Online reputation management ensures your business can combat negative feedback with a strategic approach and problem-solving mindset. Read as this blog uncovers everything to know about.
The online space can sometimes seem overwhelming while managing a business. The positive reviews and talks about your business warm your heart and make you feel proud. However, negative reviews can sometimes make it challenging to convince your potential customers that things are different from the one bad experience they have read about. This is where online reputation management strategies can ensure your business continues to thrive while actively and carefully addressing the negative reviews.
Dissatisfied customers pose problems for businesses as they highlight what is not yet perfect with your business. However, they also offer you the opportunity to personalize the customer experience. Online reputation management enables your business to take carefully planned and executed steps to guarantee that unhappy customers can be handled with care and caution and turned into loyal customers again.
But what is online reputation management, and why should businesses of all scales start implementing it?
Here’s everything you need to know about ORM, effective strategies, and where to get started:
Your potential customers actively check online review sites before they begin to form a perception about you. In most cases, this is the stage in the sales funnel where your potential customers are aware of your business and are actively researching it to learn more about it.
At this stage, your reputation plays a vital role in shaping a favorable brand perception. However, not every customer experience shared on review sites will positively impact your potential customers’ decisions. That’s where online reputation management helps.
Online reputation management involves using specific strategies to influence your customers’ perceptions of your business. An effective strategy enables your business to address negative experiences, establish brand credibility, and generate revenue.
Unattended negative reviews can hamper how your brand is perceived in terms of products offered and the extent to which your business cares about customer experience. Such negative reviews, if left unaddressed, can jeopardize the brand reputation your business continually works to maintain. Effective online reputation management strategies ensure your business can easily tackle negative reviews while focusing on improving customer experience.
Effective online reputation management strategies make it possible for your business to create a strong online presence that will not be tarnished even when you receive negative reviews. Here are some practical ways ORM is important for your business:
With mobile phones becoming more prominent than ever, people are more likely to check reviews of a business before they even consider investing their time and money in it. Negative reviews create a sense of doubt about whether your business is truly worth the investment or whether better options are available.
With ORM, you can address damaging feedback with patience and tact to improve your customers’ experience with your business. You can offer them a discount coupon that can be used during their next shopping trip or when availing themselves of your services. You can even offer a refund if a mutually acceptable decision cannot be reached.
Online reputation management and crisis management often work together, allowing your business to control a situation before it gets out of hand. Crisis management works by identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities in your business that can turn into problems in the future. Swift and practical actions ensure your business can deal with the damage before it starts affecting your online reputation.
A strong online reputation comes from customers who are happy with your brand, their shopping experiences, and your customer service. Negative reviews can make it challenging for your potential customers to trust your products or services. If your customers have faced any problems with your business, it’s crucial to reach out and mitigate the situation to ensure the situation does not escalate. This way, your business can continue to enjoy a positive online presence.
When customers know their opinions matter, they are more likely to trust your brand, knowing you will offer a practical solution to ease their concerns, if any. This, in turn, makes people appreciate your approach to handling difficult situations, such as a negative review. Being direct and open about your approach to resolving poor customer experiences further makes your customers feel heard. It establishes a sincere and positive relationship between your business and its customers.
Featuring genuine feedback from your customers and using long-tail keywords can boost your brand’s reputation as well as rankings on search engines. Such efforts prompt customers to trust your business and ensure they can easily find your business online with relevant keywords.
People want to see their favorite brands show care and consideration. When their experience with your brand is unfavorable, most customers want you to reach out and try to make amends. Such actions validate their emotions while reinforcing your brand’s commitment to being customer-centric.
ORM continuously works to make every interaction your customers have with your brand positive—whether learning about your business or after-sales services. When your business comes across as trustworthy, it becomes easier for your customers to make a purchase without second thoughts or recommend your products and services to people in their network.
Brands with a strong online reputation are seen as reliable, which translates to people opting for your products and services over your competitors. As ORM directly impacts how your customers view your brands by strategically using testimonials and positive reviews, your business has more control and navigating power in the market.
A robust ORM strategy ensures your brand is ready to tackle challenging situations without facing setbacks. Here are some key aspects to keep in mind when starting out with ORM strategies:
Before initiating an online reputation management strategy, it is crucial to determine what your current market reputation is. Look for both branded and non-branded searches to understand how your brand is perceived online. You may have to put on your detective hats to do this. Without determining how your brand is perceived, you will not know the scope and extent of the reputation management strategies you will need to implement to achieve your goals.
Identify the platforms on which your target audience spends most of their time discussing your brand. This will help you determine where most of your online reputation efforts should be directed. Putting the same amount of effort into every platform will be exhaustive and unnecessary. Make sure you identify the places where most negative reviews about your brand pop up and have a platform-specific strategy ready for online reputation management.
