Having a good business reputation is crucial in today’s online era. Online reputation makes you stand out of the crowd and provides you the potential to attract and retain more customers. Retaining your customers is essential to maintain a smooth and steady business. As per the study conducted, nearly half of the brand’s market value depends upon its reputation.
Hence, it is imperative for you to manage the search results of your business and reduce the negative elements that might be spreading misleading or false content about your business. For this, you should implement a strong reputation management strategy that creates a positive image of your business and attracts more investors and customers. How can a bad reputation impact your business?
If you own a business, you should always be ready to face the risks. But many times it becomes challenging to face critical issues that might cause great harm to your business. One of these issues might include a sudden drop in reputation.
You might have spent your whole life trying to build a business. Your company might have reached a great level of success now, and suddenly your customer base drops and your business seem to get deteriorated.
Although you are delivering the same products and offering the world-class service and your customers are satisfied with your stuff, but your business started failing gradually. This may happen as one of your competitors, or some other individual is posting negative reviews on your products to weaken your online image. This is the reason behind your business failure. And many businesses globally experience such types of situations many times.
A real-life example that depicts the criticality of ORM:
There might be many reasons why people post bad reviews online. Some people resort to offensive reviews to get free products from your company. The other case can be if you have some difficult interaction with a customer, he might try to shame you publically to ooze out his frustration.
Sometimes, your business competitors post negative and bad comments to shut down your customer base and drive away your customers.
Here I am going to quote a real-life example, where a family-owned firm namely Long Jewelers based in Boston from over 100 years had a huge customer base but suddenly experienced a sharp decline of their star rating in the year 2016 after they made progress in social media presence.
The investigation was carried out by the social media manager who revealed that the reviews were posted one after another in just a few minutes and the individuals who posted reviews resided in fictitious American towns and have also destroyed other companies by giving fake comments on their websites.
How can you fix and maintain your online reputation?
The best action you can take is to implement rigorous online reputation management strategies to have a best-in-class reputation. You must have some solution in place in case your business suffers from reputation loss. Here I’ll be elaborating some basic strategies that will help maintain your reputation:
Reviews play an important part in ORM:
Claim your business on popular review sites; this will help you to become aware of the reviews posted about your business be it positive or negative. You must pay close heed to all the reviews you are getting. A review might be the first indication of a potential issue that might be coming your way.
Whenever you get a negative review, you should respond quickly. This will be the best option to neutralize the bad effect it might have caused to your reputation. Some of the most common review sites include Google My Business, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Yelp.
Establish a good reputation via your blog:
Start your blogging website where you can post numerous contents regarding any subject, be it related to your website or your personal experiences. You can resort to some prominent platforms such as WordPress or Tumblr to reap the benefits of their
Your blog doesn’t need to become in the limelight to get the attention of the huge customers. Also, you don’t have to put extra effort to make it more successful. Just creating a blogging website and updating it regularly will help in improving your online reputation. You just need to write relevant content that supports your products or the message you are trying to convey your audience.
It doesn’t matter whether people are interested in reading your blog, you are sharing something you consider valuable to your audience so gradually they will start liking your content and will ultimately become the permanent readers of your blog. This is a huge plus in your online reputation.
Google Alert is another way to stay updated with your online image:
Whenever Google indexes new information about your website or business, you will get notification by setting up Google Alerts. If the info is positive, you can celebrate it and work more effectively to maintain that, but if it’s negative, you should devise some solution and work on that. This will help you prevent loss of your online reputation that you’ve acquired so far.
Remove negative reviews without any delay:
If someone has posted bad comments on your products or website, you must try to remove those reviews asap. If these reviews are left as it is, they might prove to be very negative for your online reputation. If the bad reviews are on some other websites, you can push them by applying
If you keep on creating content, the positive content will be pushed upwards, and negatives will move downwards.
Social media is a great way to brings more customers to your brand
In today’s internet-based world, social media has become a crucial marketing tool for various businesses. Maintaining and fixing your online reputation through social media channels is essential to make your business more successful and efficient.
Make sure you are up-to-date with your online reputation and try to maintain good relations with your customers to retain them and even attract more potential ones.
Posting the most preferred content on your social media accounts will build interest of the people in your brand and will ultimately improve your reputation.
Conclusion:
Maintaining your online reputation is not a one-day task. You have to do continuous monitoring of your online image to see how your business is presented to the outside world. Resorting to the above-explained tips can help you manage your reputation, and this will obviously take some extra effort to give you long-term benefits.
online management reputation strategy for businesses
