Your business is the result of years’ worth of hard work, capital, and sweat equity. What’s built over years, however, can be undone by negative reviews in a matter of minutes; as Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
How differently? For too many business owners, especially those operating a small business, online reputation management is an afterthought, something to be taken care of after something has gone terribly wrong. Properly protecting your business’s reputation requires an approach that is proactive rather than reactive, and that’s much easier with the help of an online reputation management agency. Let’s take a closer look at how to identify, vet, and retain an online reputation management company.
What is an Online Reputation Management Agency?
What is a reputation management firm managing, exactly? Your online reputation could be broadly summarized as the perception of your business, expressed in its credibility, trustworthiness, and authority.
Review Sites
While Yelp is, for better or worse, the 800-pound gorilla in the online review space, other sites — like Google and Facebook — aggregate reviews, too.
Social Media
Reviews aren’t the only way in which your customers express their (dis)satisfaction. Those seeking recommendations or driving discussion on Facebook pages and groups, in LinkedIn articles, or making mention on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, have an impact too.
Traditional Media
For many businesses, earned media is the holy grail of promotion and public relations alike; however, if that coverage turns negative, a blessing can become a curse.
Brand Mentions
There are myriad other ways that your brand can be discussed and mentioned, whether within the industry or by customers; how well do you know the other nooks and crannies that impact your brand’s perception?
Competitors
Unless you’re fortunate enough to be in a vertical of one, there are other companies competing for the same business and mindshare that you do. Understanding where they are, what they’re doing, and what they’re saying will influence the direction of your own reputation management efforts.
How is reputation managed? The conventional wisdom relies on monitoring, repair, and rebuilding. You need to be smarter, and more proactive. Building your reputation is a daily activity, something to be maintained diligently rather than “caught up” when calamity strikes.
What are the Different Types of Online Reputation Management Services?
When it’s done properly, online reputation management touches on a number of disciplines. Some of these are items your business may have already incorporated into its online presence through digital marketing. However, there are significant differences in the ways one addresses awareness of a product or service versus a bad reputation. SEO for ORM is different than PPC, for instance, and while there is overlap with public relations, it’s very important to account for the differences between PR and ORM.
In brief, your agency should be equipped to handle the following:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) that keeps positive perceptions of your brand front and center while de-emphasizing negative comments
- Social signals, including monitoring and managing reviews, soliciting testimonials and other positive feedback, and the myriad other ways in which your business’s social media presence influences how your brand is discussed
- Online content creation that generates authoritative and impactful content that will improve perception with your audience
- Business intelligence that lets you compare your business to your competitors, and helps you stay ahead of trends that could cause your business headaches later
- Ongoing monitoring of your mentions across channels and platforms so that negative search results and other forms of negative information don’t catch you by surprise
Why Do I Need to Invest in Online Reputation Management for My Business?
According to one study, 67% of customers are influenced by online feedback. However, customer research can be fickle and half-hearted at best. Most people won’t go past the first page of search results, and a surprising 25% of people don’t go past the first organic Google result. If your website is buried several pages back—and especially if the intervening search results are largely negative—the game is over before it’s started.
A bad reputation has other costs as well. Customers aren’t the only ones with an eagle eye for negative information; job seekers are scouring LinkedIn and Glassdoor to monitor prospective employers’ reputations, and a poor brand image can be costly here as well. The Harvard Business Review states that a poor online image can cost you up to ten percent more when hiring new talent.
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Should I Hire an Online Reputation Management Agency or a Freelancer?
If you decide that ORM is a necessity for your business, your next step is to decide whether to have it taken care of by an agency or a freelancer. Each approach has its benefits and some drawbacks.
Positives and Negatives of Working With an Agency
Agencies put an entire team at your disposal. As you might imagine, this does come with a higher expense. However, agencies are by nature better-resourced, better-trained, secure, and highly focused on building long-term relationships; as such, they’re often willing to go the extra mile in ways that a freelancer may not—whether by circumstance or by choice—match.
Positives and Negatives of Freelancers
Working with freelancers does have its advantages. You’re paying for the services of one individual, rather than a team. Freelancers are specialized, and often eager to please. There’s more of a personal touch since communications aren’t mediated by an account manager. However, sourcing talent can be difficult, and retaining it can be harder still. That can leave your reputation in the hands of a part-timer who lacks the know-how for the task at hand, who hasn’t kept up with current best practices, or who views your most important asset as just one more side hustle.
Why You Should Hire an Online Reputation Management Agency
Freelancers’ specialist nature can work against you since effective ORM is a cross-discipline affair; that means either hiring a freelance who is a jack of all trades—and you know what they say about those—or hiring a team of freelancers, each with her own niche. Finding the best costs money, while managing that kind of team involves either hiring a project manager or choosing to manage the team on your own.
