In general, Online Reputation Management is not a very popular term. Usually, people think of it as to be something done when something wrong happens and destroys the online reputation of someone. But, that’s not true. Rather online reputation management is something that’s useful and necessary for everyone. You don’t want to show something online that is not good for your reputation. The right Online Reputation Management Strategy helps you control and manage your online presence in a positive way.

The same goes for a company or brand. Whether you are starting a new business or have an existing one, you definitely need to know some online reputation management strategies to help you build your brand.

Around 86% of consumers read online reviews about the brand or the products before making a purchase. This simply means that online reviews make a huge difference in making purchase decisions.

Companies with poor reviews don’t get much of business whereas the companies with good reviews get many advantages and get much better business than the ones with poor online reputation businesses.

Online Reputation Management is an Integral Part of Online Marketing

It is important to understand that it is not only the reviews that are considered in online reputation management, rather there are a lot of different factors that are taken into consideration while making an online reputation management strategy.

Online reputation management strategy is an integral part of online marketing. Every marketer should know how to use online reputation management strategy and techniques to make a positive brand identity for their brand.

Going further into this post we will take a look at how online reputation management strategy can be used in different parts of marketing, the tools you will need, and online marketing strategies to help you create a better online reputation for your brand. But before we get into it, let’s first understand what it is, so that understanding other things become easier for you.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Broadly speaking Online Reputation Management covers everything that helps build a positively good reputation for a brand. By everything I mean it includes the online reviews and mentions about your products, company, and the brand itself. Also, it includes the social media conversations regarding your brand and gazing at the sentiments of those conversations.

If people are talking negatively about your brand over social media, it’s high time you should take it seriously and take corrective measures.

Most people use social media and review sites to read the feedback by other users about your products and brand before making purchase decisions.

If they read negative comments and feedback you understand that they won’t buy from you. That means you will lose a lot of your potential customers. Losing customers simply means losing business and killing your sale and profits.

So, it is important to take every possible action you can to make the very best reputation for your brand. But, again don’t do it unethically otherwise it may be more dangerous for your brand than you can imagine.

Search engines and online consumers are way more than smarter than you think and they understand if you try to manipulate your reputation to make a better impression. In such cases, you again will lose your potential customers, and search engines might impose a penalty on your website for using unethical practices.

The only way to do it in a good way is to do it ethically. Use the best practices and best online reputation management strategies.

How Does Online Reputation Management Impact Your Business?

It is quite evident that if you don’t handle your online reputation management properly it can affect your business negatively. This is the reason most of the brands have people in-house to manage their online reputation. It is a no-brainer to understand why they do that themselves instead of outsourcing to any agency.

If by any chance a bad word or a bad customer experience or negative content goes viral you can imagine how negatively it can impact your business. There are many such things that can harm the reputation of your brand; hence it is important and necessary to counter those things properly.

According to many studies conducted by independent agencies around 79% of consumers don’t buy products from companies having a bad online reputation.

In the age of information technology, people always do their due diligence before buying any product or service. The reviews and discussions over social media about the brand certainly influence their buying decisions. So, if your brand has good ratings, you’ll stand a better chance at making it a customer’s final choice.

Whether you sell products, offer services, or do anything online or even offline for that matter, you must manage your online reputation properly. It is important to have a good online reputation management strategy in place to counter anything that goes wrong.

Don’t let any such silly thing affect your business. Try to keep healthy business practices and do care for your customers, employees, vendors, and others associated with your business directly or indirectly, so that you don’t have to face any such negative reviews.

Importance of Online Reputation Management Strategy

Remember you are not the only business out there and consumers have a lot of choices. But it’s the reputation of the brand or company that influences the purchase decisions of the consumers. The brand or the company having the best reputation has the greatest chance of attracting customers over the ones having no reputation or poor reputation.

There are 2.5 billion websites and almost double small and big brick-and-mortar shops in number.

Also, creating and a new website and taking it online takes just a few hours. Means anyone can become your competitor in matters of hours.

And if this new business creates better reputation will attract more customers than. Even some or most of your existing and prospective customers will choose your competitor over you because of a better reputation.

So, to stand out you have to be really good all around. Your online reputation should reflect this via reviews, social media communications, forum discussions, and word of mouth.

Creating a better reputation will surely help you cut through the noise and drive more customers to your business. For doing this effectively you need to have a good online reputation management strategy in place.

Internet Can Make and Break Your Business Very Quickly

According to the largest survey conducted by bright local in 2020 around 77% of consumers won’t use a business that has fewer than four stars rating. This percentage was 48% in 2017. That means consumers are now trusting more reputable brands and businesses. You can’t afford to lose your customers because of your poor reputation.

