Why You Need To Invest in ORM
Nowadays, customers are increasingly paying attention to a company’s reputation when making purchasing decisions. A good reputation promotes customer potential, a bad reputation nips it in the bud — that’s how it usually works.
Online reputation management is about exploiting the opportunities for promoting a company’s reputation via the Internet.
What is online reputation management?
Online reputation management (ORM) is a practice that refers to primarily about maintaining a company’s good reputation. It essentially means finding and assessing what a potential customer, reporter, or partner discovers about your brand or your product/service when they search for it on search engines.
However, ORM is not only about looking for what people are saying about your brand, but also about proactively focusing on the management of a product or brand image as well as controlling and influencing the information flow online, by addressing content which is potentially damaging to it, and using customer feedback to try to solve problems before they damage the brand’s reputation.
In other words, work is done to ensure that you, your company, your products and services appear in a good light.
While in the past reputation management was mainly done via print media, nowadays it is mostly done online. Reputation management and digital marketing are closely interwoven, because your customers share their opinions on social media, rating platforms and forums. Negative voices are spread here, and this is precisely where reputation management measures must come into play.
Why invest in online reputation management?
The World Wide Web is a comprehensive channel for companies to reach customers. As such, the channel requires a variety of marketing efforts to radiate presence with the company:
- Programming and maintaining one’s own website
- Off-Page optimization through backlink building
- On-Page optimization through Technical SEO and keywords
- Social Signals from social media
- Maintenance and care of a social media profile
In view of this, why should effort be invested in reputation management?
One of the most compelling reasons is that the mentality and moral awareness of customers have changed over the past years and decades. The further development of the Internet has favored the emergence of disruptive business models by start-ups.
As a result, due to the lowered barriers to market entry, established as well as young companies are forced to respond to the most diverse needs of customers. There is an increasing focus on the customer in individual company segments.
This is connected with the fact that a company must win the sympathy of customers. If it has a bad reputation or does not radiate a special reputation, it is more difficult to stand out from the crowd and convince potential customers of its merits.
Reputation management means that companies do not only reach customers through their own products. Rather, companies receive sympathy points through which they are positively remembered by people. This mobilizes future customer potential, and leads to increased recommendations of the company.
