All types of home improvement businesses must focus on marketing. If you are not doing anything to market your business, you are not going to see it grow. You may be putting money into online and offline advertising methods. It is not about how much you are investing, though. In fact, what is causing your marketing to fail may be the one thing you haven’t done. That’s handle your reputation.

What’s Wrong with Your Reputation?

You talk to your customers. You’ve built a solid reputation with them. You’ve spent a good deal of time building up word of mouth marketing for your business. How could anything be wrong with your company’s reputation? Let’s put it this way. If you don’t know what people are saying about your business online, you don’t know what your reputation is.

How Can You Find Out?

Some businesses think a simple search online is all it will take to pull up information about what others think about their business. That’s not enough. In fact, unless you dedicated a great deal of time to the process, you are unlikely to find even half of the comments made about your business. The good news is you don’t have to do all of that work. You can let our dedicated professionals do it for you instead.

Where Are People Talking?

Just like any other type of business, you have customers that will love what you do and you’ll have customers that do not. It is up to you to ultimately work to please as many as you can and to minimize the effects of negative comments left online by those that were unhappy. Because individuals are chatting online through social media website (like Facebook and Twitter) and talking about you on blogs, in forums, and in private messages, it is a challenge to even remotely find out what others are saying.

Yet, the biggest mistake you can make as a business owner in the home improvement sector is not to address negative comments. When you work with our professionals, we’ll help you to do just that. Don’t overlook the value of having a professional organization ready and able to work to minimize the effects of negative marketing online. Your business could be missing key opportunities to save money on marketing by simply minimizing the negative talk affecting your business now.

Mark van Berkel is Founder and President of Hunch Manifest Inc. While managing business operations he also leads the team in designing semantic technology to provide personalized online presence and reputation management services. Prior to forming the company, he was consultant in enterprise software projects to companies including Panasonic, Shell, and General Electric and was an Architect for a world leading human capital management software-as-a-service. Mark holds a Bachelor of Information Systems from StFX University and did his graduate studies at University of Toronto, getting a MEng Industrial Information Engineering and an MBA, Strategy and Innovation from the Rotman School of Management. In 2006 he published a 170 page report as a researcher at the Semantic Technologies Lab at the University of Toronto and built a semantic technology prototype for SAP Research Labs. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn or Twitter. Mark is also certified in Google Analytics.