What Is Online Reputation Management: A QuickGuide
Subway went through a huge crisis in the year 2000 when their spokesperson of 15 years was found to be involved in illegal activities. This was a huge blow to Subway’s reputation since he was the face of the brand for over a decade. Fogle was the success story Subway sold to its customers, given that he lost 200 pounds consuming only Subway sandwiches.
Subway then tooka strong initiative and rebranded itself to separate Fogle’s image from theirs. They improved the quality of their products, pivoted to sports marketing to reflect their health consciousness, and brought the faces of its founders to show their legacy. This is exactly what reputation management is. Most businesses being online nowadays have to maintain a reputation on digital platforms as well, which is known as ORM or online reputation management.
Why is ORM poised to gain increased importance in 2023?
Your marketing activities are an extension of your brand, and even a speck of negativity reflects largely on your brand by the means of negative reviews and PR fiascos, and ultimately may hit your revenues. Your brand is what your customers think of you and how you make them feel. With more people moving to digital platforms, ORM is more important than ever. What you put out on your website or social media definitely forms an integral part of customer engagement but your customer reviews can either make or break your brand.
Customers choose to go through online reviews, comments on your social media handles, peer reviews, and recommendations from their personal network - to decide whether they should invest in your product. Here, online reputation management becomes essential to not only protect your brand but also to build trust and transparency. This helps your brand get constantly discovered and recommended among your ideal customers.
Challenges in the ORM process execution
Hiring and setting up a whole team for online review management is an expensive and tedious task. If you can’t afford to hire a dedicated team, review management becomes the responsibility of your already occupied employees. This ends up in overworked employees, poor management, the resolution of issues raised by customers, and longer wait in responding to the reviews. A total nightmare for companies no matter their size.
Next, one bad review could affect your overall brand credibility. It’s important that your ORM team is on their toes, all the time, and that each review and concern is tended to. Again, huge volumes of reviews are difficult to manage manually. Customers with a complaint are more likely to be impatient and leave multiple negative reviews on multiple platforms. This results in delayed and missed responses.
It’s important to figure out a way to reduce this charge on your employees and allow them to do what they do best. Automating certain aspects using an online reputation management tool will allow you to save time, resources, and money.
Why should you use an ORM tool to automate reputation management?
1. Boost customer engagement with speedy responses: Over time, quick issue resolution builds trust and encourages the customer to engage freely with the brand in future. Doing this using an online reputation management tool means you can achieve better results in less time.
2. High volumes become manageable: Incorporating automation cuts down on more than 70% of your time and effort on responding to reviews and keeping a track of everything. While 100% automation is never ideal or advisable, incorporating it to the best of its capacity is the best thing you can do.
3. It generates smart insights: An excellent online reputation management strategy can generate granular insights on how your business can increase its brand awareness. For example, each review can act as feedback, helping your brand improve, all the more so when launching a new product. In addition, even when the reviews are not encouraging, your team can address the areas of concern.
How to choose an ORM tool?
Social media listening andengagement: It is extremely important to identify and understand your audience as a brand. It is equally necessary to monitor their conversations online and understand their needs as your customers.
This could become a difficult task if done manually, but with automated strategies in place using an ORM tool like QuickMetrix, social listening gives data-backed insights into what your customers need and how they feel about your brand, be it negative or positive.
Equipped with this data, you can make more informed decisions about your social media strategy.
Reporting: Gathering data and responses is of no use if the online digital reputation management tool you are using doesn’t give you a quantitative and qualitative analysis of how your brand is being perceived by your audience. A solid reporting system would comprise a detailed review of your campaigns’ effectiveness.
Competitor tracking: No matter the audience or industry, you’re always competing with your peers for attention, followers, traffic, and sales. A good ORM tool like QuickMetrix would not just manage your crises but also create opportunities for you by tracking your competitors' content and social media strategies. You can then use this data to analyze what works for your competitors and implement these strategies in your digital marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
An online reputation management strategy isn’t just about rebutting hurdles and responding to negative reviews. The main purpose of having a solid ORM system in place is to create growth opportunities for your business in newer and larger environments.
Lastly, for fast-growing companies, ORM becomes an integral part of the business marketing and growth plan. Unsurprisingly, the customers are already talking about your brand and will continue to do so. Your task is to set an effective online reputation management strategy that can help you navigate through the online discussions across multiple customer engagement platforms and create positive sentiment about your brand.
The best online reputation management tools like QuickMetrix help businesses track, monitor and respond to online reviews.
With an effective ORM automation tool like QuickMetrix, it becomes easier for you to distinguish your business from competitors. A well-designed ORM strategy is a game-changer for businesses.