Locating areas where negative reviews are floating about your brand without a plan can only take you so far. Once you have identified the nature of the negative reviews you have received, begin making improvements.
Apart from this, ensure your ORM strategies are robust and well-calculated to ensure comprehensive implementation. Focus on reintroducing your brand to people who have had a negative experience with it; offer discounts and request feedback on areas they believe you can improve.
As important as online reputation management is, encouraging your happy customers to leave positive reviews is crucial. These reviews are organic and genuine, and they can make prospective customers interested in your business.
The best way to get genuine reviews from customers is to request them to share one. This can be during checkout or a few weeks after they have used your services or products. At this point, launching a customer loyalty program can also be helpful. These programs aim to give customers rewards whenever they post a review about your business online or if they recommend your business to their friends or family.
The number of people using social media is continuously growing. In fact, more people are turning to social media to form opinions about a business. Due to this, it is crucial that you show reviews about your business on social media alongside practicing strategies like social listening and urging your customers to tag your business as part of hashtag campaigns. This enables your business to gather scattered user-generated content and use it to encourage purchases or engagement from potential customers.
Incentives make your customers feel that their feedback holds value. It helps them realize how important it is for them to share their opinions and concerns and express what makes them happy about your brand. The incentives you offer need not be too expensive or large. They can be as simple as offering discount codes that can be used during a customer’s next purchase or even a limited-period access to premium services/content. The more special you make your customers feel, the more likely they are going to talk about the benefits of leaving a review of your business online.
Your customers want to feel they know your business inside out. By being transparent about your policies, vision, mission, and advertising, your business makes itself accessible to everyone. Apart from that, when your business is transparent, your customers can reach out to you if they need urgent assistance with your products or services. Devoting time to building policies that ensure transparency across all processes is important to avoid oversharing. It also helps you, as a business owner or manager, to not feel overwhelmed when customers frequently reach out to you.
Positive feedback proves that your business is reliable and that your customers are happy with your products and services. When you receive a positive review, your response should reflect appreciation and gratitude. It’ll encourage other customers to share their feedback about their experience with your business, too. Respond to such good reviews with gratitude and thank them for taking the time to share their thoughts. This approach increases customer engagement and satisfaction.
Social media allows your customers to voice their concerns and opinions on public forums. These opinions usually don’t have any filter, which gives them the freedom to be harsh and, sometimes, unpleasant. Due to this freedom, you need to pay extra attention to tracking what your customers are saying about your business and make constant efforts to change how your brand is perceived online.
Here’s how social media plays a vital role in online reputation management:
Instagram has over 2 billion users, and these numbers are expected to grow every day. Therefore, it is important that you create and maintain an active online presence on Instagram to advertise and market your business to this growing pool of already engaged audiences.
Your goals for building an online reputation start with outlining what you want to achieve through Instagram. Will you market your business to build a fanbase or sell products directly from your posts? By identifying these goals, your business can plan strategies to drive results. To get more insights about achieving your goals, consider evaluating what (and how) your competitors are doing and what you can learn from them.
This step offers perspective and the opportunity to leverage strategies that are already working for your competitors. Once you are certain about what needs to be done, experiment with the platform’s features and how these features can help you easily implement your strategies.
Instagram is continuously evolving and developing features that help creators utilize the platform more effectively. Spend time researching these features and using them to your advantage.
Another aspect of Instagram that makes it so popular for business content creation is trends. They change every now and then, and the most engaging content is often pushed to newer audiences, allowing your business to expand its reach. However, to ensure every strategy brings results, it’s important to create high-quality content, both visuals and copy included. Make sure to combine images and video content to get the best results.
Twitter (currently known as X) is a social media platform where people can share short-format posts (known as tweets). It is often a place where people share their experiences and even reach out to businesses they are happy or unhappy with. Due to this, Twitter can sometimes feel overwhelming to manage.
However, devising a practical strategy to respond to negative tweets can be crucial for your business. It will enable you to break the ice, address negative experiences your customers have had with your brand, and turn every negative tweet into a positive experience for dissatisfied customers.
LinkedIn is a professional platform where businesses and working professionals post about their experiences and opinions and even connect with their customers. Given the platform’s professional nature, being straightforward yet strategic will ensure your brand comes across as professional and conveys solutions with care. You can also actively create content that establishes your expertise and knowledge in your industry, making your business look credible.
YouTube is a go-to place for many due to the extensive content available. The number of users on this platform is constantly increasing. If your business does not create YouTube-friendly content, it misses out on a critical tool for improving brand perception. However, unlike other platforms, reputation management on YouTube is different.
For starters, the platform allows businesses to publish content specific to their business goals. Hence, there’s no restriction on the type of video content your business can start with. However, to ensure growth and achieve your reputation management goals, spend time creating high-quality content that aligns with your brand, be authentic in your efforts, and focus on building and nourishing your community instead of solely focusing on content creation.
