You may adore your brand and think it’s fantastic, and your girlfriends, parents, and dog may praise you. But none of this matters unless your target market is your thanksgiving dinner guest list! You’d hope that your customers share your enthusiasm for your brand, but this is rarely the case. Your brand’s online reputation is re-defined with every social media comment, review, and blog post. When someone searches for your firm on the internet, they make decisions based on the information they find.
Do you want to stay afloat and ahead of the competition and keep your business afloat? First, you must proactively manage and improve all ‘online reputation’.
There are several real and effective steps you can take to improve your internet reputation proactively, just as there are for anything else. We’ll look at the five major things you can do to ensure your brand is always displayed in the best light possible in this post.
1. Keep an eye on your online visibility and reputation.
You can see how your brand is presently perceived by monitoring it online. This is the first step: it’s tough to improve anything if you don’t know what works and what doesn’t.
What you track is determined by your brand’s presence. Are you mentioned on social media, forums, or review sites like TripAdvisor or Amazon? Do you have any idea?
Do you own a business like a restaurant, bar, or tourist attraction? It would help if you kept an eye on your online reviews. If you own a physical business location for your business, you can ensure that customers will leave reviews on sites like Reputedfirms, Yelp, and Google. You should also monitor Amazon, eBay, and other online marketplaces if you offer physical goods.
It would help if you also considered blogs and the obvious review sites. You also have to worry about forums, blogs, news sites, and social media. And you’ll need to keep track of all those chats if you want to get a good handle on your online rep.
However, your brand is constantly discussed on the internet. Therefore, trying to keep track of all of these talks on your own is futile.
Fortunately, tools, resources, and other platforms are available to help you.
Naturally, we propose that you track your brand with Mention, which allows you to track any conversation about your brand anywhere online and generate analysis and reports with just a few simple clicks.
You will be able to track everything from a single dashboard with a competent media monitoring tool, so you don’t have to go looking.
2. Have an online review strategy in place.
Online reviews are getting more common, and they’re sometimes the first thing buyers see when they Google your business.
If you wish to enhance and boost your online reputation, you’ll need a good strategy for managing your online reviews.
People rarely leave you reviews unless they’re outraged and absolutely can not wait to express their frustrations online and ask all of their friends to do the same. You don’t want these enraged customers to ruin your online reputation.
You can begin by requesting a review after a transaction or after a consumer has used your service for some time. Consider the following scenario:
After a consumer has purchased from your physical store or online shop, ask them to take a few moments to give you feedback on the things they bought and the service they received.
If you’re in the B2B space, customer success or account managers can push your customers to publish a review following a follow-up contact or after assisting them with a problem.
Customers pleased with your service or product are more likely to agree to leave you a good message if you ask respectfully and explain how much it would mean to you.
You may actively improve your online reviews in various ways, including creating official profiles, replying to reviews, closely watching and monitoring online review sites, and so on. It’s not rocket science, so give it a shot.
3. Collaborate & partner with online influencers who have a great reputation.
Influencer marketing has always been a hot topic in the industry for quite some time. Large businesses create huge ROI with beauty and fashion bloggers in the B2C sector, while the B2B world loves to hear from industry leaders and influencers who’ve made it.
Working with influential people improves your online reputation in three ways:
- It broadens your audience – “I’ve never heard of you, but I’ve heard of them.”
- It establishes trust – “I don’t know you or your brand, but I believe in them.”
- It enables cross-promotion. – ‘I like them; perhaps I’ll like you as well.’
Knowing this, we opted to include B2B marketing influencers in our videos when we started our video marketing campaign.
These videos received a lot of views, shares, and engagement on our social media channels, and they were syndicated on other sites, including Convince & Convert and Social Media Today.
The goal is to identify the right influencers who speak to the same demographic as you and have a positive online reputation. And, if you do influencer outreach well and develop long-term connections with influencers, you’ll receive powerful endorsements from these industry experts, which will help you improve your online reputation.
4. Be dependable and deliver on your promises
To build a positive online reputation, you must keep your word and be consistent in all parts of your dealings with clients, just as you would in any other human relationship.
Have you ever given a customer a discount as a way of apologising for poor service? Did you say you’d “talk to that employee” about a problem raised on Twitter?
Maintaining your internet reputation requires you to follow through on your promises and make the improvements you’ve promised.
Because everything is discussed in the open and on the internet, everyone interested may follow the tale and find out whether it ends badly (i.e. you lied or only paid lip service.)
Your marketing team may spend a billion dollars on a campaign about you being a “reputed” firm. But if your customer service is never available or treats dissatisfied customers with disrespect, no amount of influencers or marketing talk will be able to restore your internet reputation.
However, intelligent customers will notice and come back for more if you use customer feedback to make meaningful improvements in your business – and enhance your organisation.
5. Monitor the online reputation and strategies of your competitors.
People will constantly compare your online reputation to that of your competitors.
Is it more common for people to favour you or them? Customers pick your competitors over you for a variety of reasons. So what do people say when they compare your two brands?
This is all-important information that may help you improve your online reputation.
However, the most significant benefit of watching competitors is avoiding making numerous mistakes. You can either notice something they do well and copy it before repeating it, or you can learn from their mistakes.
There’s also the bonus of reverse engineering their marketing methods depending on the content they produce. Everything is public, from engagement to SEO and content; you need the right tools to uncover it.
Competitive monitoring comes in handy in this situation.
Fortunately, few items on social media, or the internet, are truly private. Therefore, you can identify and assess your competitor’s online reputation management if they market online.
What is their approach to online reviews? Do they provide customer service through social media? With whom influencers are collaborating?
Other things to consider include their websites, social media accounts, paid ad campaigns, email marketing efforts, and press coverage. In addition, you may study and improve your online reputation management plan by using every channel and area available to you.
Years to build, seconds to ruin
Your online reputation is similar to a relationship; only it involves hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it is more difficult to manage than a typical human connection, the principles remain the same. You may also use innovative platforms like Reputedfirms to take your business online presence and reputation to new heights!
Beware what others think of you, use their criticism to develop yourself, watch what others do, surround yourself with remarkable people, and be honest and reliable. It’s not easy, but it’s easy.