To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
A company’s online reputation is a powerful influencer to customers, both existing and prospective. But it’s not enough to build a strong brand online; you must also manage your brand’s reputation.
In addition to a strong website and social media presence, you must ensure that your brand makes a good impression online. Someone’s negative review or even a negative news story can unfairly tarnish your brand’s reputation. This is why it’s vital to manage your brand’s reputation online.
You can enhance your company’s online reputation by taking certain steps to mitigate damage and confront problems early — or even before they occur. Your investment in online reputation management will pay off well in the long run, and it requires a long-term commitment.
The Power of Online Reputation Management
A fundamental principle of online reputation management, or ORM, is to establish and maintain a positive perception of a business or person. Each online activity by a brand should be carefully monitored and managed to present the best possible view of a company to customers.
ORM is tied to SEO, or search engine optimization, because SEO prioritizes what appears in search results about a business or a person. Customers use search engines to find businesses and services, so it’s important to manage your presence online to ensure that those customers see it in the best possible light.
A basic step in an ORM strategy is ensuring that only the best results about your business appear high in those search results. To make sure that happens, you must be in control of those results as much as possible and own whatever message is being seen by your target audience.
An ORM strategy is a multichannel approach, dealing with any issues across platforms that might impact a company’s reputation. ORM should include a mix of:
- Owned media: Content and assets created by employees and customers, user-generated material, reviews, and brand-related content.
- Paid media: Sponsored posts on social media, lead generation, native advertising, and affiliate programs.
- Earned media: Influencer marketing, public relations, and media relations, including television, radio, and print.
- Shared media: Community service and partnerships, organic social media, and co-branding campaigns.
The Importance of Online Reputation Management
ORM is critical for companies, but many leverage it more reactively than proactively. If you make ORM part of an ongoing digital strategy for your brand, you can react to problems more easily and effectively before significant damage is done to your company’s reputation.
ORM can help change the narrative before your company’s reputation is harmed. By monitoring your brand’s mentions and reviews online, you can see and respond to negativity to ensure that it doesn’t do significant harm to your business. If you don’t monitor for this, recovering an online reputation can be particularly difficult.
ORM also gives you insight into your customers, what they expect, prefer, and experience with your brand. This will help sharpen your marketing campaigns to speak to the issues that matter most to your customers. It also helps to ensure more effective use of marketing dollars.
Additionally, ORM helps your company stay ahead of any problems that may be surfacing. It allows you to protect your online reputation by keeping a finger on the pulse of the public — and more importantly, your customers. You can develop proactive measures that will help mitigate potential problems in the future. And you can monitor your brand’s mentions in third-party content to determine whether you should take steps to address any online issues that might occur.
You may want the help of a professional ORM expert, like Status Labs, that works with companies on effective ORM strategies. They can help develop proactive measures that will allow you to maintain control of your company’s online narrative in search results. They can also help create a response plan for any future problems that may arise.
Your digital presence as a company can quickly be impacted, but an effective ORM strategy will take back control of your reputation.
