Online reputation management

Online reputation management (ORM) is establishing and managing a positive perception of a business. It covers encouraging positive reviews, tracking brand mentions, and responding to users’ comments on social media, product review websites, and other platforms. ORM enables you to improve the perception of your brand, encourage trust, build credibility, establish visibility, gain authority, and boost sales.

In this article, you’ll learn why reputation management is important and how to manage it. We’ll also unveil 5 ways to improve this measure.

Why is online reputation management important?

A positive impression online is a must for every business that strives to be successful. Online brand reputation management helps you adjust the way the audience perceives your brand. Besides a positive attitude towards your company, you can establish trust and credibility and build authority in your market. However, a good ORM isn’t just a perfect image on social media. It’s a global work of your team that covers all channels you broadcast your message through. Product review websites, online communities, social platforms, and other online places for open discussions can influence your company. That’s why you need to develop a strategy that will cover all these channels and monitor information about your product and brand in general.

Establishing and maintaining a positive narrative about your company is a challenging task. Yet you can do it successfully with the right online reputation management strategy. For instance, if you have one dissatisfied client, you can lose him. However, it’ll be very problematic for you if this person leaves a negative review on a site like TripAdvisor, Amazon Customer Reviews, or Yelp or comments under your post on social media networks. It can influence your brand reputation, credibility, transparency, and authority.

To prevent that from happening, ORM comes into action. With its help, you can instantly track all brand mentions, respond to negative comments, and solve customer issues immediately. It’ll help you avoid more complex consequences that impact the profitability and reputation of your business.

By showing customers your care and trying to solve their problems instantly, turn comments into an advantage. Trust, transparency, and sales are the things you can earn if you manage to respond to negative comments, bring your arguments, acknowledge your mistakes, and solve problems when necessary.

Now that you know about the importance of ORM, it’s time to unveil how to manage it.

How to manage your online reputation?

If you don’t want dissatisfied customers to influence your reputation by sharing negative reviews, you need to know how to manage your reputation online. In this section, we’ll uncover some important steps for you to consider during ORM. Let’s dive in.

1. Analyze your online reputation. The first step you should take is to research your brand reputation. During this audit, you need to find out what people say about your company and product. This way, you’ll be able to figure out what works with them and what isn’t doing well. Check out all the channels you use: social media networks, your website, and third-party sites. Find all the necessary information by opening an incognito browser window and searching for your brand name, its ratings, reviews, and comments. You can find the information faster using a special monitoring tool like Semrush or Social Searcher. After collecting all the data, you can make conclusions about the way customers perceive your company.
2. Develop a strategy. When creating an online reputation strategy, select areas you need to improve. Identify and focus on the urgent tasks first. Once you decide to manage your online reputation across several channels, it can take time for your team to do it at a time. That’s why it’s critical to develop rules and create guidelines. Communication guides enable employees to stay consistent and use the same brand voice across various platforms. They also help prioritize tasks when several team members work on the same task. By developing communication guidelines, you can navigate your workers how to respond to customers’ comments, reviews, and feedback. Define which tasks are urgent and need instant reaction and those with secondary importance. Build your brand’s tone of voice and mention it in your guidelines. Your content creators and managers should know how to write articles and answers to customers in compliance with your company.
3. Keep an eye on brand mentions. Every brand owner should know what people say about his company. Monitoring brand mentions lets you quickly respond to customers’ negative reviews and prevent the problem from escalating. If you answer too long, it might influence your reputation. There are two ways to track brand mentions: Google Alerts and special social media monitoring tools. Consider setting up Google Alerts for your company name and get emails once there are new results related to your topic. You can also use a special tool like Sprout Social, Brandwatch, or Mentionlytics. These platforms prevent you from searching websites with your brand mentions and analyzing them. Social media networks cover statements in blog posts, social media posts, news articles, and forum comments.
4. Come up with a crisis management strategy. A crisis can happen at any time with any business. You need to develop a crisis management strategy to deal with the problems that might arise. It should cover the steps team members should take to overcome specific problems. Cover the ways to respond to social media mentions. When developing a crisis strategy, consider using social monitoring platforms, track industry trends, identify the most powerful channels, assign tasks to people responsible for specific areas, and draft responses.
5. Encourage clients to leave their reviews and comments on your product. You need positive customer feedback to gain trust, credibility, and authority. Besides, you’ll be able to establish an online presence and visibility. Ensure your clients can leave reviews on product review websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Prospects will notice positive feedback from previous customers when they consider your product. Good customer reviews influence leads’ decisions and encourage them to make purchases. Allow clients to leave comments under product cards on your website. Ask them for a review once they receive and try your product. You can send an email campaign reminding them about feedback. Create a professional email campaign with SendPulse in minutes.
6. Take care of negative reviews. Since negative feedback prevents prospects from choosing a product, it’s essential to manage them. First, you need to identify the level of urgency to provide responses. Take care of negative feedback that emerges at the top of SERP. Search for negative reviews on all platforms your company appears on: Google Business Profile, social media, Trustpilot, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and many others. Secondly, once you find all the negative feedback, respond to the most problematic ones first. Answer comments fast and be polite. You need to show your respect and care to clients and strive to solve their problems. If your company is responsible for the issue, acknowledge your mistakes and say you’ll eliminate the problem immediately. Answer comments under your posts on social media to solve problems in public. It will show potential customers that you are approachable.
7. Make sure that your content is branded. Stay consistent with your branding. All the content you share on your website, social media, and third-party websites should comply with your branding. Your messaging and brand tone of voice should be the same everywhere. It makes your company recognizable. Branding covers all aspects of your business, including branded searches, responses to customer feedback, communication on social media networks, and responses on Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Trustpilot.
8. Partner with the right opinion leaders. When collaborating with influencers, keep in mind your and their reputation. Choose opinion leaders wisely, including their reputation. Their mistakes can make your online brand reputation hurt. Since you can’t control the content of other individual posts, it can be a problem in the future. For instance, there are many scandals connected to celebrities posting inappropriate and sometimes very offensive content. The brand can also become a victim of this scenario.

