Introduction
While searching for a hotel, a hair salon, or even a gadget, the first thing that comes to your mind is searching online. When searching for certain factors help you buy the product. Be its ratings, reviews, or services, Business Reputation Management is very important to get recognition. With an increase in the online consumer base, it has become very important to maintain a reputation of your business or brand online. About 70 % of Indians have at least once used social platforms for customer service or recommendations about their purchase.
What is Online Reputation Management?
The process of improving and managing your business’s reputation through positive rating and online reviews and immediate redressing to consumer complaints or feedback online is basically online reputation management. For the success of a business, about 54 % of brands say online reputation management is very necessary. So it is the key to make sure your brand or business is on top of its game. The positive response and presence online determine the customer behavior towards buying your brand.
For maintaining this reputation, the business needs to regularly monitor reviews and conversations about their brand. Not only this the supporting content across the internet including blogs, community forums, review sites, and social media, has to be monitored as well to get a detailed image of your business. The online reputation management tools available help in tracking and managing content which makes it easier to streamline reviews and improvise brand value.
How Online Reputation Management affects your Business?
With an increase in usage of social media and other online content for selling and buying stuff, reputation management has become an integral part of addressing a large number of audiences and building a reputation as a brand. But at times, as a brand, we might go wrong or lack behind in the race to the top. Online reputation management services are also provided at various platforms to gain reputation in an easy way. So here are certain points or factors that affect the online reputation of your business.
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- Voice of your brand: Google Analytics is a service offered by Google to track website traffic. Along with Google AdWords which is a paid platform to advertise your brand, Google Analytics helps manage and track the number of customers visiting your website. It is very crucial for your brand to gain a voice for acquiring new prospects. So the first step is online presence before maintaining an online reputation.
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- Managing feedback: The majority of customers these days use online means to review and give feedback about a brand or product. So it gets important to stay active on each platform and give the response to feedback provided by the customers. The timely response needs to be placed not just on the company websites or social media but on various review forums and portals. Distrust or sink in the sale can be the result of negative or unanswered reviews. Social media monitoring is also necessary for managing feedback about a product.
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- Responding to all comments: It is more than likely to get negative feedback or review about your product or brand. But the mistake brands do it hide or delete those negative comments to maintain a reputation. The reach and impact of customer reviews might not be limited to your page or website. So rather than covering up, the customer reviews should be answered with honesty and if needed solve the issue offline with the customer. This shows that you care about the needs of the customer and the customer might give positive about the quick response.
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- Smart Moderation: Negative comments and abusive contents are two separate things and separating the two Smart Moderation tools is used for reputation management. It removes abusive content within a minute of posting it and is a great way to filter important reviews.
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- Quick Response: With high-speed internet and fast pace lives, there is no place for slow responses and unanswered queries. The brand needs to be quick in answering or providing relevant solutions to customer’s problems. The average time taken should be 30 minutes to 1 hour. It not only helps regain the trust of the customer but also increases your brand value. The damage increases with unanswered feedback. If you’re not able to provide an immediate solution, the customer should be reassured that you’ll get in touch with them shortly. High-quality brands also use online reputation management strategies and tools for quick responses. Facebook and Twitter both provide with response badges for brand pages and accounts.
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- Getting SEO game strong: Not just getting recognition on Google results but also ensuring a positive image is made is important for brands. For this promotion, useful and positive content strategy is important and ensuring negative content is outranked after a period of time. This is a very useful step in branding
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- Be there for the customers: The social media provides a platform for interaction between customers and brand. Showing that you are active and care about your customers is a nice way to gain popularity. Responding to brand mentions and engaging with customer conversations in a healthy way is the best way to gain a loyal audience. Jet Blue responded with an online parade to a customer named Alexa Burrows, who demanded a welcome parade. These gestures in delighting customers go long way in gaining reputation on a whole other level.
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- Bring out the wittiness: A friendly interaction or a witty reply to a tweet gives the brand a whole other level recognition. Use a unique approach in responding to concerns and reviews to build your brands and differentiate yourself from competitors. Being witty and reacting in a fun way helps in online reputation management.
Along with this publishing valuable content and making better use of online reviews are other ways to gain online reputation. For bigger brands, using monitoring tools is essential in managing reputation.
So to gain value and recognition of your brand or business, online reputation management is a very important step.
