The Role of Online Reputation Management in Your Business
Nowadays, managing your brand’s reputation online has become an essential tool for any entrepreneur, whether you are a small or a big one. Anyone can benefit from managing their image online.
Prior to our current digital era, building an image used to mostly depend on word of mouth or acquaintances. At that time, only larger businesses with access to substantial marketing budgets had the ability to become household names by promoting themselves through the help of traditional media, such as television and newspapers.
Now, you are just once click away of finding anything you want just by going online. As such, it is crucial to know what customers are saying about your business and how to respond to their concerns.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) refers to managing a brand’s reputation on the internet. It is a fast-growing discipline used to shape public perception of your brand by influencing online information and increasing the visibility of positive opinions.
But why is it so important? Because most consumers search online for what people say about a brand before making any purchasing decisions. What people think of a brand affects everything about the brand. People won’t engage with your company if they don’t trust or believe in your brand’s message.
How to Manage Your Online Reputation
To help manage your online brand reputation, you can make use of various techniques and strategies, which will help you, for instance, push damaging content further down the search engine results pages by ranking your own or third-party more desirable material above it.
For instance, employing SEO (search engine optimization) will help improve the tagging and search engine optimization of company-published materials; it will make sure your content has the right keywords and headlines to give it the best chance of being seen when people search for your business.
Meanwhile, being linked with other reputable websites and organizations will not only help you establish a trustworthy image for your brand, but it will also increase your search engine ranking.
Other strategies to improve your image online includes creating engaging and fresh content and engaging on social media platforms, where you establish a connection with your customers.
Start by setting up accounts on all social media platforms relevant to your business; when it comes to social media profiles, it’s important to dedicate the resources to stay active on them by engaging in conversations and publishing fresh content on a regular basis. User-generated content, such a blog posts, websites, your own social media content, will make a huge difference in how a customer perceives you. Original content will most definitely make you stand out from your competitors.
Make sure to maintain customer engagement. Whilst sharing content or commenting on other posts/reviews, be consistent and maintain a professional and positive profile; respond in a timely manner to all comments/reviews — be it positive or negative.
You can also help your customers tell others about their experience by designing feedback surveys in a way that prompts users to post a review on social media platforms. Frequent reviews lead to better search ranking and ultimately, more traffic.
Last, but not least, monitor your results and adjust your strategies accordingly; consistency and diligence are essential to maintaining an overall positive image, and will only help your brand in the long haul.
