Online reputation management (ORM) is necessary whether you're a one-person start-up or an industry giant. After all, your online reputation is what could make or break your business.
Create a positive reputation and your business can rapidly grow to dominate a target market and maintain trust with customers.
Fail to manage your reputation online and the average consumer won't connect with your brand.
But how do you create a positive online reputation and maintain it long into the future?
This guide explains what reputation management is all about and shows you the strategies required to keeping a strong online presence.
We'll look at how you can present a positive image across multiple platforms without diluting your impact.
What is Reputation Management?
Before we look at the tactics large and small businesses use to manage their reputation online, it's important to define what we're talking about here.
Brand reputation management is about monitoring, managing, and taking specific action to improve how people see you. The aim is for your business's brand to be accurately and positively represented.
You want to tell the truth about your brand, highlight the good stories, and ensure the media does the same. This way you can build a consistent, loyal relationship with your audience.
This forges trust in an age of skepticism and brings you closer to potential customers.
Our guide looks at the basics of online reputation management, the best practices for growing a good reputation, and how to tackle any signs of a negative reputation.
We'll also share a few tricks of the trade to make the process of brand reputation management easier.
We're talking tried-and-tested reputation management strategies and reputation management software that could dramatically decrease your workload.
In this article:
Fundamentals of Online Reputation Management
Assessing Your Current Online Reputation
Developing an Online Reputation Management Strategy
Content Creation and Management
Customer Experience and Review Management
Enhancing Social Media Presence
Digital Marketing and SEO
Proactive Monitoring and Response Planning
Measuring the Impact of Reputation Management
The Last Word on Online Reputation Management
Fundamentals of Online Reputation Management
The idea of online reputation management is to monitor and improve your brand's image across the digital sphere. There are various strategies and techniques that can help you shape public perception while mitigating potential risks.
Why go to all this effort? Well, because your brand's online image has a significant impact on your bottom line.
If online reputation management is new to you, then here are the three key practices that you'll need to focus on:
Monitoring: Keeping an eye on what's being said about your brand online, across social media, in the media, and on review sites.
Addressing: Responding to both positive stories and negative comments to make it clear that you're listening and learning from feedback, whether it's good or bad.
Promoting: Sharing content that shows your brand in the best light and shows what you do best.
Core Principles of Reputation Management
Successful reputation building begins with some core principles. This goes beyond the three key practices we mentioned above. These principles are what all businesses need to follow if they are to succeed in reputation management:
Transparency: Be honest about your business practices by sharing some behind-the-scenes details. Encourage customers to share their experiences, both positive and negative. This helps create trust and build brand loyalty among your customer base.
Customer engagement: Respond promptly to customers who reach out to you, whether they're offering praise or expressing dissatisfaction. You might need to do this on a social media site, or create a direct communications channel (such as email). This will lead to improved customer satisfaction and a stronger online image.
Content consistency: Share relevant, high-quality content across your channels. Great content will form the basis of your brand identity and enhance your credibility in your industry. Remember, most people don't own your product or use your service, but they will form a view of your brand based on your content.
Monitor and analyze: Continuously track your online presence, including social media, news platforms, and review sites, and analyze the feedback to make necessary improvements. This assessment will guide your ORM strategy and help you stay ahead of potential issues.
It's vital when setting out an online reputation strategy that you consider these principles and adhere to them. They can act as your fundamental pillars that shape your brand going forward.
Assessing Your Current Online Reputation
Now that we've covered the basics of online reputation management, let's look at how you can find out where your current reputation stands.
Keep in mind that most of the following tasks can be automated with the help of social listening tools, such as CisionOne.
Analyzing Online Reviews and Feedback
To assess your current online reputation, first examine online reviews and feedback.
Think about the review sites where customers might have reviewed your products or services. These might vary depending on the type of business. For example, a beauty brand might have reviews on their own website, as well as across pharmacy websites and Amazon.
You could then organize this information into a table. That way you can easily compare the number of positive reviews and negative reviews. (This might be easier for a small or local business with fewer reviews, while a larger company might choose to use social media listening software instead.)
Look for patterns within the feedback, such as common complaints or praises, and consider these when strategizing improvements to your brand's reputation.
Monitoring Social Media Mentions and Engagement
Next, monitor your social media presence on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Try creating a list of relevant keywords related to your brand and products, then use social media monitoring tools to track mentions, shares, and engagement level for each keyword.
Use the results to track the performance of your content and identify opportunities for increasing brand awareness and engagement.
