In today’s digital world, a brand’s reputation is its most valuable asset. Why? Your online business is based on your reputation. Your consumers heavily rely on online information and reviews to make purchasing decisions. This is why online reputation management has never increasingly become critical. Your online reputation significantly impacts your success, whether you are an influence, business owner, celebrity, public figure, or individual.
Maintaining a positive reputation has become a key challenge in today’s age of social media. For business having their profiles on social media channels, a single negative comment or review can quickly tarnish their reputation, taking years to rebuild.
Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring, influencing, and improving an individual’s or a business’s reputation on the Internet. It involves addressing not only your brand’s negative image but also your positive online presence. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the dos and don’ts of ORM to help you navigate the complexities of the digital landscape and build your positive image for excellent sales performance.
Draw a Strategy to Manage Your Reputation
Managing the online reputation is essential for your online success. Online reputation management (ORM) must be critical to your digital marketing strategy. Make sure that your content aligns with your goals perfectly. If your content perfectly reflects your brand, there will be a similarity between your marketing message and product.
One of the best strategies for managing your online reputation is hiring a team of digital marketers who keep their eyes and ears open to see and listen to people’s views about your company or product. Understanding the psychology of customers is essential for your overall sales performance.
Ask your digital marketers to regularly check your brand on social media to review what people think about your brand. This will help you draw your future marketing strategy because a good reputation strategy will include short– and long-term goals, KPIs, and activities.
Monitor What People are Saying About You
After drawing a comprehensive strategy for your online reputation, now set up Google Alerts and other essential tools to monitor your company name, services or products, and online presence. There are multiple tools that you can use for this purpose.
The most famous e-commerce websites are Social Mention, Chartmeter, and Trackur. These powerful tools instantly update you when people mention your name or product on social media.
Once you know what people are talking about you, it will be easy to draw up a future marketing strategy. Ask people for feedback and opinions and incorporate them into your marketing campaigns.
If people are talking and sharing positive things about your company, capitalize on it and spread the word through your PR. And if it’s negative, immediately draw a strategy to deal with it before it spirals out of control.
Improve Your Search Ranking
Improving search engine ranking means you will enhance your brand’s reach. A more improved ranking means more traffic to your site. Make your website robust and user-friendly by adding SEO elements like keywords, meta tags, titles, and product descriptions into your content.
I always prefer quality over quantity because Google does it. Using keywords or meta tags is strictly prohibited because Google ranks only quality content. Create your website links, make them concise, and share them on your social media profiles to redirect traffic to your site.
To bump your website to the top of the first page of Google, consider rewriting and optimizing your website copy, creating high-quality SEO-optimized blog content, polishing and optimizing social media profiles, and creating a comprehensive social media content plan. Remember, quality is the key.
Become an Authority in Your Niche
Be a leader in your field. How? Establishing your name and brand as an authority within your niche makes people trust you and have confidence in your jurisdiction. Your positive image will drive more positive reviews, content, and shared opinions about your brand and enhance your sales performance to the next level, staying ahead of the competition.
When you establish yourself as an authority in your sector, people prefer your brand over your competitors. Widely use your web, blog, and social media profiles to build your reputation.
Focus on quality and use popular platforms like Medium and LinkedIn to establish your reputation in the market. Never go with the flow; always prefer real and organic conversations, as they go much further than simply placing adverts or selling your content.
Get Expert Advice
Managing and controlling your online reputation is challenging, but you have a step further in building your positive image. Don’t jump the gun if you find harmful content about you, whether it’s videos, content, or pictures on your social media profiles.
Be a professional and be a natural when it comes to defending your name or brand. Sense should prevail over emotions, as eating with emotion can worsen things. The best strategy is to contact an online reputation expert before taking the initiative. Experts know how to handle such issues and manage your reputation more effectively.
Be Consistent and Authentic
Consistency is the key to success, and when this consistency integrates with authenticity, you have already covered half of your way. Visitors check your products, confirm their orders, and leave your site.
Are you sure they will come back to you for further shopping? Yes, they will come if they trust you because people want to trust your brand and the people behind it. Authenticity, consistency, honesty, transparency, and openness are the things that will build the most robust possible connection with customers.
Devising your marketing strategy, always underpin everything, striving for authenticity, honesty, and openness. Consistently share your brand message on your profiles, making sure your brand message perfectly resonates with your product value.
Regularly check your social media profiles and react publicly online to any problem, personal attack, or negative customer reviews professionally. People forget how they react; however, they never forget how you treat them. Therefore, be consistent, non-defensive, non-antagonistic, professional, calm, and fair to lead your sector.
Be Responsive and Engage Positively
When you go online to shop, you find many brands that reply to their customers too late or never. This thing alone is enough to tarnish your brand image. People doubt your brand if you don’t reply to them or resolve their queries on the spot.
Therefore, respond promptly and professionally to negative comments or reviews about your products. Show your customers empathy and offer solutions to address their concerns.
Ask people for feedback and demonstrate how your product is the only solution to their issues. This powerful strategy will help you build and maintain your online strategy.
Build Strong Social Media Presence
A robust online presence is essential for your brand’s success in today’s fast-paced digital world. Companies that ensure their twenty-four presence on their social media profiles enjoy far more sales. Why? Social media platforms are powerful tools for managing online reputations.
