Have You Ever Wondered What Other People Think About Your Business?

Your online reputation determines how others perceive your brand when they search for it online. Nowadays, digital media has revolutionized exposure, and improved access to an individual’s or a brand’s profile, by providing instant access to unfiltered information.

As such, it is crucial to understand how much of an impact your online reputation has on your business performance, and how you can actively manage it. In order to cultivate industry authority, as well as earn and sustain consumer trust, you must seriously take to developing and maintaining an excellent online reputation.

Why is Reputation Management Important to your business’ existence?

Because most consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and most of them say that online reviews heavily influence their purchasing decisions.

Who can benefit from employing ORM techniques? Short answer- anyone. Whether your online reputation is good, bad, or non-existent, chances are, your business can benefit greatly from managing its reputation on the internet.

Businesses with negative reputations can efficiently use ORM tools and techniques to help repair their image, which involves creating new, positive content that pushes negative articles farther down in search results. Whereas, companies that already have a positive online reputation can benefit from maintenance strategies like review management and monitoring.

Accurate business information, customer reviews, blog posts and social media activity all impact your business reputation. Your online presence influences consumer attitudes towards your brand and their purchasing decisions.

How do you manage your Online Reputation?

The main strategy for any ORM system is to create more positive and meaningful content with the intent of letting the positive content overpower any negative existing content. Typically, highlighting the positive content will result in pushing any negative matter down to the 2nd or 3rd page of SERPs where it’s a lot harder to find. This task can be accomplished by employing search engine optimization (SEO).

Since highlighting positive content alone does not guarantee that your potential customers will see the most representative and accurate business information, you need effective SEO to rank and feature the strengths of your brand.

When it comes to social media management, it’s important to set up profiles on all social media platforms relevant to your brand. However, perhaps the most important is to dedicate the resources to stay active on them by engaging in conversations and publishing fresh content on a regular basis.

Generally, customer engagement comes hand in hand with managing and monitoring social media profiles. Building and maintaining a positive and transparent relationship with your customers will only help your brand in the long run.

Monitor third-party websites to see if people are talking about your business. Potential customers as well as other companies look at review sites as well as any other websites or blogs where your business is being discussed. This ensures that you always know when people are talking about your business online and what people are saying.

Other tools at your disposal include directing links to URLs off your site — being affiliated with other reputable platforms or figures will significantly boost your image; getting mentions of the business or individual on third-party sites that rank highly on Google; having journalists/bloggers write about you and your products or services with brand titled names — this will also help with ranking high on search engines; using brand advertising and/or influencer marketing to nudge searchers towards different phrases etc.

What do you gain from employing ORM into your digital marketing? Short answer: credibility, trust, increased sales and an overall better business performance — companies with higher star-ratings, reviews and positive content and PR get more business.