Consumers have become more critical than ever with easy access to the Internet and information about brands. Having an excellent reputation is now essential to your business succeeding in the era. As customers share their experience with your brand online, it has become a primary factor for other consumers' impressions of your business.
Following this, what role do reputation management services play in your organization’s success? These can impact businesses of all sizes but can be especially critical to small businesses that rely on great reviews to establish their footing in the industry.
How managing your brand reputation can help you build your ideal image online.
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What Are Reputation Management Services?
At first encounter, you might think that reputation management is all about fixing lousy news about your business. While that plays a critical part in the service and what providers have to offer, it isn’t exclusively what they can do for your business. As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure – and building a good reputation is key to keeping it up to standards as your business grows.
This can be easier to manage at the start, while your organization is smaller and easier to manage. Any hiccups you encounter can be fixed and improved for the next customer. However, as your business gains more customers, you may find it challenging to keep up with similar concerns and track comments and reviews being shared about you on various platforms.
With an online reputation management service, you can establish precautions and protocols to follow when experiencing poor ratings on the Internet. This can cover social media, search engine reviews, and third-party commentary about your services.
Why Your Organization Needs Online Reputation Management Services?
Your business runs the risk of losing up to 14.7% of your revenue when your customer experience rates poorly to your consumers. This applies to organizations in all industries, particularly if you have a public platform online where your customers can share their experiences with your brand.
With the right reputation management strategy, you can avoid any reputational risk your business may encounter, such as the following:
- Revenue loss and decreased profits
- Low customer impressions and brand engagement
- Poor search engine rankings
- Poor customer retention metrics
- High employee turnover rate
Advantages of Working with a Reputation Management Service
The sooner you start managing your brand’s engagement and the impression you make with your audience, the easier it will be to manage in the future. This gives you a chance to manage both the best and the worst of feedback from your customers, along with the following benefits:
- 92.4% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product when they read trusted reviews.
- The same study shows that featuring positive customer feedback can bolster your content marketing strategy, with 52% of marketers claiming it establishes credibility and builds trust.
- 32% of consumers are likely to visit your website after reading positive reviews about your business, and 83% of them believe that seeing user-generated reviews on the landing page attests to the trustworthiness of a company.
- This shows the influence a positive brand impression has on your business’s success and why it’s essential to foster a positive relationship with your customers from the beginning. Remember that you found a problem worth solving at the start of creating your business.
Types of Reputation Management Services
1. Personal Reputation Management
5. Third-Party Website Management
Different white-label reputation management providers will have various specializations and services to offer. Find one that has the appropriate service to match your requirements to improve your business services.
In your search for the right match for your business needs, we recommend partnering with an agency that can cover the following bases:
Personal Reputation Management
Each encounter you make on social media becomes a matter of discussion when personal and professional accounts are accessible on the Internet. This poses a challenge when developing your brand’s reputation. While your personal relationships can positively impact your business endeavors, negative feedback to your business may also poorly affect your personal accounts.
Managing your personal reputation can support you in balancing this for your staff and their public business profiles as they network with industry peers.
Content Management
Getting negative feedback may be unavoidable since your business can’t produce perfect results all the time. Following bad experiences, 17% of US customers have said they would stop doing business with a brand after one poor encounter, whereas 59% would stop after several negative encounters.
With content management, you can work on the following tasks:
- Featuring positive feedback
- Removing negative content
- Spam management
SEO Management
Create and publish valuable content to populate your website with articles for your audience to enjoy. A crucial part of your content management is integrating SEO best practices. This involves keyword research and optimization, along with content planning and development.
Improving your search engine ranking helps your website’s discoverability. Additionally, featuring positive user feedback on your website encourages new customers to finalize their purchases. Highlight your best products and services, along with their benefits
Social Media Management
While customer satisfaction has always been a priority in gauging your success, it isn’t possible to provide flawless service at all times. With social media at the tip of everyone’s fingers, it’s all the easier to post your sentiments online.
Developing a strategy to manage your reputation on social media naturally results in follower growth, along with crafting good quality content that is valuable to your audience. It’s vital to track how customers post about your business and note how you could improve your services accordingly.
Third-Party Website Management
Beyond social media and the feedback sent to your customer service team, there are also platforms to collate online reviews for businesses. Working with professionals to manage your reputation and sift through these third-party websites can ensure your positive impression is intact and respond to any negative concerns that may be present.
Should You Hire Reputation Management Services?
Once you’ve gathered customer feedback, you can make informed choices on how to address their needs and further improve your products. Think of it similar to market research, analyzing your brand’s impact and measuring how well you can satisfy what your audience is looking for in a business.
At its essence, your goal is to provide a service to your customer. Naturally, ensuring customer satisfaction goes hand in hand with making a sale. With online reputation monitoring, you know how well your products and services are being received and what can be enhanced.
Consider the following attributes, and if they're present in your organization, we recommend partnering with a reputation management service:
You’re Confident in Your Products, but Lack Metrics to Measure Customer Insight
Primarily applicable to smaller teams as they start to grow their business, it will be challenging to address customer concerns for the first time. It’s one thing to receive several batches of positive feedback, but you may be unprepared to handle matters should your services end up being poorly received.
Consulting with reputation management services doesn’t have to be the first resort, but it is an option you can consider when things don’t go according to plan.
You’ve Received Poor Feedback From Previous Customers
Businesses can’t always avoid harsh criticism from their customers, and if matters escalate to the point of harassment, having specialists manage your reputation and support you through the experience can be crucial to recovering your positive standing.
While it isn’t always an option for small businesses, working with reputation specialists can help prepare you for these issues. Working with one from the start may also prevent it from happening altogether.
You’re Eager to Grow Your Service List, but Not Sure How
Receiving positive comments is a good problem, but it can still be a problem if it means not getting enough data to help your business decide on what service or product to develop next. There is always room to grow, and there may come a time when you feel stuck on how to take your work to the next level.
Reputation management services can help you collect the correct data to help inform your business and product development specialists and push your company forward.
Reputation Management Services: Key Takeaways
In summary, we recommend working with a provider of reputation management services for a business of any size so you can take advantage of the following benefits. Below are the essential details to keep in mind:
- Measure your performance through brand impressions to see how well your products are being received.
- Make the correct efforts to develop excellent service, but be prepared for negative feedback.
- Keep track of your customers’ positive and negative comments to help guide your business decisions.
- Consult the expertise of reputation management services to confirm what steps you can take to deal with poor feedback and reward positive reviews.
Professionalreputation management companies can also help you with this process, so we advise looking for the right agency to partner with for your project.