Now that you know how to manage your reputation, it’s time to figure out how to improve it. Let’s check out the 5 ways.

5 Ways to Improve Your Online Reputation Management

Reputation is a very fragile concept, especially at a time when all the negative comments are visible and easily accessible on social networks. Since every negative review impacts your company, we’ll show you how to prevent it with ORM. We’ll unveil some tips to improve it.

1. Track social media networks. To have a perfect online reputation, having accounts on various social media platforms is not enough. For greater success of your brand, you need to monitor and update your social media profiles. Consider using special social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Agorapulse. Strive to regularly post on your social networks and increase your organic following. Share Stories, Reels, and posts to expand your reach and communicate with your prospects. Reply to comments under posts and encourage discussions to increase activity on your social media.
2. Let customers leave reviews on special platforms. Positive online reviews are powerful tools for influencing the decisions of potential customers. Most prospects search the internet to find out whether a product or brand receives positive reviews. They look through product review websites and comments under your posts to find the necessary information. If your product has many positive reviews, it increases the possibility of a person buying it. According to statistics, 95% of clients read online reviews before purchasing. Positive reviews increase trust in a brand, and more leads buy from businesses that have reviews from previous customers.
3. Write for your blog. Online reputation depends on all online platforms, including your blog. Blogging allows you to build authority in your industry and show your expertise. Share useful content with users to help solve their problems and encourage them to purchase your product. By publishing quality content, you can gain the trust of your audience, establish a strong online presence, and build a community around your brand.
4. Reply to negative customers’ comments. You need to be wise when answering comments under your social media posts or product reviews. There’s no place for criticism or discussions with customers. You need to be short and clear in your answers. Thank clients for their feedback and promise to eliminate the issue (if it exists). When customers have some problems, solve them. Use this information to improve your product and prevent this situation from happening again. Treat your clients with respect and avoid any negative discussions and debates.
5. Avoid participating in debates. As a professional, you shouldn’t be affected by criticism or hate. Don’t participate in discussions with users under your posts or on discussion platforms. It can harm your online reputation. Always try to solve the problem offline to provide real value to customers who experienced problems with your product.

Congrats, now you know what online reputation management is and why it’s essential. Hope that our guide will help establish and maintain a positive brand reputation online.

References:

1. This article unveils the importance of online reputation management.
2. In this article, you’ll find a guide on online reputation management.

Last Updated: 25.07.2023