How the public perceives a brand, business, or person is all-important in today’s ecommerce environment. Online reputation management (ORM) is the umbrella term covering everything involved in maintaining, managing, and changing these perceptions. As a modern business owner, it is vital that you gain a basic understanding of this key process.
Why online reputation management is important.
Improving how customers see your brand is just as crucial as selling stellar products or working with a top-tier merchant services account provider. When buyers feel good about your identity as a company, they will be more likely to invest in your products and to tell their friends and family about your business. With buyer acceptance will naturally come increased visibility and credibility in your industry as a whole. Over time, these two processes will feed into each other, resulting in the potential for greater profits and even expansion.
There are four main ORM channels that must be considered as you work to enhance and manage your reputation online.
- Paid media. As the name implies, you must spend money to have your brand featured here. It includes sponsored posts, social media ads, Google advertisements, and influencer content.
- Earned media. This brand-related content comes from third-party platforms without requiring payment from you. It can come from press coverage, blog articles, information about you on industry-related sites, and review sites like Yelp.
- Shared media. This is brand-related content on any social media platform regardless of whether you generate it or someone else does. This is often the source of negative reviews or comments that can tarnish your brand reputation.
- Owned media. This includes all platforms that you own such as your website or blog. Because you are in control of these, you can positively affect their effectiveness by improving their Google rankings. Strategies such as creating rich content, using effective search engine optimization (SEO), and boosting your presence in local search results can magnify your profile.
Effectively understanding and harnessing all of these channels will give you maximum control over how your brand is perceived by your current and potential customers as well as by investors and other stakeholders.
The keys to online reputation management.
Being perceived in a positive light enhances customer relations, helps to engender trust, and allows you to gain sales. Additionally, ORM gives you what you need to promptly learn about and address negative reviews and complaints before they can taint your overall brand. The following eight actions are vital for effective ORM.
- Review your website, social media pages, blogs, and third-party business profiles to learn the state of your current brand reputation.
- Determine a general ORM strategy. Prioritize your needs, dealing with the most critical first. Then develop documentation of your policies and guidelines so that everyone receives clear, consistent information and knows how you want to prioritize day-to-day tasks and customer feedback.
- Monitor mentions by setting up a Google alert for your brand name. Also, consider using ORM software that automatically gathers mentions from a variety of social media, blog, news, and forum platforms and can even help you to analyze the mentions over time.
- Figure out how you will deal with a reputation-related crisis. Even if it never happens, you should have a strategy and protocols in place. Determine your internal communication plan, who specifically will deal with the public, and how you will handle social media posts related to the crisis.
- Incentivize happy customers to leave favorable reviews online. Make doing so easy by providing links and responding to all reviews — positive and negative alike — with a personal comment.
- Promptly address negative reviews. Deal first with the most highly ranked bad reviews on the search engine results pages of Google Business Profile, social media platforms, and third-party sites. Then respond promptly and courteously, acknowledging any mistakes you may have made. Unless sensitive customer information is involved, take care of the situation publicly. This allows other customers to see your commitment to a fair resolution. In rare situations, provide discounts or refunds.
- Create and maintain a consistent brand voice in all content, including branded searches, your replies to reviews and your social media posts. Help to ensure that positive comments about your brand appear when people conduct a search by following SEO best practices.
- Consider collaborating with influencers who are in line with your customer demographics and brand. Failing to come up with the right fit has the potential to cause lasting damage to your brand. However, when these partnerships work well, they can greatly magnify a brand’s visibility and positive image.
Online reputation management is not a one-and-done phenomenon. In fact, you need to keep tabs on your brand and your customers’ perceptions of it every day without exception. When you are, you will be rewarded with heightened awareness of how your company is being seen and the ability to identify issues before they have a chance to metastasize. When you do, you will see an increase in the customer trust that is essential to your company’s success.
