Introduction
In current times where the internet is our go-to for everything, businesses need to pay special attention to online business reputation management as around 87% of consumers go online and read online reviews for local businesses whereas 73% of the customers solely focus and care about those reviews which are updated previous month. If you are also a business and struggling to understand and manage your online reputation then you are at the right place as this is your one-stop solution for all your brand reputation management problems. In this blog are going to explore how an effective online reputation can be a game changer for your business.
What is Online Reputation Management
Online business reputation management refers to the process of managing, monitoring, and improving your online business reputation on the digital landscape or on the Internet. Managing online reputation typically involves responding to bad reviews, suppressing unfavorable search results, and correcting misinformation about your business which also means taking control of online interactions about your business. The sole aim of managing reputation online is to establish balance, combat false narratives, and enable you to present your business in the best light.
Is Online Reputation Management the Same as SEO?
| Aspect | Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Online Reputation Management (ORM) |
| Definition | The practice of optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results. | The process of monitoring and influencing how a business is perceived online. |
| Primary Focus | Improving visibility and organic traffic to a website. | Shaping and managing the online perception of your brand or managing online reputation. |
| Key Strategies | Keyword optimization, content creation, backlink building, technical SEO. | Review management, social media engagement, content creation, and crisis management. |
| Measurement of Success | Rankings, organic traffic, conversions. | ORM tools (e.g., review monitoring platforms, social media management tools, online reputation monitoring tools). |
| Timeframe | Typically a long-term strategy with gradual results. | Sentiment analysis, review scores, brand reputation management, brand mentions, and audience engagement. |
| Outcome Goals | Drive traffic, improve visibility, and enhance user experience. | Build trust, improve brand image, and address negative perceptions. |
| Tools Used | SEO tools (e.g., Google Analytics, SEMrush). | ORM tools (e.g., review monitoring platforms, social media management tools, online reputation monitoring tool). |
| Target Audience | Potential customers searching for products/services. | ORM tools (e.g., review monitoring platforms, social media management tools, online reputation monitoring tools). |
| Overlap with Each Other | While primarily focused on traffic, SEO can benefit from a strong reputation. | Positive reviews and credible content can enhance SEO rankings. |
Why It Is Important To Maintain Your Online Reputation?
Influences Purchasing Decisions
It is important to maintain your online reputation as a robust online reputation influences customer behavior and their perception of a business. As per a study, approximately 59% of customers rely on online search engines before deciding on a purchase. Whereas 97% of customers check for product reviews before actually purchasing it. Positive reviews and a strong online reputation can indeed impact customers and persuade them to choose your business over others
Assists in Handling Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are something from which you can not escape but managing reputation online can help you stay ahead of your competitors and turn those reviews around. Responding to negative reviews and addressing their concerns is a vital part of business reputation management. Statistics also support this fact as customers who had their social media complaints addressed within five minutes were more likely to spend more on future purchases. It is important to maintain your online reputation as it offers you the capability to address and handle negative reviews efficiently.
It Offers Important Insights
Having a robust business reputation management strategy is essential as it helps in monitoring and keeping track of your online reputation and offers you important insights about customer experience preferences and needs. For example, if you are getting the same query and complaints repeatedly then you need to improve in that area and fix that issue. This insight helps you to make decisions and plan your online reputation strategy accordingly.
The Internet is the Main Resource for Consumer Research
In today’s time where everything is online, the internet is the go-to for everyone. Be it about purchasing a product or taking any service. Hence it is important to maintain your online reputation for your business to establish a good online presence over the internet. A positive online business reputation shows the true picture of your business and makes customers choose and recommend your business over others.
Standing Out in a Competitive Market
A well-managed online brand reputation can really make you stand out from the competitors. When consumers see that your business has good reviews, and ratings and is highly regarded by others they tend to choose you over competitors. Managing online reputation consistently you not only make sure that customers see positive reviews about your business but also help in acquiring customers and making a lasting relationship with them based on trust and loyalty.
Factors that Affect Business Reputation Management
Social Media Presence
Your business’s active presence on social media plays an important role in shaping your online reputation. Social platforms provide direct interaction with customers, bringing in opportunities for engagement, feedback, and building relationships. Neglecting your social media such as a poorly handled comment or negative content, could sometimes severely damage your brand’s image. However, a good and positive social media presence generates goodwill and loyalty.
SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO impacts how easily people or consumers can find you and your business information over the internet. Effective search engine optimization makes sure that your website, content, blog posts, and customer stories rank higher on search engine result pages. This not only helps you to take control of what potential customers see first but also enhances your brand credibility.
Online Reviews
Reviews are one of the most dominant tools in terms of business reputation management. Positive reviews always increase the credibility of a brand; they attract new customers. Negative reviews can damage your online reputation marketing especially if not addressed with the right approach. Monitoring and responding to reviews is an active reflection that your business values customers’ suggestions and is serious about improving their experience.
Which Platforms Should You Focus on For Online Reputation Management?
Google My Business
As one of the most visible platforms for local businesses, Google reputation management allows customers to leave reviews, view business information, and interact with your brand directly in search results. Google reputation management or managing Google My Business ensures that you make a strong impression and respond promptly to reviews, which can influence your local search rankings and customer trust.
Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn)
Social media is a prime brand reputation management space where you can have an immediate conversation with your audience. Every kind of platform gives you the opportunity to share content and respond to customer inquiries and feedback. Doing all of this manually helps you stay positively present and build rapport with your followers.
Review Websites (Yelp, G2, Capterra)
These other sites, including Yelp, G2, and Capterra, help ensure that customers leave feedback through their reviews. Therefore, one of the factors that determine how your customers see your business is the reviews you have on these sites and how you respond to them.
Industry-Specific Review Sites
Depending on your industry, niche review sites are of more relevance. In healthcare reputation management practitioners need to care and focus more on sites such as Healthgrades or Zocdoc, while a restaurant owner or small business needs to first look at the review sites that are more relevant to their industry. By engaging in this niche, you will not be lost in your industry.
Online Reputation Management Strategy: A Step-By-Step Approach
Develop an Online Reputation Management Strategy
First start by creating an extensive strategy to manage and keep track of your online reputation. To make a robust and efficient business reputation management strategy you need to identify your business goals, target audience, and most importantly key platforms that you will focus on which matters the most for your brand’s presence such as review sites, social media, and search engines. Create a structure for taking actions that will strengthen your brand image, and ensure consistency over all the platforms along with assigning responsibilities to team members for brand reputation management-related tasks.
Gather and Evaluate Customer Feedback
Collecting feedback is the most important step in online reputation management as it lets your business know the view of the public or customers about the business being run. You can use surveys and interviews with customers as well as online review platforms to find out experiences related to customers. Analysis such as this helps to figure out what’s working for you and where you can improve so that you can improve products, services, and how you treat customers.
Audit and Track Your Brand’s Reputation
The next and crucial step is conducting regular audits of your online reputation to evaluate of current situation of your online reputation marketing. You can use an online reputation monitoring tool to monitor your customer reviews, ratings, and mentions of your brand within Google, Yelp, or other social media sites. This will indicate trends and potential problems along with a chance for timely corrective action.
Promote Online Customer Reviews
One of the vital steps toward reputation management is encouraging satisfied customers to share their reviews and experiences by posting positive reviews on various review sites. You can encourage customers to leave reviews by sending them personalized review requests in your communication channels like emails and even text messages. Not only will this enhance your brand’s online reputation marketing, but it will also get you more visibility on search engines, helping bring new customers to the table.
Engage Actively on Social Media
Social media is a powerful online reputation marketing tool these days. Ignoring it can severely damage your online reputation marketing. Through social media, you can engage your audience through the creation and posting of content regularly. Additionally, you can also reply to comments, and respond to customer complaints as fast as possible. An active and positive social media presence helps you enhance customer’s trust and loyalty.
Excel in Responding to Customer Reviews
Responding to reviews is as important as asking for reviews, responding to both positive and negative reviews shows your customer that their feedback really matters and you are serious about improving your service. While responding to them you need to demonstrate empathy and a willingness to resolve the issue, as this can turn non-satisfied customers into successful brand advocates.
Handle Negative Reviews Effectively
Negative reviews can damage your online business reputation if ignored. While it’s impossible to completely avoid negative feedback, how you respond and address these reviews is what truly makes a difference. You need to handle the problem calmly and professionally, be apologetic when there is a need to apologize, and let them know what you can do to solve their problem. Publicly showcasing negative feedback and their resolution shows that you value customer satisfaction.
Create a Crisis Management Plan
A crucial step of your reputation management strategy is to have a crisis reputation management strategy to be ready for the worst-case scenario. For this what you need to do is:
- To identify probable risks to your reputation,
- Decide on roles in your team that can help in a crisis,
- Create protocols on how to disseminate information on the situation to the public.
