The way customers perceive a brand often depends on what they see online. Most businesses and customers conduct research online before purchasing any products or services. So, maintaining an online reputation becomes essential for your business.
You can approach an online reputation management firm to build your online reputation. Its efforts will strengthen customer trust and translate into profits for your company. It may also help you attract talented staff or employees.
A white-label online reputation management firm helps you track, control, and manage your online reputation. It helps you earn the trust of customers and facilitates a wider audience reach for your brand.
You need to know how to choose a reputation management service. You must also understand when to hire business reputation management services and when to manage it yourself.
This article shares insights into online reputation management services. Read it to get tips on how to hire the best reputation management firm for your business.
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What is online reputation management?
Online reputation management does not consist of a few tasks that you perform to save your company’s reputation in the market. It is a strategy that involves various activities.
Some of the activities that an online reputation management firm undertakes include:
- Observing the good and bad things being said about your brand, products, or products/services
- Repairing a damaged online reputation through careful strategy-making
- Responding to customer issues and complaints immediately will prevent them from damaging your company’s reputation
- Monitoring brand mentions in social media posts and reviews
- Initiating branding efforts to build a powerful brand image
To manage your online reputation, you can use Online Reputation Management (ORM) tools, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and more. You must optimize your content to present your brand in the best way possible. Competitor analysis is also essential to analyzing your brand’s positioning in the market.
These days, brands use social listening tools to monitor their brand image, as manual tracking of multiple channels and online communities is almost impossible. These tools help them track customer conversations. They also detect negative emotions that can lead to a social media crisis.
Online review management companies use these sophisticated tools to track customer sentiment. You can also collaborate with these companies if you need professional reputation management services.
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The importance of online reputation
Big brands understand the importance of online reputation and spend millions to create a powerful online presence. They hire experts to handle their social media accounts and pages. Online reputation matters for these reasons:
1. Viral posts can damage your brand’s reputation
Small events that occur on social media or in your retail outlets can affect your brand’s reputation. If your support executives misbehave with customers, they can upload the audio or video recordings on social media. You must track such issues and provide your customers with a satisfactory resolution.
2. Customers are vocal about their experiences
Customers, especially younger audiences, are quite vocal on social media. They express their negative and positive experiences through their accounts.
You must keep an eye on the customer’s post and help them out of a tricky situation. If you provide a quick resolution and show that you care for them, converting agitated customers into loyal users is possible.
3. Analyzing competitors is essential
Online reputation management is all about tracking customer sentiments and using them to outperform your competitors. It does not mean that you must track only conversations related to your brand.
Tracking conversations related to your industry will reveal the pain points of your customers. By addressing their pain points, you can meet their expectations and earn their admiration.
Online reputation management firms take care of your online image by averting a crisis. They also take the necessary steps to improve your online presence and reputation.
Do you know: 7 Essential Elements of Online Reputation Management
Signs that you need professional ORM services
It is essential to detect signs that can lead to a social media crisis. Early detection of an online crisis is possible if you have subscribed to ORM services. These are some signs that highlight the need for professional reputation management services:
1. Negative search results
When potential customers check out your services or products online, they must find positive mentions of your brand. If the negative reviews are prominent, they might think of buying from other brands.
People use the Internet to search for services/products before checking individual sites and apps. Before downloading an app, most users check the reviews posted on the Google PlayStore or App Store.
You cannot stop the negative reviews from appearing. Yet, hiring a reputation management agency will help you suppress negative conversations or posts. They will highlight positive views and posts to improve your brand’s online reputation.
2. Damaging online content
Some disturbing content or acts done by your employees or support service executives can damage your online reputation. News articles, misleading information provided through blogs, and damaging content posted by influencers can also lead to a similar crisis. Without the assistance of professional reputation management services, it may be hard to detect such content.
An ORM firm will try to remove such online content from social media. You can provide resolutions to the customers and request that they remove their posts from social media. Sometimes, you might need to delete some posts or blogs from your social media account before they damage your reputation.
An online reputation management firm also provides service or product-related recommendations based on their analysis. As a result, they also help you prevent the occurrence of negative news or mentions in advance.
Read more about: 7 Step Process to Do Online Reputation Management For A Brand
3. Persistent reputation issues
You may prevent negative news or content from spoiling your reputation once in a while. Yet, preventing online reputation damage could be tough if the issues keep surfacing. This is why you need an online reputation firm. They help you focus on your core business operations by taking care of negative news and events.
If the reputation issues are successfully resolved in a timely and transparent manner, it is a sign that the online reputation management firm is doing its job well. These firms also suggest ways to prevent such issues from appearing frequently on social media.
4. Lack of time and resources
Billions of customer conversations happen every minute on social media. Tracking each conversation and analyzing the negative customer sentiments is difficult and time-consuming.
Hire an online review management company if you do not have enough time and resources to handle your online reputation. These companies have access to the latest tools and techniques.
By using these tools, they track all the customer conversations. Specific keywords and search queries can be used to track the conversations and retrieve insights from them.
The online reputation management firm will start observing brand mentions, stories, blogs, etc. It will give you enough time to focus on your core competencies.
5. Complex online reputation challenges
Online reputation management involves many complex tasks and challenges. The process starts with tracking the sources of negative comments and mentions.
After finding the source, the online review management companies determine whether the source is genuine or fake. Sometimes, fake brands imitate your products/services and mislead users. The lack of quality in their services/products can hamper your brand’s image.
