Online Reputation Management Strategy For Small Businesses

So, you’re doing everything right, but you just can’t seem to attract new customers? Small businesses rely on digital marketing to boost their customers’ awareness and build a solid brand. Yet, many also fail to implement an online reputation management strategy.

In any competitive market, reputation is everything. After all, it’s how others perceive your company. While other forms of promoting your business have their place, you also need to invest some of your efforts into managing your standing in the digital world. 

So how do you start? 

Well, there is no singular approach - it’s more about finding out what works well for you. To help you discover that, here are some basic strategies you can follow. 

1. Communicate With Transparency

Never lie to your customers. In the modern era, they have been exposed to marketing materials so much (especially on social media where everything is basically an ad) that they can smell them from a mile away.

Don’t make up your credentials when starting out. Be honest and transparent about everything to build a solid base level of trust with your customers and prospects. 

Show what you can offer, but don’t boast wild claims or overpromise. Transparency is the only way to build lasting relationships. Otherwise, you may end up making the sale, but you’ll alienate your repeat clients.

2. Leverage Social Media To Its Full Potential

Online reputation management strategy isn’t just about protecting your business from reputational risks, it’s also about setting a precedent of how your business is portrayed online. You may already be using social media to promote your services and products, but when was the last time you created content to connect with your customers?

With social media, you can also manage your reputation. Sure, continue posting promotional materials about your offerings, but also publish fun and engaging posts and respond to any criticism in the comments. This can ultimately help you grow your brand and solidify your relationship with current customers.

3. Generate New Reviews

Here’s a question: what was the last time you called a friend and asked them to recommend you a restaurant, a plumber, or any other business? 

We can bet your first stop was Google where you checked out a few of the top listings, saw their rating, read a few reviews, and only then opened their website. 

Online reviews are an integral part of the purchasing process for most people. This is why you have to see to it that your ratings on review platforms are as high as possible while also generating new pieces of positive feedback every so often. This not only boosts your position in search engines (including business listings) but also protects you from the full impact of inevitable negative reviews. 

Since generating new reviews is a continuous process, we recommend implementing a strict sourcing of customer feedback aided by technology. And we have just the thing - ReviewArm is a platform made specifically for improving and monitoring your online reputation.

One of its most powerful features is sending out automatic review requests via text or email according to your scheduling preferences. This automates the entire process, allowing you to dedicate more time to your core business processes, instead of manually asking your customers for a review.

4. Respond To Negative Reviews

Your online reputation management strategy needs to address the matter of responding to negative reviews. Though you can only remove reviews that are considered spam, most negative feedback will “grace” your page forever. Because they’re pretty much permanent, you need to respond accordingly to minimize their impact on your business.

Write your response as soon as possible, acknowledge the reviewer’s experience, provide an explanation, and if possible, offer to resolve the issue offline. 

This helps you salvage the relationship with an unhappy customer, but it also helps new prospects see your side of the story. As such, they may not give this review as much weight as they would have if you didn’t respond.

To make this part of your strategy much easier, we recommend using ReviewArm. Besides generating reviews, it provides a dashboard that sources data from all the review sites. You’ll get a visual overview of your entire online reputation, along with a powerful notification system that informs you whenever you receive a new piece of feedback on any review platform. That way, you can respond to criticism as soon as possible, maximizing the opportunity to address the issue swiftly.

In addition, you can use ReviewArm’s powerful AI response generator feature to quickly analyze the wording of the review, and the software will generate a human-like response almost instantly. This can save you incredible amounts of time, while also ensuring that your review responses always hit the mark. 

5. Implement A Powerful Seo Strategy

An online reputation management strategy has many common points with SEO. In fact, a positive reputation will positively impact your SEO efforts, which can then help you avoid reputational risks by making certain positive information is front-and-center in search engine results pages. 

Consider this scenario. A local newspaper publishes a negative article on your business, and a forum user picks it up and shares it. In just a few days, this unflattering info will pop up whenever a potential customer looks up your business.

By investing more resources into SEO, you’ll slowly bury this article and restore your reputation back to its original state. 

Beat The Odds

Digital marketing is an integral part of building up your small business. If you don’t have a solid online reputation management strategy in place, all your other marketing efforts will fall short of their potential. By growing your brand image and working hard to maintain it, you’ll quickly start beating your competition, taking a larger slice of the pie in the competitive marketplace.

To effectively manage your standing, invest in a solution that automates the process. Since you’re probably busy and lack the funds to work on your reputation continuously, a cost-effective solution like ReviewArm can provide you with all the tools you need to simplify workflows and increase the efficiency of your overall reputation management strategy.

If you like what you read, try ReviewArm through a free trial now.