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In the digital age, having a strong online reputation is more important than ever for businesses. With the proliferation of social media, review sites, and the ability for anyone to post their thoughts and experiences online, it’s crucial that businesses actively manage their reputation in order to maintain a positive image and attract customers.
This is where a reputation management strategy becomes a critical component of your overall marketing strategy.
A reputation management strategy helps businesses maintain control over their online image and ensure that they are presenting a positive and professional image to potential customers. There are three elements that any reputation management strategy should include: online reputation management, brand promotion, and internal marketing tactics.
In this article, we’ll look at six online reputation management strategies for implementing those elements that will elevate your brand’s online reputation to the next level while protecting perception of the business.
Why is Reputation Management Important?
A reputation management plan outlines the steps a business takes to monitor, protect, and improve its reputation online. While it’s important to manage both positive and negative reviews, it’s also important to understand the other ways in which reputation management impacts your overall success.
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Increased customer loyalty and trust. Strong public perception of a business inspires customers to make a purchase from that business, and the resulting increase in client traffic not only increases bottom-line revenue, but also results in improved brand perception for the business.
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Higher quality talent applications. When job seekers are considering potential employers, they often research the company’s reputation to get a sense of what it’s like to work there. The stronger the perception of your business, the higher the caliber of the potential talent willing to apply to work with your team. A recent study revealed that 69% of job seekers said they would turn down a job offer from a company with a poor reputation, even if they were currently unemployed.
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Improved reputation acts as a competitive advantage. In today’s crowded market, it’s important for businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors. A strong reputation can help set a business apart and give it that edge.
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6 Brand Reputation Management Strategies
Having established why it’s necessary to engage in reputation management, it’s important for business owners to understand which reputation management strategies will result in increased profitability.
Next, we’ll outline six online reputation management strategies that we’ve found to be the most effective methods businesses can rely upon to manage their reputation.
1. Use reputation management software and tools
As with many modern business processes, technology has become a cornerstone around which successful marketing strategies and tactics are being built.
There are a number of tools and platforms available to help businesses manage their brand reputation online. These can include review management platforms, social media monitoring tools, social listening tools, and analytics platforms that help businesses track their online business reputation.
We’ll cover some of these tools more in-depth in our discussions of other popular reputation management tactics, but it’s important to understand that by using these tools, businesses can more effectively track and respond to customer feedback, as well as monitor their overall online presence.
2. Monitor and respond to online reviews and feedback
One of the most important elements of reputation management is monitoring and responding to customer feedback. This includes tracking reviews and ratings on review sites like Yelp and Google, as well as monitoring popular social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms where customers may be discussing your business.
In addition to tracking reviews on channels your business manages directly, social listening and social monitoring tools are gaining traction in modern marketing strategies.
Social monitoring tools allow your team to track customer sentiment towards your company as well as the competition to identify product and service gaps and understand customer needs. Social listening is dialed more into tracking brand mentions, tagged or untagged, and can help to strengthen your understanding of the competition and better focus any marketing strategies built on the use of keywords.
By keeping an eye on what customers are saying, businesses can quickly respond to any bad reviews, negative comments, or negative feedback and address any issues that may be affecting the customer experience.
This not only helps to improve the customer experience, but also demonstrates to customers that your business cares about customer opinions and is willing to address any problems that may arise. It can also help to identify new opportunities to expand your services or product offerings into channels where the competition either hasn’t expanded into yet or where customers are seeking alternatives.
By monitoring their online presence, businesses can quickly identify any potential issues or concerns and take public relations action to address them before they become a larger problem.
3. Promote positive content
Another effective reputation management strategy is to proactively promote positive reviews of your business. This includes highlighting customer reviews and star ratings, sharing positive news articles or press mentions, and promoting content that showcases your products or services.
Deploying more customized content campaigns can help mitigate negative reviews by boosting your search engine result page (SERP) rankings with new content. It can also help to support your SEO and marketing initiatives and uncover other channels where your brand is being discussed.
For businesses, content that can help in the reputation management process includes:
- email marketing campaigns
- social media posts
- feedback from reviews (to audit and adapt your website design and product offerings).
If you’re trying to boost the reputation and visibility of an individual in your organization, you can leverage press releases, news articles, and blog posts.
By proactively sharing positive content, businesses can help to shape the narrative about their brand and ensure that potential customers see a balanced view of the business. Combined with other review management tactics, positive content promotion can be a powerful tool in your overall marketing strategy.
4. Engage with customers
Another key element of reputation management is engaging with customers. This can include responding to customer inquiries or complaints on social media, participating in online discussions or forums related to your industry, and reaching out to customers directly to address any issues they may be having.
Customer engagement is a space that is becoming increasingly supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools. Customer relationship management (CRM) software platforms connect email campaign management tools, social management platforms, and sales platforms to a single channel of engagement, allowing a uniform customer experience across the entirety of your online presence.
Combined with tools such as AI-driven chatbots designed to enhance the customer service experience and field queries and service needs around the clock, automation tools allow you to gather and track customer feedback on a single platform.
By engaging with customers, businesses can demonstrate their commitment to customer service and build stronger relationships with their customers.
5. Develop a crisis management plan
Despite their best efforts, businesses may still face crises or negative situations that threaten their reputation. This can stem from negative reviews as easily as it can be a result of negative press coverage due to a cybersecurity event such as a data breach or ransomware attack.
In the wake of such attacks, the negative reviews and public perception can have such a devastating impact that around 60% of small- to medium-sized businesses never recover and go out of business within six months.
In the event of such crisis situations, it’s important to have a crisis management plan in place to help mitigate the damage and restore the business’s reputation. This can include developing a strategy for responding to negative feedback or reviews, identifying key stakeholders to engage with during a crisis, and creating a plan for sharing information with customers and the public.
By having a crisis management plan in place, businesses can be better prepared to handle unexpected situations and minimize the impact on their reputation.
6. Invest in SEO
When it comes to business marketing strategies, few tactics allow a marketing team to cast as wide and effective a net as search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO tactics touch paid search advertising, assist in new customer acquisition and conversions, and even play a role in reputation management.
One of the most powerful uses for SEO tactics in executing your reputation management campaign is to ensure your first-page Google results—from your local business listing to news and stories mentioning your brand—are positive.
Using SEO tools to optimize your organization’s website and online content for relevant keywords, your marketing team can help ensure that your services and products appear at the top of search results when potential customers are looking for products or services related to their business, and that the content and reviews are fresh and paint a positive view of your business.
Effective reputation management is essential
A reputation management strategy is an essential component of any business’s online marketing efforts. By actively monitoring and responding to customer feedback, promoting positive content, engaging with customers, and using reputation management tools and strategies, businesses can protect and improve their reputation online and attract more customers.
By taking the time to develop and implement a strong reputation management strategy, businesses can ensure that they are presenting a positive and professional brand image to potential customers and building trust and loyalty with their current customers.
If you’re ready to launch your online reputation management strategy, get in touch with one of UpCity’s top rated reputation management companies to learn more.