Businesses have taken a considerable turn in using online audiences to market their products and services. Customers will often leave their comments, opinions, and reviews in your business website’s comment section, but some utter malicious statements that attract negative energy towards your brand. Negative feedback means a bad online reputation. What’s online reputation management? Online reputation management (ORM) is a multi-faceted plan implemented to create a positive public acceptance of a brand, a person, or a business.
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A business may have the best customer service, but a single negative review or comment would jeopardize any brand’s success. Remember, the internet never forgets; thus, implementing online reputation management strategies would be the only way to clean your name in the public eye. ORM involves addressing customer feedback that would be detrimental to the brand, monitoring online reputation, and using processes to help solve/prevent cases capable of affecting its reputation.
How do you do Online Reputation Management?
Every brand, business, or person needs to have a strategic plan to carry out online reputation management. Just like businesses vary in their objectives and services/products offered, the ORM process differs as well. However, below are some of the steps any successful business or brand would implement in their ORM process.
- Business Online Reputation Auditing
The laying foundation of any ORM process is adequate online reputation auditing. Auditing aims to evaluate how the public perceives your business/brand. Through auditing, you can know the kind of issues facing your business’s’ reputation and how effective they are in public view. Brand monitoring is the most convenient way to help in online reputation auditing.
Establishing an ORM strategy process makes your work hassle-free, precise, and accurate. Remember, your mission is to clean up your name in public; thus, any ORM process should not cause more damage. Strategic planning calls for prioritization of the critical factors noted during brand auditing. You are not entitled to react to every comment, no!
Strategic planning allows your ORM process to have a goal, define your limitations or boundaries, and prioritize your response by the impact. Most importantly, any business should have a crisis management strategy in place since no one can predict emergencies and crisis eruptions.
- Efficient Monitoring of Brand Mentions
As a public figure, you need to be proactive in keeping up with the trends of your brand’s reputation online. Keeping close monitoring of your brand grants real-time reviews of your image; hence you will be ready to provide timely reactions in case of any arising crisis. Follow the brand’s mentions using the SEMrush monitoring tool for efficiency.
- Encourage People to Leave Positive Feedbacks and Comments Online.
Many people rely on online reviews while making decisions about whether to purchase any business goods and services. Additionally, search engine optimization results provide room to impact a business’s reputation. How? Your online business reputation affects the google ranking such that bad customer experiences lead to automatic downranking of your site, a case any company must work hard to avoid.
- React to Negative Reviews Professionally
People will leave negative comments and reviews on your website design, but you need to react to those reviews with the utmost professionalism as a business. Survey has shown that a large number of people turn back from a business because of the negative information they read in the customer review section. Not only do enterprises lose new customers, but also the existing customers lose faith in the businesses/brands with bad online reputations. For effective negative reviews’ management, one has to be cautious, apologize to the offended person if you are wrong, and prioritize timely responses. Timely response to negative reviews helps prevent extensive online reputation.
In Summary
Online reputation management is essential in any thriving business since any business’s growth and development is highly tied to its online reputation. People will never stop talking and writing. Therefore, all you have to do as a brand is to create a strong ORM strategy to monitor all the online conversations, react accordingly, and encourage customers to leave building positive sentiments.
