Is Working With Reputation Management Companies Better Than Using Software?

In the digital marketplace, your reputation is everything. This is because most customers use information about your business available online to form crucial opinions on your brand. 

Therefore, you could offer the best product or the best service, but if the info about you in search engines is negative, there’s a high possibility that you’ll struggle with closing sales. 

Thus, maintaining a positive online reputation is a practice you need to introduce into your overall digital marketing strategy.

But how?

Should you leverage the services of professional reputation management companies or go for reputation management software that allows you to do it yourself at a fraction of the cost?

Let’s go over the key information, such as the benefits of both approaches, to help you make an informed decision.

How Does A Positive Reputation Influence Your Sales?

Before we stack up the services of an online reputation management agency against software, it’s necessary to clarify why you even need to manage your business reputation.

In short, a good reputation increases the odds that new customers will trust you and choose to do business with you. If your customers look up your business and see a bunch of positive reviews that sing your praises, they’ll perceive your brand as reliable.

Since you can’t remove negative reviews from online listings, the only way to increase your overall rating is to slowly generate positive pieces of feedback. At the same time, you must address criticism and positive feedback to portray your business as a company that actually cares about providing a good product/service.

What Do Reputation Management Companies Do?

Similar to digital marketing agencies, reputation management companies provide a service aimed at protecting and boosting your online reputation.

These companies employ experts who will work daily on your online presence by monitoring and responding to reviews on online review listings and social media. While not the best for growing the number of positive reviews, they’re perfect for times of crisis when you’re dealing with negative PR online. 

An online reputation management agency can implement a full crisis response strategy that may encompass the creation of positive content, leveraging social media marketing, and conducting some quick SEO measures to quickly bury the negative articles deeper in search engine result pages.

If you own a large company dealing with negative press from major news outlets or online portals, this may be something you need. A local giant could lose thousands of dollars per day due to a PR disaster and they will require some targeted damage control.

However, it’s worth noting your small local restaurant or a small law firm probably won’t have to deal with such a PR issue in their lifetime. Small businesses typically need a way to boost their reviews, making professional reputation services redundant.

Working with any “reputable” reputation management companies will cost you a sizable amount of money per month. On average, expect to pay $1k per month for their services. 

Paying this amount may not be an issue for a large company, for a small SaaS business, law firm, a restaurant, or an HVAC service provider it’s simply too expensive. Plus, you’re probably already retaining a digital marketing company to handle your SEO and content creation. As such, cashing out over $1k to address your online may be ludicrous. 

What Is An Online Reputation Management Software?

Online reputation management software is a digital marketing tool used by organizations to monitor their online reputation, respond to online reviews on multiple platforms, and generate new feedback to boost their online standing slowly.

Most businesses can benefit from using this software. However, organizations that may be dealing with a large number of customers may find it even more useful. For instance:

• Restaurants
• Insurance providers
• Doctors
• Dentists
• Hotels and motels
• Service providers 

Many smaller businesses just starting out assume they don’t need to manage their reputation with software as they may not have as many customer interactions. Yet, using this software is perfect for start-ups as they’ll be able to grow their online reputation a lot quicker than if they just relied on asking the customer in person for a review. 

Plus, it doesn’t hurt to be proactive in the very beginning when just a few negative reviews could tank your chances of success.

Similarly, larger businesses could also benefit from a software-fueled approach as they’ll have an easier time monitoring the influx of customer feedback. They may be dealing with thousands of reviews a month, so manually responding to everything or sending out review requests in an effort may be impossible. With reputation management software, they can pretty much automate the process, saving valuable time and money in the process.

What Reputation Management Tool Should You Use?

If you’re looking for a cost-effective tool that allows you to automate the process of boosting and safeguarding your online reputation, you can’t go wrong with ReviewArm. 

Our crowning feature is the automatic review requests you can send out automatically via text or email after a customer makes a purchase (or in bulk later on if you prefer). This helps you automate the process of generating new reviews and also makes sure no potential feedback falls between the cracks, so to speak. 

In addition, ReviewArm’s dashboard sources data from different review sites, providing a visual overview of all your online reviews. Best of all, it automatically notifies you when you receive a review, allowing you to quickly respond and use the timing to resolve any potential conflicts before it’s too late.

For businesses dealing with a large number of tickets who may not have the time to respond to each review, we implemented an AI response generator. Using a cutting-edge language processing model, ReviewArm analyzes the content of the review and automatically generates a customized response. 

Not only will this particular feature save you time, but it will also help you portray yourself as a business that always takes the time to respond to customers, no matter the time of the day or the season. 

Implement A Proactive Reputation Management Strategy ASAP

Reputation management companies are great if you’re dealing with an online smear campaign, for example. Yet, most businesses struggle with negative reviews and the challenge of increasing their Yelp or Google rating. 

If you do have a target on your back, sure, contact a reputation management company. Otherwise, if you’re only looking to manage your online reputation more efficiently, software is the way to go. 

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