Essential Strategies For Managing Your Business’s Digital Reputation

Despite your best efforts, negative feedback and content will inevitably creep their way into the online discourse surrounding your business. 

Considering your digital reputation is a direct representation of your brand and a significant factor in consumers’ purchasing decisions, it’s essential to safeguard and proactively boost your online standing.

While this is easier said than done, you can manage your digital reputation by establishing a solid framework based on various strategies aimed at improving and maintaining a positive online brand. 

Digital Reputation Defined

Digital or online reputation is the overall perception of your brand online through the eyes of general audiences. Put differently, it’s how an average customer views your company and judges the value you bring in terms of your services or products. 

Modern consumers are tech-savvy and no longer rely on word of mouth to form an opinion about a brand. Before purchase of any kind, they’ll delve into research. If your reputation is less than stellar, they may decide to work with your competitors instead. Bummer, right?

What Is Digital Reputation Management?

Reputation management is the practice of evaluating and managing how your business is perceived online. At the basic level, it includes monitoring mentions of your brand all around the web, while also boosting positive content, increasing your rating on online review platforms, and responding to damaging or constructive criticism.

You can do this manually or hire someone else to do it for you, or use a reputation management platform such as ReviewArm to automate the process while minimizing your expenses. 

Basic Digital Reputation Management Strategies

Whether your company is new or you’re trying to resolve a long-standing reputation crisis, these next few tips (arranged in no particular order) will help you achieve clear results:

1. Monitor your reputation

Start by conducting an online search from a fresh Google account to see which information is front and center when customers look for your services. Navigate to your main review pages and take note of your rating, any unfavorable reviews, and the number of positive reviews. 

Don’t be shocked if you see some negative pieces pop up - you’ll eventually minimize their impact. For the time being, knowing how you’re perceived will be enough as you’re still formulating a strategy. 

There’s a catch here. You’ll have to do this frequently, possibly every day if you handle a large amount of customers. This can be taxing, especially if you’re juggling multiple tasks. To alleviate the pressure, consider using ReviewArm in conjunction with Google Alerts for maximum coverage.

Google Alerts will notify you when a new mention appears online, while ReviewArm will consolidate all the review platforms into one dashboard. It doesn’t take a marketing expert to realize how powerful this can be. Businesses today need to be omnipresent on various review platforms. As such, they have to monitor sites like Yelp, Google Business Profile reviews, and reviews on sites such as Facebook.

Because ReviewArm implements a notification system informing you whenever you receive a review on any of these platforms, you’ll always be informed about the current reputational challenges your business may be facing. 

2. Respond to online criticism and praise

What used to be word of mouth in the past (an invisible force, some may say) is now represented in the form of customer testimonials. Although it’s impossible to please everyone, customers nowadays expect you to respond to their comments. 

This makes sense as no one wants to be engaged in a one-way conversation. Respect your customers’ time, and most consumers reading through reviews and comments will appreciate the fact you give everyone your undivided attention, particularly customers who took the time to address you online.

In short, respond to each review. While positive feedback is easy enough to manage because you only need to say thank you, negative comments tend to be a minefield. When dealing with a negative customer online, assure them their feelings are valid and offer to compensate them somehow for their trouble. 

Most importantly, apologize for what they experienced, even if they’re wrong. Elton John was right when he said that “sorry seems to be the hardest word”, but don’t let pride come in the way of resolving a potential reputational crisis. Who knows, maybe an apology will suffice and they’ll remove the negative comment. 

Similar to tracking the discourse around your business, responding to reviews can take a lot of time. This is why you should use ReviewArm to automatically generate review responses. The word automatic may seem like you’re cutting corners, but it’s not the case. Using a state-of-the-art language model, ReviewArm analyzes the content of the review and always provides the most effective and unique response possible.

3. Control the photos being presented online

Social sharing is everywhere now, and it makes digital reputation management a bit more difficult. Everyone can upload photos related to your business. Yes, it’s a great way to show more authenticity, but you may not want to be associated with particular pieces of user-generated content.

Let’s say you own a restaurant and someone posts an unflattering picture of your business location by uploading it to your Google Business Profile. If you let this slide, the photo may eventually become the first photo your users see when they check out your profile. 

So what can you do?

Ask the customer to remove the photo (or the tag if it’s on social media), or manage your privacy settings to hide the particular piece of content unless you approve it. If all else fails, upload your material to effectively bury the unflattering photo. 

4. Invest in SEO

You’re probably already doing search engine optimization (SEO), but did you know that it can also aid your digital reputation management efforts? Remember when we suggested conducting a small “reputation audit”? Were there negative items popping up in the search results? 

If yes, we have bad news. You’ll likely never fully eliminate them from the search. But there’s a silver lining here:

people rarely navigate to pages two and three of search engine results. 

While this is the bane of the existence of all businesses in the world, it’s a positive thing when it comes to reputation management. 

Say there’s a news article floating around presenting you in a bad light. Sure, you could reach out to the author and ask them to remove the article (good luck with that, especially if the piece is receiving consistent clicks). It’s much easier to invest your resources into creating new positive content optimized for search engines and have it push the negative content lower. 

This may take months, but the negative article will someday fall to the second page of search results, aka “the purgatory”.

5. Generate new reviews

This can be a herculean effort, more so when done manually. Most happy customers forget to leave a review, even if you ask them to do so. However, anger is a much more powerful emotion than happiness. A customer scorned will have no problem writing a 100-page dissertation on why your business is the worst business of all time. 

So, what can you do, aside from asking your customers nicely?

ReviewArm to the rescue, once again!

Our platform allows you to set up automatic review requests or send them in bulk later via SMS or email. Doing this by hand would be impossible, but with ReviewArm, it’s a matter of a few clicks. Plus, email and SMS are very convenient, making customers more likely to leave a review or at least a five-star rating.

Become A Reputation Management Wizard

Besides SEO, ReviewArm will make it easy for you to manage your online reputation without wasting time or money hiring extra employees or outsourcing to a reputation management company. 

With our pay-as-you-go pricing model, you will pay for how much you use the product. This means ReviewArm is a scalable solution that can support your digital reputation management needs regardless of your size. 

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