Google is the most used search engine worldwide due to its features and convenience. One such feature is Google reviews, where people who have visited your store or purchased your products (even if it’s offline) can leave a review and share their experience. There are various reasons to pay attention to these reviews.
Here’s why Google reviews are so important for your business:
Now that we know how important Google reviews are for your business, here are some effective ways to improve your ratings:
Negative reviews are annoying, and here’s how you can deal with them:
Reviews from verified customers can really make a difference. Here are all the ways you can encourage your customers to leave reviews:
Here are some powerful statistics showing the impact of Google reviews on local SEO. These statistics are a strong indicator of why online reputation management is important. For instance, 93% of travelers depend on Google reviews before they decide to make a purchase decision. The number of clicks on a business increases by 25% if your business shows up in Google Local Pack. Around 56% of consumers prefer businesses that have a positive review.
Monitoring your online reputation is the best way to ensure your business is ready to act whenever a negative review pops up. It allows your business to be prompt and continue being a trustworthy and reliable entity in the eyes of your customers. To make sure you are efficiently monitoring how your business is being seen online, here are some key tips to consider:
Here are the tools you can consider using to track brand mentions online:
Setting up alerts for negative reviews is crucial to know what’s being discussed in your business before the conversation takes an ugly turn. To set up alerts for negative reviews, consider using your brand name and commonly used negative terms in your industry. This will ensure that whenever a relatively negative review is posted about your business online, you can spring into action and engage in damage control practices.
Depending only on tools to alert you whenever a negative review pops up online is not advisable. Instead, consider creating a strategy to audit your online reputation on a regular basis. This can include a combination of using automated tools and conducting manual research on social media platforms. Make sure to test the effectiveness of your practices regularly and pay close attention to crafting suitable strategies to respond to negative reviews with grace and tact.
Customer sentiment refers to analyzing what your target customers say about your brand online. By engaging in customer sentiment analysis, your brand can identify the tone people adopt when they talk about your business on different platforms, such as review websites and social media. Keeping an eye on customer sentiment analysis ensures that your business can quickly address negative comments by issuing a well-worded justification or simply accepting that your brand is willing to improve and is listening to the feedback customers have to share.
Having data backing your online reputation management success is crucial. Here’s how to do it right:
PS: If you’re still confused about what needs to be done, getting in touch with an expert can be immensely helpful. It is best to avoid taking risks with your brand reputation.
Reputation management can become overwhelming, and there’s a chance that if you are doing it on your own, you may not know the common traps many businesses fall into. To avoid trouble, be cautious about not making the following mistakes in online reputation management strategies:
When negative feedback pops up, businesses wonder where they are going wrong with customer service. While it may seem fine to let go of negative feedback, the implications for how it affects your brand are worth reconsidering. When your brand chooses to ignore negative feedback, it refuses to honor the negative experience your customers had with you.
It can also be seen as a sign of arrogance, a perception no business wants to be known for. Instead, choose to respond respectfully to the negative feedback. It can be as simple as apologizing for the inconvenience caused and offering your contact information so they can reach out to you. This can help you take the conversation offline to attain a resolution.
Consistency is everything when it comes to making your brand become a reliable household name. Using tools to ensure you receive notifications whenever your brand name is mentioned online is the key to making your efforts for online reputation management yield fruits. It will also ensure that your strategies are straightforward and help you act fast. Check what is being said about your brand as a regular practice and come up with practical templates that can be used while responding.
There’s no doubt that automation tools can help save time and ensure online reputation management becomes easy for you. However, relying too much on them is not advisable. There can be days when you end up missing the notification, which might lead to negative feedback being left unattended. Make sure to manually check popular websites where your customers often post reviews.
Reacting emotionally to negative reviews will attract criticism and make your business come across as immature. While negative reviews can be heartwrenching, it is best to avoid engaging with them emotionally. If you feel overwhelmed, it is best to take a step back and let someone else take care of it. In such situations, hiring a dedicated online reputation management company will be incredibly helpful as they have the right strategies to deal with such situations and are emotionally disengaged. It allows them to offer practical solutions that are customized for your business needs.
It matters how innovative and creative your business is when tackling negative reviews. However, it can also become tricky if the negative reviews highlight unique problems. To avoid not knowing what to do, consider regularly analyzing what your competitors are doing. This will help you understand their strengths when it comes to dealing with negative reviews and the extent of care and compensation they offer. This will ensure your support and feedback mechanism is aligned with industry standards.
Negative reviews can be challenging to deal with, but they also help you understand how your business can improve and what areas it can leverage to ensure customer satisfaction and make profits. Given today’s competition levels, every business should pay attention to online reputation management. It allows them to turn negative customer experiences into positive ones while showing customers how their opinions are valued. Implement tools to efficiently track when and where your brand is mentioned online. This will enable you to act promptly and ensure your customers have an amazing experience while interacting with your business.
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