Content
- Why Does Your Small Business Need Reputation Management?
- The 5 Stages of Reputation Management
- Claim Your Business on Relevant Websites
- Establish Your Brand
- Be Present online and Tell Your Story
- Be Active on Social Media
- Ask for Reviews
- Be Present on Review Generating Platforms
- Monitor Your Brand
- Be Proactive and Not Reactive While Responding to Negative Comments
- Crisis Management
- Create A Long-term ORM Plan
- The Best Tools for Reputation Management
- Answers to commonly asked Reputation Management Questions
Rupert Murdoch once said, ‘Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.’ There isn’t much to argue when a statement like this comes from Rupert Murdoch, the American media mogul. Why is it vital for a small business to keep their online reputation beyond reproach? What is at stake here? This comprehensive guide on ORM – Online Reputation Management answers all these questions along with reputation management tips for your brand.
Customers today are taking a deep dive before making a purchasing decision. Be it directory sites or social media the online landscape has created a wide variety of information available for your potential users. Things can quickly go out of hand when you turn a blind eye to negative reviews about your small business. In fact, even a single negative review can change things and make or break your business growth. That’s where Online Reputation Management comes in.
Online Reputation Management involves protecting your online image from being damaged by negative reviews, detrimental comments, adverse feedback, and so on. Maintaining a sterling reputation is an ongoing task involving crafting and implementation of strategies that shape the public perception of your brand or small business. Reputation management plays an important role in setting the expectations of your future customers and leaving a great impression on what you do.
Why Does Your Small Business Need Reputation Management?
In the early 2000s or even before that, dissatisfied customers could have easily influenced their family and friends. One unhappy customer meant no business from their relatives or possibly even the community. Fast forward to 2020. Customers have multiple ways and channels to share their negative experiences with a company. These reviews can be seen quickly by hundreds of your potential customers beyond your locality. In fact, consumers are conditioned to take a look at online reviews before making a purchase – more the reason for you to create and implement a reputation management strategy.
Here are 4 reasons why you should consider reputation management for your small business.
- Influences Buying Decisions: According to BrightLocal’s “Local Consumer Review Survey,” 82% of customers across the world read online reviews before purchasing products and services. And, nearly three out of four shoppers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Positive reviews influence the buying decisions to a great extent and can be a game-changer.
- Word of Mouth Travels Fast: Be it going live on Facebook or putting up a post on Instagram, it takes only a few seconds for customers to show the quality of your product or service. This means that their experiences reach people from different corners of the globe in almost real-time. Viral videos of poor-quality product or services can be lethal to the existence and growth of your business. That is why you need to consider everything starting from response time to product quality to customer support behaviour.
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A Negative Reputation Can Stay Forever: Be it an online archive or a simple social media comment, a bad reputation, the outcome of an accident can stay online forever. You can’t make the negative impression go away. Even though you can counter-argue or highlight how prompt you were to solve the issue, the first impression is the last. Adopting suitable reputation management strategies will help to proactively manage how you appear to your potential customers.
In 2017, officers forcibly removed a passenger from a United Airways flight from Chicago to Louisville. What followed was a massive negative public exposure. Overnight, the airlines lost nearly a billion dollars in market cap value, much to the horror of investors.
United Airlines still flies today, albeit its reputation got permanently scarred. Had it been a smaller or less capable airlines, they would have had to shut down in the wake of this kind of reputation disaster. - An Opportunity to Correct What Went Wrong: The most remarkable quality of reputation management is it offers you a chance to correct what you did wrong. Be it the quality of the product or response time; you can always act based on feedback received and show your potential customers that you are ready to go that extra mile.
The 5 Stages of Reputation Management
Now that you understand the significance of reputation management, it is time to delve deep into understanding the five stages of reputation management. Each step is essential in its own right. Once you follow these steps, you will be able to deliver more WOW moments to your customers.
