What Is the Importance of Reputation Management and What Goes Into an ORM Strategy?

This article about the importance of reputation management details the most important aspects of developing a positive brand reputation.

In today’s digital landscape, businesses need to grow and nurture their online reputation in order to drive success.

The modern customer expects stellar performance from a company. They also expect brands to abide by a set of core values, meaning the products and services a company sells are not just transactions — they also embody the company’s voice with which its customers resonate. 

When done right and with purpose, this can be immensely beneficial for the brand and its customers. Effective reputation management strategies can create a customer base that believes in the brand and builds loyalty over time. And loyalty goes a long, long way!

However, maintaining this relationship with your customers requires consistent effort.

Think of a company’s online reputation as its business card. It’s the first and the last impression that customers get of the brand. It’s also a type of living entity, changing and growing along with the company’s development, product releases, and customer reviews.

Maintaining a positive, long-lasting, stellar reputation is an ongoing process that requires steady management. Read on to learn what reputation management is, how to build a comprehensive reputation management plan for business success, and which elements you should focus on most. 

NetReputation provides information and services to help you protect your business’s reputation. Call us at 844-461-3632 to learn more, or fill out the contact form below for a free consultation.

Getting Familiar With Reputation Management

A common misconception is that your brand reputation relies solely on the quality of products or services you provide. Because of this, many business owners believe the path to success relies on product perfection.

Another misconception is that product or service quality speaks for itself. 

For sure, your products are an essential element of creating a positive online presence. Still, there’s a lot more to consider when it comes to reputation management. Your success relies not only on product quality, but also on brand perception and your ability to respond to customer needs.

For this, online brand marketing and delivering excellent customer service are just as important as developing the product itself.

What’s more, these elements must create a unified front that tells your brand’s story using its own voice and tone.

What Is a Reputation Management Strategy?

The collection of actions you take to manage brand perception is ultimately your reputation management strategy. This strategy must account for all the potential factors that influence public opinion.

The aim is to protect your company’s positive image, spark engagement with customers, and earn brand trust.  

Three Major Elements of Reputation Management

Reputation management requires a multi-layered approach that strengthens the relationship with your customers. To get a better idea of how that works, let’s look at three of its main elements:

1. Brand Mission

Your mission tells people about the specific needs your company aims to meet. It also speaks to the problems that your products and services solve.

2. Brand Vision

What is brand vision? This tells people how your company aims to deliver on its promises. It also includes your company’s plans to stay on top of customer needs, even those that may pop up in the future.

3. Brand Values

Your brand values show what your company stands for, what drives you forward, and how you build solutions for your audience.

Reputation management is crucial. Call us at 844-461-3632 for more information about proactively managing your brand’s image.

Creating Your Brand Persona

When building a brand, it’s essential to define the values that shape your brand persona. These tell customers who you are and, as a result, spark engagement across the web. In other words, your company’s core values are embodied in the brand persona; these values build a brand identity that customers respond to.

Before they get a chance to interact with your employees, customers meet and interact with your brand’s persona. This is true whether they find your brand through an online ad, scroll your website or visit your social media profiles.

If your brand were a person, who would it be? How would it talk? What tone would your brand use?

The answers to these questions matter. Your brand persona is your company’s virtual presence, and how well it reflects your brand impacts your positive reputation big time. This fictional persona can embody your company’s core values and bring your mission and vision to life.

Typically, brands embody an archetype and have a personality. For example, your brand can be the humble hero who always comes to the customer’s rescue and strives to be their trusted sidekick. Or your brand may be the jester, playful and cheery, bringing joy and entertainment.

Brand Voice

Customer interaction involves communication. And even though this happens on a variety of different channels, it must always represent the brand persona. Importantly, customer communication must always be carried out in the brand’s voice.

A brand that embodies the personality of the humble hero sounds different from one that is the jester or the caregiver, for example.

When developing a reputation management strategy, all communication must be carried out in your brand voice, as this will contribute to your positive reputation and recognizability.

It’s important that your messaging be aligned with your brand to build cohesiveness. Once you nail this, your customers will associate your brand with its personality. 

Brand Tone 

Also corresponding to a brand’s personality is tone. Your brand tone must be clearly defined and used in all communications, from product descriptions to ads, blog posts, emails, and customer support conversations.

If the foundation of your company’s mission is to meet customer needs, you must determine the ideal tone your potential and existing buyers want to engage with. How would they want you to talk to them? 

Building a successful reputation management strategy includes using the correct brand tone whenever possible. This involves proofreading and updating every document and communication piece, as well as training employees to use the brand’s tone when representing the company.

Customer Perception and Customer Trust

The customer’s perception of your brand begins at the very first interaction. This interaction is usually initiated by the brand through an ad, a social media post, a blog post, or another type of marketing product. 

From this first interaction on, the customer has an opinion of your brand. Then, as the customer interacts further with your products or services, they build a more informed view of your brand.

From there, interactions include those with your company’s website, customer service desk, and brand touchpoints like invoices or contracts. They may also include in-store experiences.

Based on their perception, customers will choose if they want to become loyal consumers and if (and how) they’ll tell other people about your brand.

Online Reviews and Customer Feedback

Positive customer experiences inspire the customer to return to your business and to recommend your brand to others.

