What is Online Reputation Management and Why Do You Need It?
You work hard to keep your customers happy. You tirelessly try to gain more customer satisfaction by developing new products and features to meet ever-evolving customer needs.
But is that enough when all your customers are connected over the internet and probably discussing your product or service online?
Even businesses with the most responsive customer support sometimes get negative reviews and responses over the internet. An angry review or a negative media story can go viral all over the internet in no time. It could dent the hard-earned reputation of your business within a few minutes.
You need online reputation management (ORM) to save the online image of your business. It can help you keep your online presence as positive as possible by minimizing the negative feedback.
What Is Online Reputation Management?
Online reputation management or ORM is mainly required to address false or negative comments that mention your brand on review websites, forums, or social media. It includes responding to negative customer feedback and reacting to media stories that portray your business in a bad light.It may include posting responses on social media or releasing a public statement.
How Is Reputation Management Different From PR?
Both ORM and PR have the same goal of protecting the reputation of the business and keep its image as positive as possible. However, the difference is in how both works to achieve their respective goals.
While PR works through media promotion and advertising, ORM is often reactive. Online reputation management identifies and responds to negative content that could damage your business’ brand.
Why is it Crucial to Manage Your Online Reputation?
Online negative publicity can dent your business enormously. Even a tiny negative comment and a low rating matter. These small feedbacks add up quickly and can become a nightmare for your business’s online reputation.
Hence, you need to take care of these tiny negative instances before they snowball into a serious threat. On top of that, ORM also helps you maintain transparency and earn more loyalty from your customers.
How?
Customers trust a business more that is engaged in organic interactions and personalized conversations through direct messages, tweets, or comments.
Addressing negative comments openly and directly also helps in building a brand that is open to feedback and makes changes as per customer demands.
Strategies You Can Use for ORM
With multiple social media channels and websites, Online Reputation Management in India can be challenging. Here are a few strategies that you can follow for efficient ORM of your business.
- Respond with Empathy
Sometimes customers ask questions before posting anything negative and they expect a prompt response. This is where you should seize the opportunity by responding promptly to all the queries. And if you smell any dissatisfaction, try to resolve it at that point in time only.
The key here is to understand their issue with empathy and make them feel that you are completely invested in resolving their issue at the earliest. Conveying a sense of genuine concern can go a long way in building customer relationships and trust.
Always remember that an unattended question can quickly transform into customers’ rage and eventually bad word of mouth all over the internet. And anything can go viral in today’s times instantly.
- Address Negative Comments and Reviews
When customers research about your business, apart from reading negative reviews, they also read your responses to them. It shows even if there is a problem, you are always there to take care of it.
Hence, you should always respond to negative reviews and comments. Online reputation management services should always respond to negative online feedback. Hear them patiently and try to resolve their issue at the earliest.
- Admit your Mistake
It is always wise to own your mistake and apologize instead of arguing pointlessly with the customer. This way, you can easily diffuse the tense situation with the customer. It will also reflect your honesty, transparency, and accountability – the ethics of fair business.
Apologize genuinely and address the issue directly. Inform the customer how the issue will be resolved and what would be the timeline. You can also choose the platform for apology depending upon where you are getting most of the negative comments.
Making a mistake is common but how you will fix it will set you apart from other businesses.
- Rank on Top of your Search Engine Result Pages
Ranking on top can help you minimize the visibility of negative press related to your business. This is because customers are more likely to click on top results. A reliable online reputation management company can help you manage Google search engine ranking.
You can also encourage satisfied customers to write positive reviews of your business on top websites. This can help you enhance your average rating and online reputation.
- Automate ORM
Managing ORM manually can eat up a lot of time and manual resources. You can automate ORM tasks through software. Google Alerts is one of the simplest and free tools to monitor your brand over the internet.
Just enter the name of your brand in the tool and get automated notifications every time something about your business is posted on the internet. Other tools like Brand24 and SEMrush can help you do sentiment analysis and search ranking analysis respectively.
You can also leverage these tools to track what customers are saying about your competitors while saving a lot of time. It can help you plan your marketing strategy more effectively.
Wrapping Up
Online reputation management can help you build a more positive image of your brand that you have built over the years of hard work. By responding to potential and current customers, you can create a business that is always there for its customers.
In the long run, an efficient ORM strategy can give you greater control over how your business is present as a brand in the market. Connect with our experts to discuss how our experts can help you with online reputation management.