they impact the overall marketing strategy.
  • It is possible with ORM for campaigns to constantly improve and stay relevant to stakeholders’ needs. These outputs can be used by other departments, such as HR.
  • The Internet is the largest focus group.

Exercise

  1. Can you think of another situation where these insights can be beneficial to a company?