Measuring Brand Sentiment Across Relevant Platforms
Customer sentiment focuses on how people feel about your brand and products.
While this might be easy to judge when there's only a handful of comments, it can be much harder with a lot of mentions.
When you're working at scale, customer sentiment analysis tools can be helpful to measure positive, neutral, and negative feelings expressed by your audience across relevant platforms.
Visualizing the consumer sentiment breakdown could help you identify areas in which you need to boost brand positivity and address negative content.
Developing an Online Reputation Management Strategy
If you were to employ an online reputation specialist, they would tackle the following steps to pin down your strategy.
But you can be your own reputation management company. Simply set goals and objectives, make sure you have the right tools for the job, and get ahead of that all-important audience interaction.
Here's how to do it:
Setting Clear Goals and Objectives
Think first about your goals and objectives in order to create an effective online reputation management strategy.
Consider what you hope to achieve with your reputation management efforts, such as increasing brand awareness, customer satisfaction, or getting ahead of crisis management.
Having a clear understanding of your goals and objectives will help you develop and implement a more targeted and efficient reputation management strategy.
Choosing the Right Tools and Software for Monitoring
Investing in the right tools and software makes it much easier to keep track of your online reputation.
Look for software that offers varied monitoring and analytics capabilities tailored to your needs. Some popular reputation management software options include CisionOne, Brandwatch and Google Alerts. These come at different price points to suit different budgets.
Read up on the features and capabilities of these tools and have a think about what best suits your needs.
>> Read: The Cision guide to Online Reputation Monitoring Tools.
Engaging with Your Audience Proactively
Proactive engagement with your target audience is critical to a good online reputation.
This doesn't mean you need to respond to every tweet or send a new LinkedIn update every day. Instead, maintaining an active presence on social media and other online platforms is about regularly publishing relevant and engaging content.
This means creating content that your audience likes, while also interacting on a consistent basis.
Are you doing the following? If not, start now.
Respond to customer comments and reviews in a timely manner
Address negative comments politely and professionally
Share updates and news about your business
Provide helpful tips and insights related to your industry
Participate in discussions about your brand and industry
You're probably not going to do all these things on one social media platform. After all, discussing your brand and industry is perhaps better suited to LinkedIn and not X. But by using the right blend of social platforms, you can manage your brand's reputation well and stay visible across the social spectrum.
Content Creation and Management
We've said it before and we'll say it again: Great content should always be at the forefront of your efforts, and it's no different with reputation management.
Crafting Positive Content for Brand Image
When it comes to enhancing your online reputation, it's crucial to create positive content that reflects the values and vision of your brand.
Start by identifying your brand's strengths and unique selling points, and use them to craft compelling content tailored to your target audience.
By regularly producing and sharing high-quality content, you'll build a strong foundation for your online reputation, leading to increased trust and credibility.
Utilizing Owned Media to Control the Narrative
Owned media channels, and by that we mean things like your website, newsletter, and social media accounts, allow you to fully control the content and narrative surrounding your brand.
Here's how you should be managing those channels in terms of online reputation:
Consistent messaging: Aim for a unified tone of voice, style, and messaging across all your owned media channels to reinforce your brand image.
Publish frequent updates: Stay active and provide your audience with regular updates across all of your own media channels.
Monitor and respond: Actively monitor comments, direct messages, and online mentions, and be responsive to both positive and negative feedback. This can help uncover customer insights and enhance your brand's image further.
Collaborate with earned and paid media: Use these channels to share news articles, PR releases, and sponsored posts that make your brand look great.
Customer Experience and Review Management
We all know that positive online reviews can boost your reputation, but how do you encourage customers to write about having a great experience with your brand?
Don't worry, we have a few ideas.
Encouraging More Positive Reviews from Customers
To add some shine to your online reputation, it's essential to rack up those positive reviews from existing customers. Here's how you get there:
Provide exceptional service: Aim to meet or exceed customer expectations to leave a lasting impression.
Ask for reviews: Sometimes the simplest strategy is the best. After a successful interaction, politely ask customers to share their experience online.
Incentivize: Offer exclusive deals or discounts in exchange for honest reviews (with the focus on honest - if you ask for five-star reviews, this could be unethical).
Make it easy: Provide clear instructions and direct links to review websites on your website, emails, and social media.
Remember, potential customers rely heavily on reviews when making decisions, and positive reviews can significantly boost your reputation.
Handling Negative Reviews Gracefully
No business is immune to bad reviews. However, handling them gracefully can be a game changer, helping to turn unhappy customers into loyal advocates:
Acknowledge and apologize: Respond promptly, thank the reviewer for their feedback, and apologize for their less-than-stellar experience.
