The perception customers have for a brand matters!
What one customer says about a brand is read, heard, and trusted by other customers online. It is like a vicious Chinese whisper game, wherein one person speaks about a brand, and the others merely follow.
But why?
Let’s understand it with an example.
Suppose you are looking for a charger online. Now, you’re already overwhelmed with so many manufacturers in the market. So, you start researching brands. And how do you do so? Via the internet. You read everything written about chargers online, right from their specifications, to their usage and whether your online group recommends it. Apart from all its product and monetary details, one of the most reliable search sources is the reviews posted online. You read them, and based on that, you choose one amongst the tough contenders.
Wait, what just happened?
Well, you believed some anonymous review from a buyer that you’ve never met or known and based your purchase decision on it. Now, it doesn’t matter if that charger is, in fact, a good buy, but it did suffer thoroughly due to one bad review, losing all its sales and customers.
Now, this is just for one person!
Think about how billions of internet users worldwide practice the same process.
Not only do negative reviews affect sales and revenue, but most importantly, it impacts consumer trust and credibility in the market. No matter what marketing gimmick this product launches now, it cannot reverse its fallen credit.
That is how much online reputation management matters.
Even a single adverse comment ruins a product’s chances of making it to the top market position. Ultimately, that product loses everything, and its competitors take it over.
Online reputation makes or breaks a brand!
Ever wonder why big enterprises hire top-class PR companies and why PR companies always try to keep customers happy and satisfied?
Yes, you guessed it right!
To prevent any online reputation mishap and to stop any online crisis that, overnight, destroys years of brand recognition and supremacy.
Regardless of a startup or a conglomerate, investing in online reputation management services is a must. It is a path that businesses have to walk on, maintain, and invest in if they want to stay in the market for decades and centuries.
But why?
Because online reputation management proactively influences the information published about your business online, assuring what people read is nothing but the best about you.
Top-notch online reputation management companies practice several techniques and strategies to hide damaging and harmful content and place positive and constructive comments stay at the top.
ORM isn’t about filtering negative comments and reviews or managing content that appear on SERPs but a combination of both. It is everything that leads to a healthy brand image online and engages customers in a rewarding experience. It includes monitoring online reputation, addressing content requirements, respond to customer feedback, and employ strategies to safeguard a brand’s reputation.
How does online reputation management works?
In a nutshell, online reputation management affects customer impressions about your business and the content displayed online.
While it might seem an easy thing to accomplish; in reality, it involves several platforms, tactics, and tricks. Online Reputation Management functions as per the PESO Model, including aspects like paid media, earned media, shared media, and owned media.
Your actions insinuate conversation on platforms, establishing your authority on social media, Google, forums, and other channels. So, the better you command the channels., the more are the profits earned, and the better is the ROI.
Paid
media:
Paid Media refers to social media activity involving payments to improve the discoverability quotient of your brand. These include Google Ads, influencer promotions, sponsored posts, and social media ads. Since these are paid for, you control how and in what manner your ads appear.
Earned Media:
Earned Media talks about free brand promotions on external platforms. Since these unpaid, such mentions occur when a brand offers impeccable services and products. It includes external articles, blogs, vlogs, online forums, press releases, and third-party listing sites like BBB, Glassdoor, Yelp, Google My Business, Angie's List, etc.
Earned media results in publicity, improving your brand’s persona, and influencer engagement rate. It turns detractors into loyalists, which turn to brand advocates.
Shared Media:
Shared media details all those channels that represent an online version of your business. It's shared space will:
Evaluates mentions that negatively portray your business
Check reviews and testimonials that might impact purchasing decisions made by potential customers
·Addresses complaints and low-star ratings
And enhance your brand image on online media
Owned media:
It refers to your website and blogs – the properties that are in your control. In owned media, you can publish information only after the owner's permission.
So, what do you need to manage here?
It's ranking.
