8 Top Tips For Managing Your Online Reputation
If your business is still trying to find its way around the internet and managing its online reputation, then these tips will help you hit the ground running.
What can you expect from this blog post?
Today we live in a connected world where it’s highly likely that others will judge you by what they find online, so we want to help you make sure that your business put its best foot forward.
This article will help you understand the importance of having a strong online reputation, why it’s so critical to build one, and how to do just that. Using this information as your starting guide, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on where to invest your marketing money so that you can secure a good return on investment and see your business take off online.
1. Step One: Identify Your Online Business Assets
The first step in managing a healthy online reputation is to determine what your existing online assets are. This includes your brand name, customer testimonials, social media accounts, website, products, services, and any other content that is online that represents you. Any time you put information online, you are likely building an online asset. These can be a powerful marketing tool for your business, but you need to know what they are, and you need to know how to manage them.
Sometimes, your online assets might not be things that you or your colleagues, have created explicitly, rather, they take the form of User Generated Content. UGC can take the form of your customer’s social media posts, online testimonials on websites like Google and Facebook and even comments mentioning your brand on blog articles (like this one). If you aren’t aware that this content exists, how can you possibly manage it and ensure that this content is representing your business in a positive light? (Spoiler alert: you can’t — but later on in this blog we’ll suggest some useful tools for you to find content like this online).
Online reviews and testimonials are one such example of an online asset that you should pay a great deal of attention to — 93% of consumers admit that online testimonials influenced their purchasing decisions and on average 91% of 18–34 year olds say they trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. So make sure you’re paying attention to the information that your next potential customer can already find out about you online — remember, their first encounter with your business online might not be on your own website…
2. Establish Your Brand Online
Your brand is more than just a logo and tagline. It is everything that people associate with your business. Your brand is what you stand for. It’s the voice of your business, a promise to your customers. That’s why you should take the time to identify the things that make your business unique and then figure out how to convey those things to your customers.
Part of establishing your brand online will undoubtedly include establishing a social media presence. But wait! — Social media is not just a tool to broadcast your message — it’s a place to engage and build relationships with your target customers. Establishing a brand presence on social media is crucial if you want to have a successful online marketing campaign. One of the best ways to establish your brand on social media is by making your social media accounts more human and personable. Show people who are willing to interact with your business online that there are real humans behind the brand. This is likely to build trust with your potential customers and they will be more likely to engage with your brand as a result.
Speaking, of engagement…
3. Find and Engage With Your Audience
Social media is an amazing tool to engage with your audience and give them a platform to share their experiences. The only problem is that there’s often too much noise and too much content. Standing out and being consistent is extremely difficult. To make things worse, people are incredibly fickle and tend to forget quickly. And that’s where the importance of online reputation management comes into play. It’s all about being where your audience is and influencing their perception of you. It’s about listening to what’s being said and, most importantly, understanding why it’s being said and taking action.
Key takeaway? — Find out where your target customers are active online, and make sure you maintain a presence there so that you can influence their perception of you. This might involve setting up social media profiles on platforms where you can interact with potential customers, or creating a Google My Business listing so that Google can return enriched search results about your company (including displaying glowing testimonials from previous customers!), directly from the search engine results pages.
4. Monitor Your Online Reputation
An important aspect of dealing with your online reputation is to know what information is already out there. While you certainly can’t control what people are saying behind your back or when you’re not around, you can get an idea of the overall sentiment about your business. If you’re a local business, you may be able to benefit from a Google My Business listing. This can help you show up when people search for your business and create a central location for people to leave reviews for you online.
Make sure you take advantage of online tools to see what’s already being said about your brand online and stay alert for future mentions. Later on in this blog we discuss some tools which can help you seek out existing user-generated content referencing your brand, as well as being notified when your brand is next mentioned across the web.
As indicated previously, you should also be using social media to respond to questions and comments, as well as follow up with people who have interacted with your business. Even if nothing is posted online, you can still get information from friends, family members, and other people in your social circles. Get all the information you can, and don’t be afraid to take the next step of reaching out for help if you need to.
5. Consider using Social Media Influencers to Promote Your Brand
Social media influencers are people who have a large following and are more than capable of promoting your brand or product online. The trick is knowing how to find them, how to get them to work with you, and what to expect. This can be a valuable resource for any business but it’s a critical component for startups and new businesses that need social proof to help boost their credibility.
Influencers are certainly a powerful source of marketing and advertising. But they have been known to be controversial in the industry. Brands that hire these online marketing influencers can have a difficult time controlling the message that they are trying to send out to their target audience. Social media influencers can be hard to keep track of, and it can be difficult for brands to ensure that their message is being portrayed correctly. There is also the potential for influencers to act in a way that is not in keeping with your brand image, or for them to infringe on another’s intellectual property without your knowledge. Regardless of the controversy surrounding influencers, they are a part of the marketing industry, and there will likely be a presence of them for a long time to come.
