You may adore your brand and believe it is fantastic, and perhaps your girlfriends, parents, and dog agree. But none of this matter if your target market is simply the guest list for your Thanksgiving dinner.
Every social media comment, review, and blog post redefines and evolves your brand’s online reputation. When someone discovers your company, they base their decisions and purchases on the information they find online.
So, if you want to stay ahead and keep your business afloat, you must proactively manage and improve on all internet feedback.
There are practical steps you can take, as with anything else, to proactively improve your online reputation. In this post, we’ll look at five things you can do to always present your brand in the best light possible.
1. Keep an eye on your online reputation and presence.
Monitoring your brand online allows you to learn about your brand’s current image. This is the first step – it’s difficult to improve anything if you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t.
What you track is determined by where your brand is present. Do people discuss you on social media, forums, or review sites such as TripAdvisor or Amazon? Do you even realize it?
If you own a restaurant, bar, or tourist attraction, you must at the very least monitor online review sites. You can bet that if you have a physical location, people will leave reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google. If you sell physical products, you should also monitor Amazon, eBay, and other online retailers.
Aside from the obvious review sites, you should also consider blogs. You also have forums, blogs, news sites, and all of the social media to worry about. And you must keep track of all those conversations to have a complete picture of your online reputation.
But people are constantly talking about your brand on the internet. Trying to monitor all of these conversations on your own is futile.
We recommend that you track your brand with Mention, which allows you to track any conversation about your brand, anywhere online, and generate analysis and reports with a few simple clicks. A good media monitoring tool allows you to track everything from a single dashboard, eliminating the need to go looking.
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2. Establish an online review strategy.
Online reviews are becoming ubiquitous – they’re the first thing people see when they Google your company.
You must have a solid strategy for managing your online reviews if you want to improve your online reputation. Most people don’t bother leaving you reviews unless they’re really upset and can’t wait to vent online and ask all their friends to do the same. You don’t want to entrust your online reputation to these irate customers.
You can begin by actively soliciting a review after a transaction or after a customer has used your service for some time. As an example:
- After a customer purchases from your physical store or online store, ask that customer to take a moment to provide feedback on the products purchased and service provided.
- Customer success or account managers in B2B can encourage customers to leave a review after a follow-up call or after assisting the customer with something.
Mention has an in-app pop-up that asks users how satisfied they are with our tool. If they give us a rating higher than 8 out of 10, we ask them to leave us a review on a public review site. If customers are pleased with your service or product, they will usually agree to leave you a nice message if you ask nicely and explain how much it would mean to you.
There are numerous other ways to actively improve your online reviews, such as creating official profiles, responding to reviews, monitoring online review sites, and so on.
3. Collaborate with influencers who have a strong online reputation.
For a long time, influencer marketing has been a major industry trend. Big brands generate significant ROI with beauty and fashion bloggers in the B2C world, and the B2B world loves to hear from experts and industry influencers who’ve made it.
It improves your online reputation in three ways:
- It broadens your reach: ‘I’ve never heard of you, but I’ve heard of them.’
- It lends credibility – ‘I don’t know you or your brand, but I believe in them.’
- It enables cross-promotion: ‘I like them, maybe I’ll like you, too.’
4. Be consistent and follow through on your promises.
As with any human relationship, keeping your word and being consistent in all aspects of your communication with customers is critical to developing a positive online reputation.
Did you offer a discount to a customer as an apology for poor service? Did you promise to “speak to that employee” about a problem raised on Twitter? Following through and implementing the changes you’ve promised are critical to maintaining your online reputation.
Because everything is said online and in public, anyone interested in the story can follow it and find out if it ends badly.
Your marketing team can spend a billion dollars on a campaign about you being a “caring” brand, but if your customer service is never available or treats unhappy customers disrespectfully, no influencers or marketing speak can help you save your online reputation.
However, if you use customer feedback to make real changes in your business – and improve your organization – savvy customers will notice and return for more.
5. Keep an eye on your competitors' online reputations and strategies.
Your online reputation will always be relative to that of your competitors.
Do people prefer you or them? Why do customers prefer your competitors over you? What are people saying about your two brands when they compare them?
This is all critical information that will assist you in improving your online reputation.
The best advantage of monitoring competitors is that you can avoid making many mistakes. Either you notice something they’re doing well and can replicate it before you miss out again, or you can learn from their mistakes.
Conclusion
Your online reputation is similar to a relationship, except it involves hundreds of thousands of people. It’s undoubtedly more difficult to manage than a typical human relationship, but the principles remain the same.
Be aware of what others think of you, use their feedback to improve yourself, observe what others are doing, surround yourself with good people, and be honest and reliable. It’s not easy, but it’s straightforward.