Make your profiles on the most popular and relevant social media profiles. Regularly engage with your customers by posting valuable content, responding to comments, and addressing inquiries. A robust social media presence assists you in shaping a positive reputation and building a loyal following.
Encourage Positive Reviews
Regularly interact with your customers and ask them for feedback, reviews, and opinions. Give weightage to their opinion and value their reviews. Remember, your satisfied customers can be your best advocates.
Ask your satisfied customers to share your content, comment below, and make a review video of your products. Publish their positive reviews and testimonials on popular review sites like Trustpilot. Be original, never post fake reviews, or avoid incentivizing reviews, as this could violate platform policies and damage your credibility.
Promote Positive Content
Proactively create and share positive content like blogs, news articles, reels, success stories, and positive customer reviews of your brand’s achievements. These things will build a positive image of you and your brand. Ask your followers to share your content on their social media profiles.
Never share harmful content as a public stunt to attract large customers. Optimize your website and social media profiles for positive keywords to push harmful content down in search engine results.
The Don’ts of Online Reputation Management
Never React Offensively
If you have an online business, you may encounter criticism, negative feedback, and harsh opinions. Learn the fun to respond to this negativity defensively and professionally. Remember, if you respond to negative feedback or reviews with a highly defensive or aggressive tone, public rebuttal will come back to haunt you.
People forget what they say, but they remember for a long time how you treat them. Keep in mind that even criticism isn’t immune to criticism, no matter how you could be. Therefore, while responding to negative reviews, make sure your tone is defensive, not offensive.
Be brave and show publicly that you acknowledge and accept the criticism and that you are working to resolve the issue. This will boost conversions and enhance sales through the ceiling.
Never Bring Your Personal Life into Business Social Media Channels
Separate your business profiles from your accounts, no matter who you are: a manager, a CEO, a selling agent, or a business owner. Never bring your personal life into your business social media channels.
Think carefully about your intended audience before creating and publishing your content. Keep your accounts business-oriented, and never indulge in political debates and contentious issues. Make your content engaging and balanced, reflecting your brand perfectly.
Never Engage in Online Arguments
Avoid touching sensitive topics, political or social, as they can damage your image and brand identity. Sensitive topics always result in heated debates or the exchange of harsh words, especially in public forums or social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Engaging in online arguments negatively impacts your online reputation.
Never Focus on Negative Comments Too Much
Negative reviews and comments impact your brand and tarnish your image beyond your image. You must develop a strategy to deal with such things; however, avoid any imbalance. You can tackle any issue if your approach to addressing the problem is correct and balanced.
A balanced approach is the key to your online reputation. Instead of focusing too much on negative reviews and feedback, focus on creating good stuff because good content can outweigh the bad, and this should be utilized as part of your strategy.
Never Give Up Too Soon
As I discussed earlier, managing and controlling online reputation is difficult. Establishing and managing an online reputation is a long-term investment. Never ditch your marketing strategy if you don’t see immediate returns. Fools give too early and never succeed; they remain consistent and ultimately succeed.
Ensure your reputation management strategy runs alongside your marketing strategy and is critical to your overall business plan. Remember, building an online reputation isn’t a short-term fix. ORM is all about building, constantly improving, and maintaining a successful reputation.
Never Respond Emotionally
When you hear or watch something negative about you or your company, be calm, it’s normal. All online businesses have to encounter critics at some point in their life. Therefore, when faced with harmful content such as comments and reviews, refrain from responding emotionally or defensively.
The best strategy is to take a step back, assess the situation objectively, and craft a composed and professional response because it takes years to build your image, but you need a second to ruin it.
Never Violate Copyright or Privacy Laws
Wherever you go, you must follow some rules and regulations without exception. This is with the online businesses. When posting or promoting your content, ensure it resonates with the platform’s policies where you are posting it. Remember, violating copyright or privacy laws can lead to legal repercussions, worsening your online reputation.
Avoid Fake Profiles or Reviews
Be original and be natural to be successful. Never pay for fake reviews or create fake profiles. Why? Search engines like Google rank the content as original, authentic, and relevant. Fake reviews are immediately detected as reviewing platforms such as Trustpilot are increasingly adept at identifying and penalizing such deceptive practices.
Be Inconsistent in Brand Messaging
Inconsistency leads you nowhere. If you genuinely want to lead your sector and be an authority in your area, maintain consistency in your brand messaging across various social media platforms. Why is inconsistent messaging so dangerous? It can confuse your audience and weaken your online reputation.
Conclusion
Online reputation management (ORM) is an ongoing process that requires openness, diligence, authenticity, and transparency. Establishing and managing your online reputation has always been challenging. It takes years to build a positive reputation; it takes only a few seconds to ruin it. In this blog, I have shared the dos and don’ts of online reputation management. By following these, individuals and businesses can safeguard their online reputation and maintain a positive digital image.
Inam Ullah Dar is a content writer by passion and profession. He started his journey with Motif Creatives. He primarily writes for guest post articles falling under various niches. The main area of his interest and expertise is Web design & Digital marketing. He enjoys reading and writing about healthcare, mindfulness, and well-being to educate people about being happier and lively.