A well-thought-out plan ensures your business is ready to respond quickly and effectively, thereby reducing reputational damage.
Monitor Brand Mentions
Most businesses excel when it comes to keeping track of their online reputation marketing and evaluating their performance online but what they miss is online mentions. Keeping an eye on online mentions of businesses with online reputation monitoring tools that track conversations across social media, review sites, blogs, and news outlets. Such tracking will keep you abreast of public perception and most importantly, will help you identify at which point you can engage with the audience or address issues before they reach a harmful level.
Dominate Your Local Search Market
Dominating your local search market is an indirect but very effective way to boost your online presence. For this what you need to do is claim your Google Business Profile, make sure business information is accurate, and collect reviews from locals to optimize your website for local SEO. Improving search visibility in your locality attracts more potential customers from your area and infuses a good boost into your brand’s credibility.
How to Choose the Best Reputation Management Software for Your Business
Does the Online Reputation Marketing Tool Offer a Collaborative Workspace?
While you may be in the lead of your online reputation management strategy, you must also involve other teams across your organization to achieve success. Your online reputation marketing software should bring together those different internal teams and external teams to carry out those tasks with minimum duplication.
Is the Online Reputation Monitoring Tool Scalable?
Online reputation management involves engaging with external platforms which are able to modify features quickly. When opting for an online reputation marketing software you need to ensure that the online reputation monitoring tool you are opting for is scalable or it can accommodate the growing demand of your business as it grows. You need to ask these questions which include how long it takes for new features to be incorporated and whether new members of customers can be easily added. Such questions point out whether the digital reputation management tool can expand further alongside your organization.
What Channels Does the Brand Reputation Management Tool Integrate With?
Before and while opting for software you need to ensure what channels and tools are you already using and what platforms you want your reputation management software to integrate with. Evaluate the software and opt for it only if it offers seamless integration with existing tools. If you identify significant discrepancies, you might end up needing to supplement your software solution with additional work to ensure all tasks are addressed. Hence you need to make sure that seamless integration is the key feature of the software.
What Reporting Capabilities Does the Digital Reputation Management Tool Offer?
In reputation management, having a complete idea of your reputation and key insights are very important. Hence while saying yes to software to level up your reputation management game, it is important to make sure that it offers comprehensive analytics and details insights about your strategy. Insights related to the number of review requests sent, the response rate, negative responses, and a lot more!! It will give you a brief idea about how your strategy is performing and what improvement needs to be made.
Does the Digital Reputation Management Software Offer AI and Automation?
In current times AI and automation are everything hence you also need to keep your reputation management game with AI and automation. AI can analyze customer reviews more intensively and help you spot trends and patterns so that changes can be made. Opt for digital reputation management software that has the capability to automate the workflows related to reviews and reputation such as automating review requests, and responses, sending real-time alerts, monitoring your online reputation, and a lot more. Through AI and automation, businesses can maintain a proactive approach to reputation management while minimizing manual effort.
Why Emitrr is the Best Online Reputation Management Platform
Automated Review Requests
Emitrr makes digital reputation management effortless by automating the whole process. From automating review requests to responding to them, you can reduce manual efforts. It ensures that review requests are sent immediately after a customer makes a purchase or uses a service. This approach promotes timely interaction with customers, increasing the likelihood of receiving valuable reviews. This also increases the chance of getting valuable reviews without constantly putting in manual effort. Emitrr streamlines the overall process of online reviews and reputation management.
Create Tasks and Tickets to Ensure No Review is Missed
Emitrrr knows that every review matters in digital reputation management and to ensure that you do not miss a single review it is equipped with a task and ticket feature where you can create a task related to reviews and assign it to your team member to ensure that each review are responded to and nothing slips through the cracks.
Save Time Using Pre-Built SMS Templates
There are situations where you do not have enough time to focus on each review and request it to customers and Emitrr knows its importance in online brand reputation management. Hence to allow you to focus on other areas that are more important, it has come up with pre-built SMS templates to send a review request or follow-up. This can save effort and time since the message is already ready for use and can be customized according to the tone and voice of the brand.
Intelligent Redirection to Various Review Platforms
Emitrr offers a feature that allows you to send patients a review request after a repeat visit or service. If they’ve already left a review on one platform, the system will redirect them to a different platform where they haven’t yet provided feedback. This smart positioning redistributes customers to different platforms for reviews, depending on your preferences or specific interactions with your customers, ensuring that reviews go where they can be most influential and thus increase visibility. It really plays a vital role in online brand reputation management.