Some of your unhappy customers might talk negatively about your company or give poor ratings and feedback. If you are not alert you might not even know when that took place, and it can hurt your overall sales and brand reputation.

Even the smallest mistake can cause big troubles. For instance, not responding to your customer’s complaints, bad behavior of the staff, etc. Every action you take can have a bigger impact than you can imagine.

If your customer service or grievance redressal mechanism is not easily approachable the disgruntled customers will take it to online forums and write stinker reviews and feedbacks. There are few customers who simply don’t want to have any communication and express their opinions online.

Some of it may be genuine complaints and criticism but many times it is because of the competitors using black hat SEO techniques to make your brand look bad and attract your customers.

You should know that around 89% of consumers read local businesses’ responses to reviews, feedbacks, and complaints. And it is important to note that consumers trust businesses that respond to reviews and complaints.

So, do not ignore your unsatisfied customers and avoid their reviews and complaints. Do ask your customers for their feedback and reviews and ask them how can you help them by improving your products, services, processes, etc.

Remember, that being proactive with your online reputation management strategy can make a huge difference.

How Online Reputation Management is Different from SEO?

It is a fact that SEO plays a crucial role in determining your online reputation. For instance, if the negative posts about your business gain a higher ranking in the search engine results, which is very unfortunate, in such situations you are more than likely to have a reduction in sales and losing out on many prospective customers. It is important to counter such negative posts or links appearing on the top of the search results.

How can you make sure these negative posts do not get so much prominence in the search results and harm your online reputation?

One simple and straightforward way is to counter these negative posts by improving your SEO.

You can counter these posts, complaints, and allegations by responding to them and helping the dissatisfied customers solve their issues. Mostly those dissatisfied customers remove their complaints if their issue is resolved to their satisfaction.

But the reviews done by the competitors or customers who don’t want to take off their complaints can be countered by doing SEO.

To do that you need to optimize your website to rank better in the search engines. You can do that by improving your technical SEO, improving your content, and other on-page optimization techniques.

Improve Your SEO

By improving your backlink profile, you can build domain authority that increases your trust flow. This helps you rank your website better in search engines.

Improving social media popularity can help you increase your traffic and search engine ranking. Keep posting useful and sharable content on your website so that people who like your content share it on their social media.

With more work you do on improving your website and social media engagement more are the chances that you get better search engine rankings. This helps you push down the negative links and pages talking negatively about you or your brand.

People make up their minds and opinion about a person or company from the links they see on the first two-three pages. Only two out of a hundred users go beyond page three to look for something.

So, if they see good things about you or your brand on the first two pages it is quite natural that they will trust your brand.

Black Hat SEO Strategies and How to Counter them?

Competitors sometimes do play dirty. They use black hat SEO techniques to discredit you or your brand. It is important that you keep an eye on this and counter it in time.

Otherwise, there is a possibility that some of these negative posts done through black hat SEO techniques will rank higher in the search results. Needless to say, this can adversely affect your reputation, business, and profits.

If you practice regular monitoring and audit of your online reputation you will know what is being talked about online for your brand. Based on what you see you can make your online reputation management strategy. Broadly it is about influencing the perception of the public about your company or brand.

You may take the help of some software to manage your online reputation. Though the software is no good unless you work on it. But if you are not sure then you can hire an Online Reputation Management Agency to help you with your online reputation management.

Is it Worth Investing in Online Reputation Management?

Online reputation management is important and you should certainly not ignore it. Obviously, it takes time, monitoring, reaching out, and implementing the online reputation management strategy, but is it worth it. Remember, one bad review can refrain hundreds or thousands of people from purchasing your product or services.

With an online management strategy, you can protect the reputation of your company. Your competitors, enemies, unsatisfied customers, even disgruntled employees can destroy the reputation of your company with few bad reviews.

If you already have a lot of negative reviews and comments and you can’t get rid of them on your own you can hire an Online Reputation Management Agency to clean up all that mess.

How do Online Reputation Management Services work?

Online reputation management is geared towards removing the bad reviews and comments and show people positive things about your brand. Removing anything from the internet is not easy. It takes a lot of time, effort, and a good Online Management Strategy to make it work in favor of your company.

Content creation, content management, link building, keyword positioning, online banner promotion, pay-per-click advertisements, guest posting, encouraging your happy customers to share their experiences, and other strategies can be used for Online Reputation Management.

Benefits of Online Reputation Management Strategies

Online reputation management is necessary for every business online and even offline. It has numerous benefits and here are some of them:

Builds Domain Authority & Brand Trust

People trust businesses and brands that have a good online reputation. They make their opinions and purchase decisions based on what they read online. If you give them reasons to read bad about you, they will read bad and make their opinions negatively about your brand.