- Research - The Foundation of Reputation Management: Research is the first stage of an online reputation management campaign. During this phase, you will be identifying the top search phrases, including key services and name variations. Don’t miss out on taking into consideration the SERP gap and influencer identification.
i) Exploring Content Removal Options: Research involves exploring if any content needs to be removed from any website/search engine and the way to go about it. Based on what you find, you can make DMCA-take-down requests or opt for suitable legal methods. Depending on the situation, you may want to simultaneously use it with other removal strategies such as Google search result removal, NoIndex removal or YouTube Video removal.
ii) Analysing SERP Gap: The next step is to minimise potential threat opportunities. At this stage, you will find out the significant differences that exist between search results for your business and a similar one. This will help you to reduce possible reputation threats. You can take the necessary steps to minimise.
iii) Creating A Development Plan: With the GAP analysis results ready, now it’s time to create a list of websites where you can publish positive content about your business. These sites fetch organic traffic and gain inbound links to your website. This development plan plays a vital role throughout the online reputation management campaign.
iv) Identifying Relevant Influencers: At this stage, you should be looking for industry-specific influencers and thought leaders who can help you to promote your business in a later phase.
- Strategy - Setting the Vision and Direction for Reputation Management: The second step of a reputation management campaign involves creating a plan based on the inputs conceived in the research phase. Depending on the nature of your business and the research, make a strategy by combining different techniques such as content replacement, rating improvement, Wikipedia development, positive results promotion, article replacement and review improvement.
- Content Creation - The Cornerstone of Building Trust: Creating content lies at the heart of every successful reputation management campaign. It may take time to create content pieces, but the result at the end is definitely worth the effort. Some of the crucial steps involved in the process of content creation include brainstorming, development, and review improvement.
i) Brainstorming: Brainstorming sessions help you to come up with different content ideas that your target audience will find useful. Create target audience personas so that your content resonates with the actual customers and their pain points.
ii) Content Development: After brainstorming topics, the next step is to create a content calendar with a detailed plan of the different kinds of content you plan to post on your website and social media handles. Types of content may include but are not limited to blog posts, social media posts, videos, guest posts, external articles, press releases, slideshows, and so on.
iii) Review Improvement: Review improvements means getting genuine reviews from your customers so that your business appears to be more credible to potential customers.
- Web Property Development - Doing the Groundwork for Content Distribution: Building your brand’s online properties such as websites and related microsites, social media profiles and business listings plays a crucial role in managing your online reputation. These properties help to spread a positive word about your business and gain the desired traction. The commonly used web properties include a website, video profiles, image sharing profiles and social media profiles.
- Brand Promotion - Increasing Website Traffic and Footfall: Online reputation management doesn’t end at creating content. In fact, think of it as a beginning. You also need to promote the content you created. Some of the brand promotion activities which equip you to build a positive reputation around your business are:
i) Owned Web Properties: Since you have greater control over the websites that you own, you can easily promote positive content published on your website and other web properties that you own.
ii) Paid Content: You can also include paid content promotion in your reputation management strategy. Forms of paid content include guest posts on high-authority websites, paid content discovery, and sponsored content on authority websites.
iii) Strategic Asset Retargeting: To gain traction, you can learn what worked and focus on the same. Be it off-page optimisation or link development or SEO outreach, ensure that your content is easily discovered by the target audience.
11 Essential Tips for Managing Online Reputation Of Your Business
Handling criticism online isn’t exactly a piece of cake. Be it claiming your business online or being proactive in responding to negative comments; you must be willing to bend over backwards to get the job done. Here are some strategic tips essential for managing the online reputation of your small to medium business.
1. Claim Your Business on Relevant Websites: Verified businesses on relevant websites (such as Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter) is an excellent way to tell your customers that they are looking at a valid business. Claiming your business on these sites along with the correct name, address, and phone number makes you visible and trustworthy as well. After claiming your business, you will be able to:
- Complement your local SEO efforts
- Identify traffic source with unique tracking URLs
- Respond to reviews received on these business listing websites
2. Establish Your Brand: The online landscape today is cluttered with similar businesses fighting for space and attention. That’s why it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to widen their digital presence. But this doesn’t mean that businesses can sit on the fence and do nothing. The first step of establishing your brand online is to be present where your customers are. Be it social media platforms, review sites, or community forums; you must be able to communicate with your customers either by sharing regular updates or useful information.
For example, if you run a B2B business, you might want to connect with potential buyers on LinkedIn and share relevant information with your network.
If you run a dental clinic, you could explore digital marketing channels such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to showcase client testimonials, your areas of expertise and subject-related knowledge.
