Reputation Management online can be used to shape how a business is viewed by its target audience, helping protect against negative content, increase positive reviews, and promote the use of social media.
ORM can also help identify and suppress products that don’t align with your brand strategy – an important tool for companies targeting younger consumers.
1. Monitor Your Reputation
Your brand’s reputation is its public face and greatest asset, shaping consumer perception and driving business growth. Yet any issue can quickly undermine it.
Bad content can cost your company customers, vendors, and general trust among the general public – and take time and money to repair.
Reputation management involves tracking conversations across review platforms, social media and other sources. It involves monitoring all conversations on review platforms, social media and other sources as well as highlighting positive testimonials and managing online listings. Tools designed specifically to aid reputation management make daily management much simpler – helping find negative reviews, track competitors and keep an eye on industry news as well as establish goals and benchmarks to gauge your online reputation management success.
2. Respond to Reviews
One bad review can damage your reputation and dissuade potential consumers from doing business with you, so monitoring both positive and negative feedback is vital to building brand loyalty and encouraging repeat purchases.
Negative reviews should always be addressed by someone from your customer support team, to demonstrate to other customers that your company cares for its customers and responds accordingly. Your response can demonstrate to other consumers that your business cares.
Keep in mind that reviews reach beyond just the individual who posted them; readers online could see them and form opinions of you based on them. Showing humanity could help potential future customers feel more at ease doing business with you. Acknowledging negative feedback could make a lasting impression; try acknowledging it while asking how you can improve.
3. React to Negative Comments
No one can avoid negative comments, but you must respond in an effective way that can salvage your image. When someone criticizes your business, acknowledge their concern while assuring them you will address any problems promptly and then seek feedback about any particular issues so as to improve them.
Remove any hateful or unreasonable comments while accepting all negative reviews as part of normal operations. Even large multinational companies experience bad reviews occasionally; how you handle these effectively will depend on keeping calm and responding promptly in order to retain revenue and customer trust. With the right response plan in place, even unhappy customers could become brand advocates who stand behind your product/service and become loyal brand promoters!
4. Respond to Negative Blog Posts
Although it can be tempting to overlook negative comments, a timely and appropriate response from your brand can turn the situation around. For example, offering facts to counter any criticism can often make such comments less malicious and make your response seem more convincing.
However, care must be taken when applying this approach – using it too frequently may create the perception that your brand is aggressive, so use only when necessary.
Negative reviews can quickly damage a company’s reputation. Without being able to manage how they’re portrayed online, negative reviews could ruin business operations and result in legal complications for you or even harm. Walker Sands can assist by creating top ranking industry mentions to even out the playing field in your favor and restore its balance.
5. Monitor Social Media
Social media makes it increasingly challenging to keep up with every comment, but being proactive about monitoring and responding to negative comments can help avoid public perception issues from developing.
Negative online reviews or complaints can have an enormously detrimental impact on the reputation of any business. Thankfully, various tools exist to track mentions of your brand across various sources like blogs and the news; one such tool is Meltwater which allows users to monitor this discussion around them.
Social Mention provides another useful service by monitoring social media for mentions of your name or brand name on specific platforms where your target audience is active, helping your business avoid getting bogged down in negative comments on platforms that don’t reach any further than yourself.
