Managing your online reputation is a crucial part of your brand’s success. It helps drive your company’s customer acquisition efforts and ongoing customer retention strategies. As your reputation management team works on monitoring and shaping the way your brand is perceived online, keep these best practices in mind:
- Optimize your brand’s local listings
- Engage in social media
- Create an online review management strategy
Find out your brand's online reputation score
Take the guesswork out of your strategy. Instantly generate your brand's online Reputation Scorecard, complete with review highlights, ratings, keyword trends and more.
Managing Your Online Reputation Tip 1: Optimize Your Listings
The first place that most consumers will find you is search engine results pages, which include your business’ online listings such as your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and Apple Maps / Apple Business Connect listing.
Ensure that these listings have updated information, including your business locations’ NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number), hours, etc. Incomplete and inconsistent online listings, as well as listings with bad or outdated data, can confuse and misdirect consumers and impact your traffic and revenue performance.
If your business locations moved to a new address or changed contact information, make sure that these changes are reflected across all the digital properties where you are listed.
Managing Your Online Reputation Tip 2: Engage on Social Media
Social media reputation management goes hand in hand with your general community management practices, helping your team manage your online reputation not only in search results but also in social media channels and online forums and communities.
Apart from harnessing social media to push promotional brand content, your team should also keep an eye out for conversations about the brand. Develop a social listening strategy if this is something you don’t yet have. Answer questions that users bring up when they mention you, steer them towards content that provides additional context if they have an early interest in your offerings, or simply thank people if they mention their experience at one of your locations.
These actions can elevate your social media presence above competitors. It shows consumers that there are real people behind each account and that you are willing to engage with people on multiple platforms. This lends your brand additional credibility and authenticity and reduces any potential consumer friction.
Managing Your Online Reputation Tip 3: Create an Online Review Management Strategy
Simply put, online reviews are the social proof that consumers need before they make a purchase decision. By managing reviews, you can protect and improve your online brand reputation, boost your search engine performance, and foster brand trust among existing and potential customers.
Showcase your best reviews. Reviews provide social proof, which can help inspire trust in consumers who go online to discover businesses. Incorporating reviews into your marketing materials — whether it’s on your website, Facebook business Page, or search ads — can have a major impact on the results of your efforts. Using a website review widget to embed or display online reviews from your review profiles to your own website can even improve your conversation rates, decrease bounce rates, and improve your ad quality scores.
Ask for reviews. Your team should also practice asking for reviews from customers.
Having more reviews is much better than having fewer reviews — unless, of course, most of your reviews are negative. Having a few reviews is better than not having any at all.
Reviews are also one of the biggest factors influencing a company’s local SEO performance.
From this perspective, it makes business sense to learn how to ask for reviews from customers and ensure a steady stream of more and better reviews. After all, when you’re already delivering experiences that customers love, they won’t hesitate to vouch for you. All you have to do is ask. Often, this is the best way to get more reviews.
Respond to reviews. When you do get new reviews and unsolicited feedback, it’s important to let the customers know that you are listening and that you care about making their experiences better. Learning how to respond to negative reviews and looking at positive review response examples can help your team avoid potential reputational crises, while also strengthening your brand reputation. Consumer perceptions immediately improve when a brand responds to reviews, making it more likely that people will come and visit your business locations.
Conclusion
Keeping these key tips in mind can make managing your online reputation easy to do. In the long run, these steps also ensure that you know when, where, and how to pivot if your brand’s reputation is falling under certain benchmarks. In time, these best practices will be second nature, and your company will continue to flourish thanks to a steadily improving online reputation.