3. Be Present online and Tell Your Story: The age-old technique of storytelling never disappoints when it comes to connecting with people. In fact, good storytelling is mission-critical for giving voice to your brand. Such stories help you to make room for your business even in a crowded space. For example, a story on how you built your product, the challenges you faced when starting up or even introducing people running your company.
Businesses are not only competing for making more revenue but also for getting attention from the right audience. That’s where storytelling comes in to help you build a memorable connection and manage a long-term relationship.
4. Be Active on Social Media: Almost every small business today has an account on different social media channels. Unfortunately, having a social media page is not enough anymore. In order to build a reputation for your brand, you need to create engaging content and interact with your followers or subscribers regularly. This helps you to be present in their mind by appearing on their social media feeds.
Well-maintained social media channels play a critical role in boosting engagement and creating conversations with potential customers. Since almost every buyer today searches your business on Google before purchasing a product or service, a well-nourished social media strategy is likely to increase their trust.
5. Ask for Reviews: Building a reputation for your business becomes easier when you have a ton of positive reviews from happy and satisfied customers. In fact, an average consumer reads 10 reviews before being able to trust the business. Therefore, the importance of harvesting positive reviews is second to none.
Ask happy customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business page so that your potential customers are aware of the quality product or service you offer. Besides helping potential customers to trust your business, online reviews speak even louder than any promotion. While managing reviews, you should take care of the negative ones by resolving those and showing how prompt you were in offering a quick resolution. Every negative review in fact is an opportunity to show your willingness to go the extra mile in hearing your customers and addressing their problems and challenges.
Some of the most popular ways of asking for a review include email and SMS.
6. Be Present on Review Generating Platforms: Collecting reviews and managing them is extremely important when it comes to online reputation management. Why is it so? Negative reviews provide you with an excellent opportunity to learn what went wrong and take the necessary steps to fix it. Fixing such reviews helps you to ace customer retention as well.
On the other hand, positive reviews are the best way to show real value to potential customers. Now, how do you get all these reviews? By being present on different platforms that help you to generate customer reviews. You must track reviews on every review platform that you sign up for. Some of the most popular customer review platforms are TrustPilot, TestFreaks, ConsumerReports, Consumer Affairs, City Search, Yelp, G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, Better Business Bureau, Capterra, Glassdoor and HundredX.
7. Monitor Your Brand: How do you track everything that is being said about your brand online? With brand monitoring. Also known as social media listening, brand monitoring entails the process of identifying brand mentions on different websites and assessing them. It is usually done by tracking and monitoring specific keywords. Brand monitoring helps you to listen to your customers, improve offerings based on feedback, improve customer support, boost sales, and measure the impact of marketing campaigns.
Some of the most important channels to monitor your brand include online publications, review platforms, forums and social media. SocialPilot, a social media monitoring tool allows you to monitor your brand reputation and mention, even when your brand name is not tagged. And don’t forget the old yet still very useful Google Alerts.
8. Be Proactive and Not Reactive While Responding to Negative Comments: Does a negative review leave you angry? Well, that’s certainly not the way to go about it! Every negative comment is an opportunity to improve your product based on customer feedback and show how willing you are to resolve customer issues. Here is a 5-step approach on how to respond to negative reviews and comments.
- Evaluate Feedback: The first step is to evaluate the feedback internally. Even if the review leaves you angry, don’t respond immediately in anger. Take a step back, talk to your colleagues about what went wrong, and be prepared to acknowledge the mistake.
- Put Up A Public Response: This is the time to show that you truly care about your customers. Post a comment that acknowledges the fault on your part and suggests a mutually inclusive way to move forward. Always remember to keep such responses public so that your potential customers can see your reaction and willingness to resolve the issue.
- Be Transparent & Take Responsibility: Every business is run by humans who are bound to make mistakes at some point. That’s why you need to be always transparent and forthcoming to take responsibility for what went wrong from your side.
- Ask Questions: In case you are not sure about the issue, don’t forget to ask questions politely. Adequate information helps to craft an appropriate response in solving the customer problem.
- Show Empathy: Chances are, you would be using canned responses ready for different kinds of reviews. In the case of a negative comment or feedback, instead of using a canned response, draft a personalised reply. Don’t forget to show empathy in your response, add a signature at the end, and offer a constructive solution weaved into your empathetic response.
