Marketing experts often advise entrepreneurs to spend a lot of money and time managing their reviews and ratings. However, a bad reputation can ruin the best of reviews.
Almost all businesses have occasional issues with their customers. While it’s better to resolve things with them before the matter gets out of hand, you may sometimes need an online reputation management strategy to handle those issues. Customers may become dissatisfied with your brand to the extent that they feel the need to warn people about your business. The internet has also reduced the distance between one customer and the other. One silly mistake can quickly spiral out of control.
Therefore, as an entrepreneur, you need to have a plan for handling criticisms directed at your brand. That way, you may lessen any damaging impact that results from such complaints. Though online reputation management software is an excellent tool for managing your online reputation, at other times, you may need to contract an ORM company to do the work for you. In this article, you’ll learn ways of keeping your online reputation impressive.
1 Establish An Online Presence On All Relevant Web Platforms
Your company may have already established an online presence on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or you probably have a website. However, these are vital elements of creating an online presence, though they may not be enough. If you want your brand to be highly competitive, you need to be active in additional sites. Currently, many are available, and some are niche-specific.
If your brand is a B2B or has many professionals, having your executives and employees on LinkedIn may increase your brand awareness. On the other hand, if your business deals with visually-oriented products, you can register Flickr, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts. Some companies also benefit from video sites like Vimeo and YouTube.
Having a presence on most social media platforms will allow you to interact with many and different customers. It may also improve your full service web design influence and increase your engagement scores. Neglecting a presence on these sites has its share of consequences. If somebody with malicious intent posts damaging content about your brand online, it may be impossible to outrank their postings.
Though it may be difficult to understand how Bing and Google analyses social media accounts’ strength, using independent scoring utilities can help you know your growth. It’s vital to know whether your brand is achieving the purpose for which you created it.
2 Protect Your Employees and Customers
Your customers and employees are the core of your business. If they’re dissatisfied in any way by how you treat them, they may help in damaging your reputation. Ensure you treat them well and protect them from any online attacks. If any of them comes to you with a complaint, address it before it’s posted online. If you have a good relationship with your customers and employees, they’ll protect your brand’s image.
It’s also essential to create a strong social media presence for your company’s executives and employees. That way, in case there’s defamation against your company, there will be many people tied to your brand to handle it.
Keeping a low online employee profile for the sake of privacy may work against you if there’s criticism. Many people wouldn’t take your executives or employees’ sentiments seriously if they don’t know how they’re related to your company. It’s also advisable to entangle your company’s identity with executives. That way, consumers searching for company names through professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and dentists will easily find you.
3 Build Profiles For Your Products And Services
Apart from creating profiles for your company, you need to develop profiles for your products and services. Having pages for your products may help to increase awareness and reach more target consumers. Therefore, you want to develop social profiles and online materials for your company and products. If you have products with different names, you may also need to create content to enable them to rank for those names.
4 Write Blog Posts
Blogging is a powerful marketing tool that you don’t want to leave out of your online management reputation strategy. That’s because it will help your site rank for relevant keywords and give your social media accounts some fodder. Your audience needs to be engaged with useful articles that can teach them one thing or two.
Actionable blog posts that give step-by-step solutions to customers’ pain points may further increase your brand awareness. Any article you write should make readers frequent your site regularly. If they do that, they’ll familiarize themselves with your products and eventually make a purchase.
Research has shown that long posts receive more social shares and organic traffic. If all your customers read and share this content, you will have more customers and increase your sales. Blogging can also give you a safe platform for responding to any complaints. Addressing complaints on your site is vital to prevent issues from spilling to other sites and blogs.
5 Listen and Be Compassionate
When addressing bad reviews or complaints, it’s essential to understand that some of your processes may be weak and should be handled. Always getting negative feedback from customers about a product or service may warrant investigation. Therefore, instead of becoming inflexible, you need to courteously answer the customer and promise that you’re looking into that concern.
Becoming dumb or paying little attention to customers’ concerns may effectively drive them to other competitors. Don’t bog your customers with tedious filling procedures in online forms if they want their concerns addressed. Make the process simple for everyone. You shouldn’t charge service fees for offering solutions because that will continue to portray your company’s image negatively. Do away with those fees and have a customer service team that can provide answers to customers all the time.
Also, if your company fails or messes up, own up and genuinely apologize. Saying sorry for the wrongs committed to customers can reconcile the brand with them and avert a reputation damage crisis.
6 Invest In Reputation Management
To develop an excellent online reputation, you must spend money and time. Though most local businesses do it themselves, you need professionals to perform it excellently. Professionals are trained to interact in online communities and manage negative criticism about brands.
Managing your reputation alone may be difficult because you may become emotional towards negative remarks and respond inappropriately. To have less stress and keep your emotions in check, you may need to hire an ORM firm to handle things for you.
7 Partner With Social Media Influencers
Influencers can be an excellent tool for attracting more customers. You can use influencers to recommend your business to their audiences. Some research found out that 74% of people resort to social media to get information about a product. Out of that number, 40% buy products that they’ve seen an influencer promote on social media.
You can find influencers on online platforms such as FameBit. Alternatively, you can engage them through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The more influencers you get to promote your brand, the better.
The Bottom-line
Including these tips in your strategy can help your business to have a more robust online reputation. Though it may cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars to put in place, it’s worth the money in the long run. Think of it as some form of insurance. It may not prevent people from saying corrosive statements about your brand, but it may keep it from getting worse.