Similarly, if they read good about you, they will form positive opinions about your brand. Always make sure that your online reputation is perfect in every respect.

Increase Profitability

A good online reputation helps increase the business of your company. People want to buy products from the companies they trust. With a good online reputation, people will trust your company and buy from you. More people trust your company more they will buy from you and more will be your profitability.

A Good Opportunity for Conflict Resolution

Online reputation management provides a great opportunity to the brands for conflict resolution. If you don’t have to manage your online reputation you won’t care what is being talked about you online. But in a world that is digitally connected not managing your online reputation could be detrimental.

When you manage your online reputation, you keep an eye on every comment and review regarding your company and brand. You can respond to the comments in real-time whether it is good or bad. By reading and responding to the comments and reviews you can easily resolve a lot of conflicts.

If you resolve the conflicts quickly you may not have to spend your time cleaning up the bad comments and reviews. This is because people take down their complaints and bad reviews if their issues are resolved by the company.

How Can You Improve Your Online Reputation with Good Online Reputation Management Strategy?

There are a lot of strategies that are used in improving online reputation. The popular and standard techniques of online reputation management are as follows:

• Tracking and monitoring your reviews and feedbacks, and overall online reputation.
• Monitoring the mentions of your business and brand and handling negative content and criticism in a positive and coherent way.
• Replying to online reviews in a polite and professional manner. Technically showing gratitude for the positive reviews and intent of solving the issues in the negative ones.
• Engaging your customers and audiences to talk about your brand in a positive manner.

The above are the standard ways of improving your online reputation management. Though, there are some other ways of improving your reputation. Let’s see them one by one.

Focus on Your SEO

Do not ignore the SEO. Ignoring the SEO could be costly. Put your time and efforts into SEO. Getting all your SEO elements right helps increase your search engine visibility, increase relevant traffic, and getting a better search engine rank.

The search engine algorithm is being constantly changing to provide better results to the users. Make sure your website adheres to all the SEO guidelines to make it to the top of the search engine results. Remember there is no alternative to doing your SEO right to get your site rank better in search engines and getting the right kind of traffic on your website.

Deliver on Your Promises

A brand is a promise. That’s what people trust. For instance, Apple is just not a brand it’s a promise of offering people premium products, security, and a great user experience. People trust Apple for its promise of delivering great products and a great user experience.

Whether you are a small company or a big brand it is important that you make sure that you deliver on your promises. Remember, make only those promises that you can keep. Sometimes, brands fail to deliver on their promises, but that should not make your brand look bad in public opinion. If you fallout on your promises, try to manage them by offering something good to your customers.

Doing this would give people reasons to talk positively rather than talking negatively because you fail to deliver on your promises. This certainly should be part of your Online Reputation Management Strategy.

Post Positive & Useful Content on Your Website and Blog Regularly

Many people don’t believe in it but, to be honest, content creation is the most significant part of online reputation management strategy.

Whether it’s the content on your website, blog, tutorial, or anything else, it all counts. Search engines keep looking for the updated and latest content for indexing and providing users most relevant results.

If you post new content regularly, search engines will take into account all the new content when indexing things about your brand. Search engines rank fresh positive content higher than the old negative content.

That way you will be able to show positive things about your brand on search engines to your customers and audience. Better content not only helps your website rank better in search engines but also helps builds the credibility and authority of your brand.

Don’t Expect Without Asking it

You know that only people who are dissatisfied with a company’s products or services write online reviews and comments. But people who are happy with the products and services rarely write their experiences online.

It is obvious that people who are dissatisfied will write bad reviews and comments. And when others read those reviews and posts form their opinion about your company or brand. When people make their opinion by reading only bad reviews and comments it is not good for your brand.

So, you should encourage your happy customers to share their experiences online so that people can read about them as well. Doing so will help you accumulate more positive reviews than negative ones.

This way people reading the reviews and comments won’t make their opinions only based on the negative reviews.

But, that’s not all. You should talk to your unsatisfied customers and try to solve their issues and make them happy and then ask them to write their reviews and comments. Remember your happy customers will keep shopping from you but the unhappy ones won’t. So, try to keep your customers happy and keep getting business from them.

Take it Offline

Obviously, people vent out their frustration online in form of bad reviews and negative comments, but if you respond to it online and the conversation goes on. Everything you do there remains there. And it might show a bad image of your brand. Also, people will read it and the more people read it more prominence it gets on the search engine results.

Also, if people start to share it online on social media sites it becomes worse. The best way to handle such negative reviews is to take them offline and resolve them online.

You can offer to talk to the customer by phone or email. Resolve it and ask that unsatisfied customer to remove his review. If you resolve their issue, they usually remove their bad reviews. That way others won’t see the bad image of your brand.

