The Best Online Reputation Management Guide 2022

Does your company have a reliable online reputation management strategy? An unhappy client’s complaints can be resolved quickly if he/she makes a call or email enquiry.

However, many are those that leave negative reviews about the business online, raising the risk of damaging the reputation that you have worked so hard to build. This is why your company or business requires an elaborate and professional online reputation management (ORM) to deal with such challenges. 

This post is a comprehensive guide to online reputation management in 2022. Keep reading to learn more about ORM, including its definition, benefits, and tips that your company should employ. 

Understanding Online Reputation Management 

Online reputation management (ORM) refers to the control or work that helps to define how your company/brand is portrayed online. It is a crucial aspect of the current digital age because more people are opting to work, shop, and do most of their things online.

So, whether it is on social media, websites or search engines like Google, it is prudent that your company portray a positive image. 

Primarily, ORM targets responding to and undoing negative feedback that might have hit the market and concerns your brand.

The negative sentiment or review might come from a customer who was not satisfied by the services offered, misinformation, or incorrect posts designed by competitors to soil your brand. You cannot let such negative feedback pull down a brand that took years to conceive and build.

This is where online reputation management comes into play. Below are some crucial statistics about online reputation management that you should know before developing a system to monitor or hire professional services. 

• About 25% of an enterprise’s market value depends on its online reputation. 
• Approximately 54% of consumers have clear opinions on whether they would want to see a change in how companies engage them. 
• Fifty positive reviews of your product can push click-through rates by up to 266%.
• Approximately 80% of customers rely on information gathered from search engines to determine whether to buy from a business/company. 

Special Benefits of Online Reputation Management for Your Organization 

Online reputation management is very important for any type of organization, be it a school, real estate company, e-commerce enterprise, hospital, or consultancy that entails purchasing a luxury or necessity. Check out the benefits to anticipate from good online reputation management for your brand. 

• Helps to Increase Online Visibility 

With good online reputation management, you are sure of your company or organization staying visible organically. This is made possible through positive online interaction and publishing quality content that portrays the company in a positive way on the internet.

This can help your business to get a string of positive reviews on different online platforms, such as social media and company’s website.

Remember that at any moment, you should always target making your company’s online visibility and image interesting to help drive more traffic and grow your customer base.

• Online Reputation Management Implies You are Marketing the Company Correctly 

As we pointed out already, customers are always searching for real and organic interactions with the brands of interest. Online reputation seeks to provide this interaction by making clients feel connected and part of your brand. The efforts you make, whether it is creating content or direct interactions with clients, will leave an imprint that is crucial for your company’s marketing. 

To make online reputation management even more impactful, you might want to include it as a part of the marketing team. This implies that as different marketing campaigns, from SEO to social media strategies, continue driving traffic and sales, any negative review or sentiment that can slow down growth is quickly handled by the ORM. Therefore, ORM is an important pillar for successful online marketing. 

• Good Online Reputation is Crucial if You Target to Rank at the Top of SERPs

When visitors search for a product, brand or service online on a search engine like Google, most of them only check the first page of the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Because your ranking depends on the reviews that clients or people provide, you cannot afford to let them slide into the negative end. Indeed, all your marketing efforts can quickly be watered down if the negative feedback goes unaddressed or becomes persistent.

This is why you should have a responsive and articulate ORM system for your company to address issues from customers. 

Good online reputation management helps to clear issues by your clients or people and transform them into brand ambassadors.

This implies that although a client might have raised an issue about product delivery delays, online reputation management seizes the opportunity to demonstrate that the company values clients so much by addressing the issue immediately.

With more positive feedback, reviews, and engagements, your brand is sure to enjoy a better ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). Remember to also work on other aspects of technical SEO to maintain the ranking at the top positions of SERPs. 

• Building Trust and Raving Customers 

To grow your business, you require customers’ trust in your brand. Well, developing a high-quality product or service is only one part of this journey, but you have to do more by engaging clients online and ensuring they have positive reviews.

Online reputation management helps to identify, respond and prevent/ reduce the impacts of negative sentiments about your company. This can help to build public trust and transform clients into raving fans. 

Tips for Outstanding Online Reputation Management in Your Company 

The following are the top six strategies that you should employ to maintain a positive online presence for your company.

• Review and Broaden Your Online Presence 

The modern customers, partners, suppliers, or other stakeholders are very different from those of the past. Before making the decision to buy or associate with your brand, they do some analysis of your profiles and sentiments from other clients online.

If you do not have an online presence or negative feedback is extensive, there is a risk of losing to more vibrant businesses/ brands. Therefore, you should embrace multiple tools for online reputation management to grow your brand’s digital footprint. 

 Some of the top platforms to consider for the fast growth of your digital footprint are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Remember to also carefully review the data from the platforms because they work differently depending on the issue at hand and targeted clients.