Address the issue: Show concern and offer a solution to put things right. If possible, resolve the issue offline to show genuine commitment.
Be professional: Maintain a respectful and courteous tone throughout your response, even if the reviewer is aggressive.
Learn and improve: Analyze negative reviews to pinpoint areas for improvement and prevent future bad reviews.
Don't forget: your response to a negative review can also be read by potential customers, so it's important to handle each and every one professionally.
Integrating Customer Experience into Reputation Management
Are your customers having a positive experience when they engage with your business online?
To answer that question, try working through the following steps:
Monitor and analyze: Actively monitor reviews, comments, and mentions about your business online. Employ some analytics tools to identify patterns in feedback and areas for improvement.
Engage with customers: Respond promptly to all reviews, both positive and negative, to create a strong rapport with your customers.
Implement customer feedback: Make changes based on the feedback received, and communicate changes to your customers .
By actively managing online reviews and listening to your customers, you can enhance your customer experience and foster a positive business reputation.
Enhancing Social Media Presence
Social media is an incredibly important piece in the puzzle of online reputation management. After all, it's where you're going to get direct feedback, and social conversations can set the tone for your brand.
To make sure you're doing all you can to protect your reputation (and take it to the next level), you'll need ensure your social media presence sparkles.
You can do this by widening your overall presence on socials while creating a broader strategy.
First up, let's look at expanding reach and getting more eyes on your content.
Expanding Reach on Social Media Networks
If you want to expand your reach, then you'll need to establish and maintain active accounts on various social platforms.
Start by identifying the most relevant networks for your audience.
Once you have your accounts set up, use the following techniques to increase your online visibility:
Share valuable, informative, and engaging content regularly.
Interact with your audience by responding to comments and messages.
Collaborate with influencers and organizations within your industry.
Employ targeted advertising to reach a larger audience.
Join trending conversations and expand your reach.
Weave these techniques into your reputation management strategy and track how it enhances your social presence.
Maintaining Consistent Brand Tone and Messaging
A vital aspect of effective online reputation management is maintaining a consistent brand tone and messaging across all your social media posts.
Consistency is key to the art of storytelling in PR and marketing. It is consistency that helps establish your brand identity over time, making it easily recognizable to your audience.
The famous McDonald's arches are the perfect example of brand consistency that has formed part of the company's identity over decades.
But what does consistency look like in practice? Here are some tips to make sure you're staying consistent:
Develop brand guidelines that outline your brand's tone, voice, and messaging. Share this with your team members responsible for creating content.
Use the same visual elements, such as fonts, colors, and logos, across all your social media platforms. Consistency is key on social media.
Schedule regular reviews of your social media content to ensure it aligns with your brand guidelines. Here's how to conduct a social media audit in just seven steps.
Put these practices into action, and you can ensure that your brand's tone and messaging stays in line across your social media networks.
Employing Social Media Marketing and Public Relations Strategies
There are some classic social media marketing and public relations strategies that go hand in hand with boosting your online reputation.
If you're not doing the following already, now is a great time to start:
Create and publish sponsored content to reach a wider audience.
Reach out to journalists and industry publications to secure coverage of your brand.
Collaborate with influencers to promote your products or services.
Keep an up-to-date media kit to make it easy for journalists and influencers to write about your brand.
Measure the effectiveness of your ads and adjust accordingly.
If you're employing the following tactics already, pat yourself on the back. You've also ticked off some tasks in your online reputation management to-do list.
Read More >> PR Strategy Essentials: 6 Tips to Boost Your Brand
Digital Marketing and SEO
As with social media, there might be a few digital marketing and search engine optimization tasks you're already doing which will benefit your online reputation.
And if you're not doing these already, now is a great time to start.
Optimizing Online Content for Search Engines
Quality content not only appeals to your audience, but it can also play a significant role in your ranking on search engine results pages.
To ensure your content boosts your rankings in search results, consider the following actions:
Keyword optimization: Be strategic in choosing high-relevance keywords that your target audience is likely to search for, and incorporate them naturally into your content.
User engagement: Publish content that encourages users to engage (like, share, comment). Search engines love to see a high engagement rate.
Link building: Try to create content that other websites in your niche will be interested in linking to, as backlinks contribute to higher search rankings.
Website indexing: Optimize your content to ensure that search engine bots can properly index it, making it more visible to users.
As long as you're optimizing that quality content we mentioned earlier, you'll improve your search rankings and hopefully shine a light on the positive aspects of your brand.