Your website’s ranking deciphers your brand’s reputation, impacting a customer’s perception. So you need to monitor and manage its online stand to make sure you are on the right track. Moreover, you need to practice agile and extensive online reputation management service so that search engines capture nothing but the best about you.
The top online reputation management trends to follow
Overcoming all barriers and obstacles., online reputation management made it to 2021.
However, for online reputation management companies., 2020 was a rather pleasant year since brands globally comprehended the power of online mediums, and their magnanimous role in scripting a positive and growing online image.
While the online channels present ample opportunities, it also poses problems and drawbacks. However, just like 2020, content plays a gamut role in 2021’s online reputation management services as well.
The central idea behind ORM trends is to inform brands about upcoming drifts in the market and prepare them for it. Customers will exceedingly demand satisfactory services, and brands, to stay competitive, will have to bow down to their patronage.
That said, the following are top online reputation management trends to keep an eye out for in 2021.
Trend 1: Growth in influencer marketing is certain
When notable social media share their views about products and services, it humanizes a brand.
Despite the prevalent pandemic conditions, influencers will continue to function as a valuable asset for companies. More and more online reputation management services will concentrate on influencer marketing in terms of efforts and budget allocation, enhancing a brand’s overall credibility with the online audience.
Therefore, online reputation management strategies would focus more on collaborating with social media influencers for better exposure and community building. Moreover, such people have massive social media following, thereby spreading the good word about a brand amongst their followers.
Influencer marketing adds a touch of authenticity and genuineness to a brand. It builds a community for your product online comprising of people who vouch for it. This way, the online audience relates better with your products, positively impacting ROI and sales.
Trend 2: Video marketing garners customer interests
And thanks to the powerful technologies that advise us with content similar to our interests and history, consuming video content has become our favorite pastime.
That said, short-format videos possess limitless power, not just for brand marketing but for changing customer perception. With smartphones and faster internet speeds in the picture, there is no doubt that consumers will squander video content quickly, especially when they strike a chord with our emotional level.
Featuring videos on social media channels and online forums will uplift your online reputation management services to the next level.
The magnetic and instant appeal of visual content is a powerful online reputation management trend in 2021. Therefore, brands investing in video marketing on social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc., will connect better with their target audience.
Trend 3: Empathy is the best policy, at least for ORM
For online reputation management, empathy is a core business value.
Why?
Because in the modern digital market, offering empathetic services could be a key differentiator from your competitors.
True that the best visuals represent your products and services in the brightest light; empathy shows that you care about your audience more than anything else. And the latter is what will help you win the online reputation race.
That said, online reputation management involves replying to customer reviews, testimonials, and comments with care and concern. It shows how much, as a brand, you prize your customers and are willing to necessary actions for them.
It allows you to facilitate an intimate connection with your customers, which will eventually help you gain followers, customers, and loyalists.
Trend 4: Practice omnichannel online reputation management
The art of online reputation management isn’t limited to just social media but also includes review sites, e-commerce websites, press releases, blog posts, etc.
So, if you presume that managing your reputation only on social media will do the trick for you, let's clarify it for you, it won’t!
Since your online reputation does not encompass just one medium, it becomes mandatory for brands to adopt an omnichannel approach, one that directs their efforts to all the necessary online platforms.
Talk strategies on an omnichannel level, study a platform's uniqueness, review its audience, script a rewarding marketing strategy for all such channels, and combine them for an ultimate online reputation management solution.
Remember, the more agile and dynamic your approach is, the better you will adapt to the wayward market needs, and the more you will enrich your online reputation.
Trend 5: Weave the potential of ORM tools
Your brand’s
reputation affects your public image. Customers won’t buy your products if they
feel you’re unreliable. Or worse, if they don’t trust you.
So, never let that happen.
But does this mean you have to scroll through thousands of comments and mentions every day and filter them?
Neglecting the intrigues of the idea, you practically cannot do that.
So, what to do then?