For example, LinkedIn data analysis shows that it works best when targeting business-to-business connections or professional clients. However, other platforms like Snapchat and TikTok might be a better pick if you are interested in younger demographics. 

Always remember that no matter the platforms that you select for online reputation management, it is always a good idea to carry out progressive monitoring and regular reviews and determine the effectiveness of the selected strategy. 

• Manage Your Social Media Accounts Prudently

While having a presence on different platforms is crucial, simply opening accounts or profiles is not enough for building a good reputation.

What is even more important is that you should be able to manage these accounts to drive a high organic following. This calls for the creation and publishing of relevant and interesting content, which will ultimately help to boost engagement and create opportunities for interaction with potential clients.

With such top-notch content, it is possible to easily outrank negative sentiments that might come your way. 

 So, make sure to include comprehensive keyword research and the creation of top content as part of the reputation management for your company. This is never easy because the process can be lengthy and requires a lot of expertise in digital marketing.

To maintain a consistent flow of high-quality content that will yield quality leads, drive traffic, grow sales and improve online reputation, consider working with an agency of experts. 

• Generate and Promptly Respond to Online Reviews 

About 86% of people check online reviews for businesses before making the big decision to buy a product or service. Therefore, you should target to ensure there is a stream of public reviews that clients can read to make their decisions to buy from your company.

One way of generating these reviews is by asking clients for their reviews after buying your products or interacting with the brand. 

Once you get reviews from clients, online reputation management requires you to identify and correctly respond to the negative ones.

You cannot ignore these negative sentiments because they can easily shift or shrink your traffic and distract clients. Therefore, you have to monitor and reach out to those giving negative reviews to offer an apology for the negative experience. Most reviewers are willing to update their negative reviews and provide a higher rating. 

Note that online reputation management is not just about making the clients change their minds. In addition, ORM should work with other departments to ensure that issues are addressed comprehensively.

If the client is concerned about poor packaging, ensure it is reviewed so that other clients get satisfied. 

• Protecting and Motivate Your Employees

For businesses that offer legal, health and beauty-related services, among others services, it is not uncommon to get clients asking about the specific “person” to go to rather than the “business.”

For example, a customer might talk more about the doctor who attended to him than the specific hospital. If your business falls in the category of such industries, having a good social media presence for the employees and motivating them can be an excellent way of handling online reputation. 

The direct connection helps to support clients to develop even deeper connections not just with the respective employees but also with the entire company. Remember that even with such connections, it is prudent to ensure the feedback is monitored and negative reviews addressed immediately. 

1.  Update Your Blog Regularly 

Blogging is a very reliable method of online reputation management. It provides brands with an opportunity to showcase their expertise in the field. It helps to give answers to your followers not just about the product under consideration, but the entire industry.

Therefore, providing information to fill possible gaps allows clients to get the answers they might need instead of providing negative feedback.

For example, blogging can demonstrate a company’s commitment to customer value by showing how to deal with things like delivery of damaged items or wrong products. 

When you blog regularly, the new content can come in handy in boosting local SEO, customer support rating, driving traffic, click-through rates, and improving ranking on SERPs. Remember to start by studying your targeted clients and their needs. Then, create posts that answer their issues and demonstrate your product is the best. 

• Always Avoid Online Arguments 

As we have demonstrated in this post, negative feedback can originate from anywhere and rapidly erode the credibility of your company.

Whether it is your company that had issues that resulted in negative feedback or the client simply put forth a false claim, it is prudent to avoid starting online arguments. If you become emotional, there is a danger of causing more reputational damage. 

The best way to handle issues related to arguments is to steer the client offline and fix the challenge. If you establish that your business regularly gets drawn into digital disputes, it is prudent to look for a professional strategy to handle such situations.

Use an Agency of Experts for Outstanding Online Reputation Management 

The strategies we have demonstrated above are very important, but executing them is never easy for most companies. Often, managers find it challenging because a lot of expertise and time are required. For example, crafting top-notch and regular content for a monitoring and positive online reputation is never easy.

The best method to get it right is by working with an agency of experts. Check out some of the benefits to anticipate for working with professionals: 

• The experts have the required skills and experience to handle negative feedback online. 
• Having helped other companies in the past, professionals in online reputation management can easily tell you the strategies that work and those that do not.
• Because of the extensive work involved, working with an agency of experts allows you to focus on the core work of growing revenue as experts handle ORM. 
• The experts can teach your staff important skills about digital marketing and online reputation management. 
• Experts guarantee you not just a better reputation but improved ranking and click-through rates. 

No matter the type of business you run or the industry, it is prudent to maintain a positive online reputation because the bulk of stakeholders use it to make buying decisions.

Remember that online reputation management should be continuous because you can never know when the next negative review or misconception about your brand will hit the internet. Consider working with the best online reputation management agency for better results.