Do Not Ignore the Negative Reviews & Comments

Negative reviews are not that bad if you know how to handle them. But ignoring the bad reviews and letting them float around online may harm your brand’s reputation even more than you can imagine.

Take time to read even negative reviews, and respond professionally. Treat all your customers in the same way even if they post negative comments. If you talk to them and resolve their issues, they may do business with your brand again and might also become your brand advocate.

Keep in mind that you should keep yourself calm and avoid using a negative tone in your replies to these negative reviews. There is no shame in accepting your mistakes, apologize for the mistakes you made. Accepting your mistakes makes you look honest and transparent. People like brands that are honest and transparent. 

Build Brand Advocates and Encourage them to Respond to the Criticism of Your Business

As discussed earlier, the majority of people read the reviews about the brand and the products before making any purchases. They surely won’t make any purchase on a website having a lot of negative reviews and comments.

If you provide good products and good customer service your happy customers become your brand ambassadors and they counter the negative posts and comments. And they do that without any incentive. To that, all you need is to provide better customer experiences.

Use the Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Every marketer agrees that word-of-mouth marketing is the best form of marketing. The best part of it is that it is a free form of marketing. Your happy customers refer and recommend your brand to their friends, family, and social groups. It is not always that you get sales of products through word-of-mouth marketing but you also get positive reviews and comments from those happy customers.

Try to integrate word-of-mouth marketing in your Online Reputation Management Strategy. This will help you get a better reputation for your brand online.

Try to Remove Negative Links and Content from the Search Results

Though it is not easy to remove the negative links or reviews from any website, if you make efforts sometimes you can do that. You can ask the website hosting the negative review to remove the review. If you give them proper reason and evidence that the review posted there is not real but an attempt to demean your brand’s reputation. Those websites, sometimes take it seriously and remove that from their website.

Besides this, if something is done by the competition to make your brand look bad, it means it would be a baseless and fake effort. In such cases, you can go to court, and if the court orders that website to take that article or piece of content, they have to do that according to the law.

Also, you can write articles and content to explain the situation to your audiences. This you can do for the negative reviews. If you do that people will read your responses and it would help them to trust your brand.

Transparency is the key in Online Reputation Management Strategy. Be open, be proactive, and be transparent in your actions so that your customers can trust your brand.

Make Best Use of Your Social Media

Make sure that you are active on social media. By active I mean to keep posting valuable content on your social media channels. Social media help build trust, rapport, and engagement with your followers and audiences. You can also use social media, as part of your customer support. Using social media for your customer support can also help with your brand credibility and transparency.

All major eCommerce companies use social media for updating their customers about new arrivals, deals, discounts, and offers. Also, they do use social media for engaging with their customers and listen and resolve their complaints. Twitter, is one of the best platforms to quickly engage with your customers. Also, they can engage with your brand quickly on Twitter.

However, you should try to give your customer a place on your website or an easily approachable contact number, or email address to contact you and discuss their complaints and issues instead of sharing them publicly on social media.

Though, when you respond to your customer complaints and attempt to solve them on social media other prospective customers can see your interaction and trust your brand.

It is one of the significant parts of online reputation management strategy. And you should do it very carefully and religiously. Remember to talk to your customers on social media as a human, not as a machine. Avoid, giving them automated answers and listen to them before you respond. Also, do not take too long to solve their problems.

Ask for Professional Help

Managing your online reputation is difficult, especially if you don’t have experience in it. Do not shy away to seek professional help if you are unable to handle your online reputation management on your own.

There are ORM companies that offer great ORM services. Doing that frees up your time that you can focus on your core business. While your reputation management tasks are taken care of by the ORM professionals. These ORM experts know how to handle your online reputation management in the best possible way.

How Long Does Online Reputation Management take to Work in Reality?

There no exact answer to it. It completely depends on the existing situation of the reputation you have and the types of techniques and strategies used to make a better online reputation for your brand.

It may take a couple of days to few weeks. But again, it depends on the situation. If there is already a lot of negativity against your brand it may take weeks to counter that but if there are fewer things to be taken care of then it may be done in few days.

Summary

Online reputation management is not a one-time activity. You need to work on it continuously as you do on your SEO. Don’t worry, online reputation management does not require a lot of investment.

If you spend few hours a week managing your online reputation you can handle it well. Keep checking top review sites or use mention to get updates on everything happening on the web. If you find anything negative you can respond to it and get sorted.

At last, if you are not sure how to handle the ORM yourself you can contact an ORM agency like us to get professional help.

The post Online Reputation Management Strategy – Expert Tips appeared first on Digitoly. Digitoly - Digital Marketing & Branding Consultancy authored by Krishan Kant Upadhyay