9. Crisis Management: A single negative review is capable of jeopardising the reputation of a brand. There are times when businesses face a crisis which ultimately impacts the reputation and business growth. In such situations, a crisis management plan helps you formulate a clear outline of how to react to a crisis or how to be prepared to avoid any future problems. Some of the best ways to manage such a crisis include:
- Reviewing the impact
- Pushing down negative articles
- Boosting positive positioning for all keyword searches
- Getting rid of negative keyword searches
- Optimising social media content
10. Create A Long-term ORM Plan: If you don’t already have an online reputation management plan in place, create one immediately or, contact Adaptify expert. A plan like this helps you to set the direction of how you want your brand to be perceived. Additionally, the ORM plan protects your business from reputation damages. Here is a 6-step process for creating an online reputation management plan for your business.
- What Is Your Story? Start with identifying what you want your business to be known for. It can be product superiority, prompt and personalised service or family tradition. This is your USP and the reason why your customers will buy your products and services. Understand and highlight your key offerings or unique selling points.
- Review Online Presence: The next step involves running an audit to get a detailed picture of your online presence. This is the time to review social media handles, blogs, or any other web properties that you might have. At this stage, you will have to create an account on relevant review sites and platforms.
- A Steady Stream of Useful Information: The third stage requires creating and updating a steady stream of useful and relevant information in the form of a blog, video, or email newsletters. Diverse content formats will help your prospective customers to learn more about your business, products, and services.
- Ask for Reviews: Once you have a few paying customers, you must ask them to submit reviews. These reviews will help you to earn the trust of your future customers.
- Monitor and Respond: As the reviews start pouring in, it is time for you to sit back, monitor online mentions, and respond. In case you receive a negative reaction, don’t take it personally. Rather work towards solving it and thank your customer for bringing it to your attention.
- Crisis Plan: The final stage of creating a long-term ORM plan is to craft a crisis plan that you can refer to in future instances of a crisis.
11. The Best Tools for Reputation Management: Managing the online reputation of your business becomes easier with ORM tools. Here is a list of some of the better reputation management tools:
- Reputology: This tool eliminates the need to individually check each of the review sites you are present on.
- Mention: Mention is an excellent tool that helps you to track every mention of your business on the web, including social media channels, blogs, forums, and so on. Mention users have access to Reputology as well.
- The Brand Grader: This free tool provides you with an overall customer sentiment towards your business.
- Similar Web: Similar Web lets you compare your brand presence, including traffic with your competitors.
- … and many more
Answers to commonly asked Reputation Management Questions
Evaluating the impact of an online reputation management campaign becomes easier with key metrics like customer sentiment, referral leads from review sites, the volume of client testimonials shared on social media, and net promoter score.
If a negative review is significantly damaging your business reputation, we highly recommended that you try to resolve the issue with the customer. However, reviews violating the terms of services of the review platform can be removed within a week, depending on the responsiveness of the website. It can take up to 8 weeks to remove online content. This is dependent on your relationship with the publisher and the publisher’s response regarding the removal of content.
Every business needs a different online reputation management strategy based on the kind of damage it has suffered from. Some of the most popular techniques used for managing online reputation include Wikipedia page development, influencer publication, positive press releases, review improvement, PPC campaigns, publishing positive content, search engine optimisation, development of microsites, negative content removal, and so on.
Businesses suffering from reputation damage often find it overwhelming to grasp the complete picture for identification and removal strategies. That’s why it is important to get a deeper and holistic perspective from the reputation management experts. Whist the initial perceived damage may seem minimal at the start; it has the potential to spiral out of control very quickly and cause permanent damage to your hard earned brand equity.
Yes. Reputation management at a larger organisation impacts more stakeholders who may take some time to agree on what solution to go for. Also, bigger companies suffer from maximum impact because of their size and online recognition. The chances are high that the damage is serious by the time you reach out to a reputation management consultant. That’s why it takes more time to repair reputation damage for enterprise-level businesses.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question since it really depends on several factors like the size of your business, the number of review sites you are present on and the social media presence. For example, if there is one negative review, and you have three reviews in total, that negative review can do every possible damage to your reputation. It is best to try to solve negative reviews by interacting with the customer.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to managing online reputation. While creating and implementing a reputation management strategy, experts take certain factors such as the volume of business, number of negative reviews and estimated impact into account.