Centralized Dashboard for Seamless Review Management Across Channels
Managing multiple review platforms is indeed an uphill task and we know it! Hence to allow you to work with ease, Emitrr offers a centralized dashboard where you can see all the reviews from every platform such as Google, and Facebook under one dashboard.. ou can also respond to them and share them from the same dashboard making it super easy and effortless.
Advanced Review Filtering by Location, Source, and Rating
Emitrr also allows you to filter your reviews based on location, source, or rating. This gives you a really granular view of specific areas or issues and lets you know the things and areas that need improvement or problematic aspects that need modification.
Personalize Responses with Advanced Customization Options
Emitrr excels when it comes to the personalization for online brand reputation management. It is equipped with personalization options where you can personalize the review request or respond to reviews in a way that feels more personal. You can customize it in a way where you can add something specific related to customers’ purchases or services making it look more general and specific to their preferences. This customization not only helps you to make requests and responses more personal but also shows that you value and care about each and every customer.
Receive Instant Notifications and Stay Informed
To stay ahead of your competitors and create a robust online brand reputation management plan, it is important that you are updated with real-time updates each time a new review is posted. Real-time alerts not only help you to be updated with the reviews that you receivebut also address those responses that need urgent attention. This way you can manage feedback effectively and maintain a proactive reputation strategy.
Harness the Power of AI and Automation
Emitrr’s automation comes in handy to improve your online brand reputation management game. AI can identify the patterns in your customer reviews, flag potential issues, and automate routine tasks like sending out responses so you can focus on what really matters.
Get Insightful Analytics
Emitrr offers you detailed analytics that goes beyond just monitoring. It offers detailed insights which include the number of review requests sent, the number of reviews on each channel such as Facebook, Google, etc, the total number of reviews, and a lot more!! By harnessing the capabilities of analytics and metrics you can make informed decisions and see what works best for you and what needs to be improved.
How Businesses Have Excelled in Their Review and Reputation Management by Leveraging Emitrr.
Citryn adopted Emitrr’s patient interaction platform in September 2020, which immensely benefited both single-location and multi-location clients and improved communication. Replacing the old ways with text messaging helped them get a 70% increase in conversions because of the open rate on texting, which is 98%. Features by Emitrr include those of webchat-to-text, missed call texting, and automated FAQs on communication, and an added value is that of sending review requests, automatically via EHRs, which added a 200% spurt in client reviews. Within less than 9 months, Citryn had reached 30 locations, reduced no-show rates by 90%, generated more than 1,500 new reviews, and produced over 2,000 leads via web chat.
Community Discussions on Online Reputation Management
here are some community discussions on Online Reputation Management you can refer to –
Online Reputation Management FAQs
The primary goal of online reputation management is establishing and maintaining a robust positive online brand image by addressing negative reviews and encouraging positive feedback to improve trust and credibility.
The 3 negative effects of neglecting online reputation management are as follows
– Loss of customer trust and loyalty.
– Decrease in sales or business opportunities.
– Damage to brand image and overall credibility.
Yes, an efficient tool like Emitrr can be a game changer for your business and help you repair a damaged reputation by actively addressing negative reviews, promoting positive content, and automating the whole reputation management process.
Emitrr is the best online reputation management tool that excels when it comes to building a positive business reputation. From affordability to comprehensive features, it tops the list in every parameter.
A service to help your business manage and discover your online reputation is crucial as it provides tools to monitor, analyze, and respond to customer feedback across several platforms. This helps businesses stay ahead of potential issues, enhance their brand image, and build stronger relationships with their audience. Businesses can make data-driven decisions and continue to improve their reputation, attract new customers, and stay ahead in the competitive battle if key insights and trends are discovered.
Conclusion
Online reputation management can be a game changer for all sizes of businesses in each industry, especially in the current time when potential customers rely on a company’s image before making a purchase. All you have to do is look for robust software that is made specifically for you and your business needs, where you need not to be tech savvy to operate the tool. When it comes to the best all-in-one solution Emitrr is the top choice for its comprehensive features, ease of use, affordability, and customer satisfaction.
If you also want to transform your online reputation then do not hesitate and book a quick demo to discover the capabilities and offerings Emitrr has to level up your reputation management game.
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