Negative experiences, however, usually encourage the customer to switch to a competitor’s brand and tell others they were unhappy about the experience. Consider these stats:

• 77% of customers will recommend your brand to a friend after a single positive experience.
• It takes as many as 12 positive customer experiences to compensate for a single negative experience.
• Typically, satisfied customers share their positive experiences with 9 people. Dissatisfied customers share their negative experiences with 16 people.
• Following a bad experience with customer service, 40% of customers will recommend their friends not to do business with your brand.
• 8 in 10 customers would consider changing companies after a negative experience with customer service.
• After a dissatisfactory customer service experience, 39% of customers will avoid your brand for as long as 2 years.

Customer trust is earned through positive experiences and good online reviews. However, it can be quickly lost to negative experiences when online reviews aren’t managed correctly. Maintaining a positive customer perception is only possible through a solid reputation management strategy. 

At NetReputation, we work with individuals and businesses on implementing reputation management strategies that meet your needs. Give us a call at 844-461-3632 to learn more.

Search Engine Optimization

Today, creating and maintaining a consistent online presence is extremely important, and search engine optimization (SEO) lies at the core of your online presence. This is what connects your website with the organic pathways your potential customers use to find you.

In short, SEO enables you to appear in the top search results for the phrases people use to find what you offer.

A strong SEO strategy helps make your site more visible. Simply put, it targets the main set of keywords associated with your brand. You’ll also be able to target some less-obvious keywords connected to related user searches. Also, a good SEO strategy helps ensure your content adds value and responds to what customers are looking for on the web. 

Ultimately, SEO drives organic traffic to your platform by making your content the best resource for what users need.  

SEO and Branded Content

As part of your reputation management efforts, SEO is most helpful by powering branded search.

When people type in the name of your company in Google, is your website the first result? While you might expect this to be the obvious outcome, it’s not always the case! You have to make sure your branded content is properly optimized to get the best results.

Furthermore, setting up your company’s Google Business Profile should never be overlooked. This way, you can control what users see in the snippet about your company when they type your company’s name into Google.

Employee Behavior and Customer Satisfaction

A big part of your company’s reputation is built on customer interactions, such as with ads or social media posts. Plus, individual experiences with brand representatives can make or break your positive reputation. 

That’s why employee behavior must be in line with the company’s core values, brand persona, and brand voice.

As an example, if the brand adopts the caregiver persona, then all customer-facing employees must strive to reinforce the caregiver image. The language and the tone they use must make the customer feel safe and protected.

A grumpy attitude, an overly familiar tone, or a tendency to make jokes will make the interaction inadequate for customers. Why? Because customer expectations are built on the established caregiver personality.

Plus, interactions with customer support can lead to ratings and online reviews. Negative feedback and word-of-mouth can result from poor interactions, pointing to low customer satisfaction.

Managing Customer Feedback

Keeping track of reviews and using them to generate a positive experience should be an essential point of your ORM strategy. Why? Because customer reviews have the power to persuade or dissuade prospects from making a purchase with a company.

Customers express their opinions through reviews, whether positive or negative. It’s up to your company to interact with these in the best possible way.

Encouraging More Customer Reviews

What’s worse than having negative reviews? Having no reviews or customer feedback at all.

Your reputation management plan must include actions that encourage customers to review your brand.

First and foremost, your platform must technically support customer reviews. You should also make sure you are present on review sites like Trustpilot.

The next step is mapping out the customer journey. This helps point out the ideal moments when people are likely to provide reviews. Based on this, you can build touchpoints that encourage more reviews.

For example, an ideal time to ask for a review is after a customer receives their order or has spoken with a support agent.

You can contact customers via email or SMS to gently request a review. It’s also wise to offer an incentive, like a discount or free shipping, in exchange for an honest review (note that you can’t directly ask for a positive review).

Engaging With Positive Reviews

Once you have positive customer reviews to work with, turn them into deeper conversations by responding.

Thank them and tell them that their opinion is important to you. This is one of the simplest and most effective reputation management tools you can use. It helps make customers feel appreciated and provides an authentic experience with your brand. 

A quick response to a positive review can turn a positive experience into a stellar one.

Dealing With Negative Reviews

Negative customer reviews are often perceived as something to be avoided at all costs. But that’s not always the case. 

Negative reviews can often be turned into positive experiences when managed correctly. 

When a customer gives a negative review, you can respond to it just as you would to a positive one. In fact, how you respond to negative reviews should be a pillar of your reputation management plan. 

When a customer writes a bad review, it means that they have a problem with your products or services. What happens next is up to you. You can either argue with the customer and dismiss their problem or use it as an opportunity to help. 

A candid response, a sincere apology, and an offer to assist them may be just what’s needed to turn a negative experience around. This is important not only for the customer but also for all the other potential customers who will read that review.

Positive Reputation Management is Crucial for Your Brand’s Image

To sum up, reputation management is the full array of actions that companies use to shape brand perception.

This includes everything from establishing and maintaining your core values and brand persona to applying a solid SEO strategy, taking control of customer reviews and maximizing your online potential.  

At Net Reputation, our online reputation team helps you build and maintain your positive reputation. We also offer internet privacy solutions that ensure your online journey is safe, positive and productive.

To find out more about our online reputation management services, get in touch with us by calling 844-461-3632 or filling out the contact form below.