Verifying genuine conversations is complex but an essential aspect of ORM. Only professionals can handle such tasks and keep your brand image clear and consistent.
Let’s learn: What Are the Advantages of Having a Good Online Reputation?
Benefits of hiring professional ORM services
Hiring a reputation management agency known for offering professional services offers many benefits. Only professional reputation management services can save your online reputation in different situations. Here are the key benefits of hiring professional ORM services:
1. Expertise and experience
There is no use in hiring a reputation management agency that is going through a reputation crisis on social media. You must research how to find a reputation management agency on the Internet.
An agency with a good online reputation is likely to have the expertise and experience to resolve complicated issues. It tracks the controversial links that can damage your online reputation. After that, it takes the necessary steps and actions to prevent them from spoiling your reputation further.
Collaborate with the marketing agency that is active on the social media apps that matter most for your business. If it is not active on social media, it won’t be able to take the essential steps on time. Transforming your online image will be difficult with such agencies.
2. Tailored strategies and solutions
Hire a reputation management agency that has tailored strategies and solutions to revamp your online image. If your social media image is facing an emergency, you won’t have the time to figure out a solution. Only predefined solutions can protect you during such testing times.
The agency you hire should use automated tools to detect and manage negative conversations. ORM professionals have years of experience when it comes to acquiring customer insights. With their dedicated support team, you can seek immediate resolution to your queries.
Their advanced technologies improve your online presence by redefining how your brand looks and reads. They have access to privacy protection, content suppression, and other tools and services. These tools play a significant role in protecting and managing your brand’s online reputation.
Here is the: 5 Step Process to Protecting Your Online Reputation
3. Continuous monitoring and damage control
Choose powerful ORM services to handle your online reputation. Their social listening and AI tools automate the processes of monitoring and damage control. They provide you with a special ORM dashboard. It helps you manage the conversations happening on several social media channels through a single interface.
4. Proactive Reputation Management
Proactive reputation management is perhaps the most critical aspect of ORM. It involves constant monitoring of review websites, social media, and online communities.
Bad reviews or content posted with your brand name, product, or logo will be immediately tracked via social listening tools. Preemptive action will be taken to either suppress, delete, or modify the content as per your brand’s requirements.
The use of SEO-based ORM, review-based ORM, social media ORM, and content-based ORM makes this possible.
Learn more about: What Are The Different Types Of Online Reputation Management?
How to choose the right ORM service provider?
By now, you have understood why you need an online reputation firm. Now, let’s check out how to find the best reputation management agency to manage your online reputation:
1. Assess their expertise and track record
Find a reputation management agency that uses ethical methods for managing online reputations. The agency must have a proven track record of repairing brands’ damaged online reputations.
It must be able to build effective content marketing strategies to improve your online visibility. The agency must have expertise in SEO-based ORM to suppress negative reviews and increase positive reviews.
It must track social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to grow your brand’s online visibility. It must have the necessary expertise to handle Public Relations (PR) issues. Also, it must employ the right tools to acquire customer reviews and data.
2. Understand their approach and strategies
Understand the approach and strategies that an online reputation management firm uses. It will reveal key details regarding its expertise. Choose a company that does not use unethical methods to remove negative content from the Internet.
You cannot force customers to delete negative comments by threatening them. It will malign your reputation and lead to a much worse crisis. So, working with agencies that use such an approach is a big no!
Consider the key factors: Choosing The Right Online Reputation Expert
3. Evaluating their tools and technologies
The ‘Internet’ is not limited to a few social media networks. New social media apps and networking sites surface every year. So, brands must leverage the latest tools and technologies to track customer data through these sites.
While evaluating their tools and technologies, check whether they use Artificial Intelligence (AI), social listening, and other latest innovations. Tracking data via these tools will be much easier as compared to traditional data-tracking methods.
Also, these tools help you respond to customer queries and complaints in real time. So, working with these tools gives you a clear advantage over other brands.
Find the professional reputation management services that top brands use. You can either adopt these tools or hire a developer to develop similar tools on a lesser budget.
4. Consider cost and budget
Calculate how much of your budget you can allocate to ORM from your total marketing budget. You can allot a substantial part of your budget to these services if your brand’s reputation is not up to par. If you have a strong online reputation, you can focus more on promoting your products or services.
You can manage the cost of ORM services by adopting a single platform that can manage all your requirements. This platform must have capabilities to manage user data. It must also allow you to analyze the data and draw meaningful conclusions.
Find a customer experience management suite that allows you to track and evaluate customer data. It must also possess social listening and other analytical capabilities. By using such a platform, you can minimize your overall marketing costs.
5. Check client reviews and testimonials
To determine the best online reputation management firm, you can check the reviews and testimonials of the clients that use them. It will give you an idea of their services. By comparing their services with those of other ORM firms, you can determine the best online review management companies that suit your requirements.
Here are the: 5 Major Factors that Impact Our Online Reputation and How to Improve It
Conclusion
These were some key insights for hiring business reputation management services. We hope that you have understood all the tips for hiring the best reputation management firm for your brand.
Platforms like Konnect Insights help you avail yourself of the best ORM services at cost-effective rates. Konnect Insights helps you track online conversations in real time.
Konnect Insights is an omnichannel customer experience management suite. We are integrated with Business Intelligence (BI) tools and have an intuitive dashboard to manage customer conversations. You can handle all your customer data on a single platform by subscribing to our services.
By analyzing customer insights, you can make immediate decisions and protect your company from an online crisis. Check out our website today and learn more about how this customer experience management platform can help you.