By contrast, an agency employs and manages a team of specialists. All of your needs are handled under one roof, with greater visibility into processes and improved accountability. There’s also a degree of continuity when dealing with an agency that can be easily interrupted if your freelancer turns out to be less than reliable. While agencies’ up-front costs may seem higher at first blush, it’s actually a far more time and cost-effective way of managing your reputation.
Hiring an Online Reputation Management Agency
Addressing bad reviews or a poor brand reputation isn’t something that’s best handled in-house. However, outsourcing review management and sourcing positive reviews is also no longer a matter of opening the Yellow Pages and making a few phone calls, but then again, neither is it a matter of Googling and praying for the best. Finding the right agency means asking the right questions.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire an Online Reputation Management Agency?
The short answer: it varies, and can range between $1,000 per month and the mid-five digits. Your price will be dictated by the needs of your business, the urgency of your situation, and the scale at which your project will unfold all play a part in pricing. It’s important to note, however, that pricing should be consistent; price fluctuations from month to month, or any lack of transparency in pricing regardless of the size or nature of your project, should be cause for alarm.
How to Find a Reputable Online Reputation Management Agency
How do you hire an effective online reputation management agency? It starts by scouring not only Google search results, but also your network. However, it doesn’t end with a list of names. What is their reputation? Answering that question means circling back to the fundamentals of online reputation management that we discussed earlier.
- What kinds of social signals accompany their business?
- What are their reviews saying, not just on their own site but also on review aggregators?
- Are they present on B2B marketplaces like UpCity, which vet talent based on quality and reputation?
- What’s the conversation around their business on social media?
- Most businesses, including reputation management companies, invest time in establishing themselves as thought leaders, so pull that particular thread and ask yourself if their particular brand of leadership is one you’re comfortable following.
In summary, one of the most important things you can do when finding an online reputation management agency is to see how they’re doing at managing their own reputation. No company will be entirely free of negative comments, but if you find your prospective agency is chronically experiencing the same problems you’re calling on them to solve, that should give you pause. Evaluate their reputation, and see what their customers have to say about the experience of working with them.
Eight Questions to Ask an Online Reputation Management Agency
You can ask any number of questions to gauge your ORM agency’s qualifications and your comfort level. A few of the most useful:
1.
What services do you offer? Online reputation management and public relations alike encompass a wide variety of services and strategies; specifics matter.
2.
How do you identify a reputation problem? Speed matters and this requires eyes across multiple platforms rather than a simple Google alert.
3.
How do you address issues when they arise? Specifics can vary from one case to the next, but no agency should be caught flat-footed when asked about their overarching approach to crisis management.
4.
How do you address negative items that affect reputation? Some negative content can be “buried” by more positive content, but never quite goes away; while removing negative items is more complex, it’s more effective where it’s possible.
5.
Are you compliant with Google’s best practices, or do you game the system? Black hat SEO tactics may work in the short term, but can severely damage your visibility and reputation longer-term; these should be avoided at all costs.
6.
How long before we see results? Any company that promises overnight success ought not to be trusted, but it’s likely that one that is vague about the timeframe is likely too inexperienced to be of much use.
7.
How can we make this process easier? From developing consistent brand guidelines to implementing a robust social media policy, ORM agencies should be able to give you tools to assist in your own success.
8.
How do you measure success? Just as your business has KPIs to determine what works, so too should your ORM agency.
Post-Hiring Expectations
You’ve hired an agency. Now what? None of us likes the sinking feeling that we’re throwing good money after bad, which makes it vital to evaluate your agency’s performance. There are a few KPIs by which this can be measured.
- Where are you showing up in the search results?
- What is your Google PageRank?
- When someone Googles your business, what’s the first thing they see?
- What impression is left by your online reviews?
- Take a look at your social media feeds; what does the conversation sound like?
- Furthermore, is your audience active and engaged in a positive way with your business?
- Would your customers recommend you to friends, family, or even strangers? Have they actively done so?
Bear in mind that your online reputation also has offline consequences. It’s equally important to look at metrics that aren’t explicitly related to your SERPs and Yelp reviews. To that end, track changes in customer satisfaction surveys, referrals (and their conversion rates), and customer lifetime value, too.
Earlier, we cited the Oracle of Omaha’s assertion that a positive online reputation is years in the making. Just as you wouldn’t build an airplane as you fly it, your reputation should not be built, or managed, by the seat of your pants. This needs to be a thoroughgoing process, something that is maintained as much as built. That process begins by identifying the top online reputation management company in your area.