6. Build Customer Relationships
One of the most important things to remember is to build relationships with your customers. They like you enough to give you their money, and you should be grateful for that. Without them, you wouldn’t have a business. It’s important that you treat them well. Good customer service and providing a positive customer experience are some of the best ways to build relationships with your customers. It’s imperative that you make your customer feel special at every point during the selling process, and beyond. Make sure to take care of your customers when they have questions or problems with your products or services, as a poor after-sales service could lead to negative reviews being posted about you online.
As well as ensuring your customers can reach you by telephone and email, consider providing a way for your customers to self-serve and find the answers they need online. Since you might not be around 24/7 to answer all of your customer’s questions face-to-face or over the phone, it’s a good idea to have a way for them to get the answers they need online, as either a first port of call or just when your other customer service options are out of hours. One thing to note here is in order to prevent frustrated customers, make sure they’re still able to contact you quickly and easily if their questions can’t be answered anywhere online.
Just like it’s important to have a website for your business, it’s also important to have a customer service website, or at the very least dedicated pages on your main website. For most businesses, this might simply take the form of a Frequently Asked Questions page but it could also include a fully-blown community support forum or a self-serve help desk with comprehensive documentation on how to use your product or service. The benefits are obvious — customers can resolve potential issues more quickly, and potentially without placing demand on you or your customer support staff.
By providing a positive customer experience, and taking good care of your customers when they have questions or problems with your products or services, you’ll be able to keep the majority of them happy and coming back for more.
7. Use These Tools to Keep Up With Your Online Reputation
Sometimes, it makes sense to leverage technology to help alleviate any pressures on human resources. This is especially true if you’re just starting out, or your existing team is small — but even larger teams can reap the benefits of using automated software to make processes more efficient. Here are a few of the tools we’d recommend to monitor and bolster your online brand presence and assist in online reputation management.
- Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service. While Google Alerts was initially designed to track news articles, it can also be used to search for information on any topic, such as your brand name! Submit your brand name to sign up for email alerts and you’ll receive notifications of your mentions across the web.
Price: Free - Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, and videos. The intent is to reflect popular opinion about any topic on the web. It uses an algorithm to calculate each topic’s strength, sentiment, passion and reach scores by using sentiment analysis and considering how much the given topic has been discussed in online sources, and what quality those mentions are, based upon their popularity (i.e., whether they come from well-known sites or written by influencers).
Price: Free - RepuRobin.io
RepuRobin is a fully automated platform that lets you manage your online reviews from one place. It offers you the unique ability to automatically request and publish customer reviews on all major review sites such as Google, Facebook, Yelp!, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, and more. With RepuRobin it’s possible to save buckets of time previously spent on curating positive reviews by leveraging the power of automation.
Price: 14 Day Unlimited Free Trial, then tiered pricing dependent upon the selected plan.
Disclaimer: RepuRobin.io is a Red Robin Creative brand!
8. Stay Vigilant and Keep on Top of Your Online Reputation
You’ve done the hard part. You’ve built a great website and you have great online content. You’ve started to build up a following on social media platforms and you’ve created a blog. You’ve started getting some backlinks and you’re getting some organic search traffic. You’re getting all the right kinds of visitors to your website and you’re starting to attract new business. Your customer service is on point, your customers love you and they’ve even started to generate positive content about you on their social media platforms, becoming organically grown brand ambassadors. You’ve collected their glowing testimonials, published them out to major review sites like Trustpilot and Google My Business, and you’re also displaying them proudly on your website. You look great online. But hold on, you can’t stop there. You have to stay vigilant and continue on the path of digital success. Your online reputation is what people see when they search for you online, and it’s the first thing they see when they visit your website. It’s your brand. Don’t let it slide!
Whether you’ve already got a hugely successful and positive reputation, or you’ve put in considerable effort to reverse the effects of a poor rep, it’s up to you to ensure you maintain the fruits of your labour in order to keep your digital presence in tip-top condition. Make sure you use the tips, tricks and tools within this blog post, consistently, to keep your brand looking brilliant online.
Let’s wrap up!
We hope you found the content of this blog post helpful and informative. As you can see there are many steps that go into managing your online reputation. It’s important for you to stay on top of your online image so that you can make sure your brand is always looking professional online, is up-to-date, and accurately represents the values and ethos of your business.
Got questions or comments about this blog post? Need help with your online presence? Hit up the comments section below, or drop us a line at hello@redrobincreative.com.
Thanks for reading and we’ll see you all next time!
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Written by Robyn,
Part of the content team at Red Robin Creative.