This is where online reputation management tools come into play. These tools help you take care of your brand picture and protect it from being tampered with or tarnished.
But which tools to use?
The alleys of online reputation management are flooded with tools that can perform all sorts of modern researches and derive actionable insights.
Let’s cover a few of them.
Reputology:
If you want to manage your online
reputation, this is a tool for you. It specializes in tracking reviews so that
you can find and monitor brand mentions all across the web. The best aspect
about this tool is its location specificity.
That means you can check the reviews and ratings of your store with competition for each location separately. If Shop A across downtown receives 3 stars and Shop B 5 stars, Reputology will decipher what causes such changes and respond to reviews from within the platform.
This way, you can understand the reason behind bad reviews and act via the Reputology platform.
Mention:
Mention is for online reputation
management, what Google Alerts is for digital marketing. It delivers alerts in
real-time, owing to its robust and comprehensive analytics. The tool also
allows you to compare your brands with the competitors based on brand voice,
sentiment, influence, and reach contexts.
Through this tool, brands can know what customers say about their products, and when they say it, empowering them to start making smarter reputation management choices.
Mention helps brands know what people feel about them, and such insights are a valuable perk for online businesses.
ReviewTrackers:
This tool is all about tracking online
reviews on social sites like Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Grubhub,
FourSquare, etc. You’ll be surprised to know that ReviewTrackers covers more
than a hundred review sites, allowing brands to monitor their mentions and
comments on all the leading review sites.
Moreover, this tool emails your attention-seeking reviews so that you don’t have to check the app every time. It also analyzes ongoing customer feedback and provides you with insights that matter for your business.
Trend 6: Modern technologies like
Artificial Intelligence offer a remedy
Brands via social
listening; can track, analyze, reply, and converse with their social media
audience. Social listening has made it possible for them to engage better with
their customers and provide them what they need and love. It enriches business
data with insightful customer details that helps brand improve their services.
When correctly implemented, social listening functions as a crucial component,
a must-have weapon.
Now, you have a delicious menu, and you
feel very positive about it. So, to know more about what other customers sense,
you start to listen more to their conversation. You listen to people loving one
specific recipe over the other, and a third recipe receives some constructive
criticism. Based on what you’ve heard, you start implementing necessary
changes.
Several online reputation management companies employ social listening tools to decipher online mood and design more personalized content. In the long run, it improves your ROI, sales, and revenue figures.
Trend 7: Search engine optimization will galvanize online reputation management
So, how is online
reputation management and SEO linked?
We all know that reviewing companies, services, and products is very common these days. Customers, when frustrated with a product, add a review about it online. Such actions become a concern when several customers follow this trail.
Now, this is where review signals enter the scene.
Suppose you’re interacting with a new client, and you want to check whether they are genuine or not.
So, what do you do?
You Google their name.
The links and information that appear on the first pages of Google are what your potential partners perceive about you. If the details displayed are negative, you might not do business with that client.
Understood why following up with SEO-driven content is imperative for online reputation management?
SEO-driven content, disguised as review signals, is the content published about you on websites and search engine results pages.
As per SEO tools like MOZ, local search ranking factors are influenced by review signals, with the latter being the fifth most necessary search engine ranking factor. These review signals comprise testimonials, online reviews, third-party reviews, etc.
And, as we all know that 99% of customers review user-generated content before sealing a purchase, investing in an SEO-powered ORM strategy becomes a necessity.
Therefore, merely working on online reviews is not enough if you don't follow effective SEO tactics to improve SERP ranking.
Conclusion
Brands always need to remember one thing, trends might come and go but what stays are genuine products and services and happy customer reviews. If you offer customers what they need and are looking for, nobody could ever tamper with your online reputation.
However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t carry out the necessary precautions.
The above trends will help you ace online reputation management services. So, pack all learnings of the previous year, and carry this bag full of opportunities and possibilities for online reputation management in 2021.
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