Remember, Google is smart enough to revisit articles and change their ranking based on a wide spectrum of factors. If you need to improve your SERP results, then check out these SEO tips for PR pros.
Competitive Benchmarking and Market Analysis
To effectively manage your online reputation, it's essential to understand your competition.
Competitive benchmarking is the process of analyzing your competitors' strategies to improve your own digital marketing efforts.
You'll want to pay attention to their SEO, paid media, content, and social media tactics.
To perform a competitive analysis, follow these steps:
Identify your competitors: Research and compile a list of direct or indirect competitors in your niche.
Analyze their SEO efforts: take a close look at keyword rankings, backlinks, and on-page optimization strategies.
Evaluate their content: Cast a critical eye over all of their channels - think about content types, lengths, quality, and how often they publish.
Assess their social media presence: Examine their platform choice, engagement, and posting frequency.
These insights into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses are your secret weapon.
Once you understand how your competitors work, you can adapt your strategies to outperform them and improve your online reputation.
Paid Media Strategies for Enhanced Visibility
Paid media plays a significant role in boosting your online reputation. It helps your content reach a wider audience and increases your visibility in search results.
To get your money's worth from paid media strategies, try the following:
Paid search: Use targeted ads on search engines (e.g., Google Ads) to attract potential customers searching for specific keywords.
Remarketing: Utilize display ads that target users who have previously visited your website, keeping your brand top-of-mind and increasing the chances of conversion.
Social media advertising: Reach your target audience on platforms like Instagram and Facebook through sponsored posts and ads.
If you've done a lot of work on your social media strategy, you'll probably already have an idea of the paid media channels that will suit you best. If you invest in a bit of paid media, your online presence should grow, ultimately enhancing your online reputation.
Proactive Monitoring and Response Planning
Even if you feel that your brand reputation is already in shipshape, you'll need to employ some ORM strategies to make sure it stays that way.
Setting Up Alerts for Real-time Monitoring
To keep on top of your online reputation, you'll need to set up alerts for real-time monitoring. This way, you can quickly address any negative content or comments that appear across different platforms.
Consider using tools like Google Alerts, CisionOne, or Brandwatch to monitor mentions of your brand, products, or services. They can notify you when new content is published relating to your chosen keywords.
Good review management should also involve setting up alerts for reviews websites relevant to your niche, e.g., Yelp, Google My Business, and TripAdvisor.
Creating a Crisis Management Response Team
A proactive approach to online reputation management requires a dedicated crisis management response team.
This team should be responsible for promptly addressing negative feedback and implementing effective solutions to prevent further damage.
Key roles in the team may include:
Social Media Manager: Monitors social media platforms for negative comments and addresses them appropriately.
Customer Service Representative: Handles customer complaints and ensures prompt resolutions.
PR Specialist: Communicates with the media and external stakeholders during a crisis.
Legal Advisor: Provides guidance on legal matters related to online reputation management.
Having your crisis management response team ready to go can help you stay ahead of any potential threats to your online reputation.
Learn more about Brand Reputation Crisis Management here!
Measuring the Impact of Reputation Management
If you've been employing ORM strategies for a while, you'll want to be sure that your efforts are worth the hours you're putting in.
If you're seeing good reviews and positive feedback on social media, your efforts are probably working.
However, there a couple of other ways you can monitor your online reputation management efforts and make sure they are meeting your business needs.
Reviewing the Return on Investment
One way to measure the impact of your reputation management efforts is to review the Return on Investment (ROI).
This can be determined by tracking key performance indicators such as website traffic, lead conversion rates, and sales figures.
Identifying Areas for Continuous Improvement
Finally, to ensure the continued growth and success of your brand reputation, it's essential to identify areas of your online presence that require ongoing attention and improvement.
Pay attention to customer feedback and brand mentions, as well as the latest industry best practices.
Keep in mind that maintaining a great online reputation can have a huge impact on your business's long-term success.
Strive to keep on top of the following tasks:
Respond promptly to negative feedback and work to resolve any issues
Engage with your audience regularly on social media to humanize your brand and build trust
Regularly audit your online content to ensure its relevance and accuracy
The Last Word on Online Reputation Management
If you're proactively working to continuously improve your online reputation, you'll be better equipped to maintain a positive brand image and stay ahead of your competitors.
At the very least, we hope you'll feel like you now have more control over your online reputation.
But if you do take our advice and follow the steps in this guide, we hope you'll soon see your business's reputation fly.
