Aside from its employees, your business’s single largest asset isn’t the patents it holds, its office spaces, or even its distribution and supply channels. All of these assets, though important, pale in comparison to your company’s reputation. A single statement taken out of context can result in your business’s reputation crashing down to the ground, especially when it goes viral for the wrong reasons.

Your potential customers will likely look up your business online before they buy anything from you. If they find something negative about your brand, they will most likely take their business elsewhere. This is where online reputation management (ORM) comes in. 

Why Is Online Reputation Management Important?

More than half of digital marketers say ORM plays a significant role in their company’s success. However, we feel this figure does not reflect the full reality. All businesses should be conscious of their online reputation, regardless of their niche or business model. ORM is important for businesses that wish to maintain a positive brand identity and attract consumers. In other words, all businesses!

This is confirmed by a survey conducted in 2018. The study claims more than 60% of companies monitor their online reputation at least once a day, with 21% checking in on their reputation every hour. These businesses obsess over their online reputation because bad press results in a loss of customers. 

Whether you’re dealing with a local business or a larger one, you wouldn’t want to transact with a business that has a shady reputation, would you? ORM helps your brand transform its online presence into something that generates leads and attracts customers instead of turning them away. 

How Does ORM Impact Your Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing and online reputation management are closely intertwined. An excellent online reputation makes it easier for digital marketers to generate leads and convert them into customers, while a poor ORM performance complicates your digital marketing team’s job. 

Here are some ways online reputation management makes an impact on your digital marketing strategy:

Sales

People make a purchase from your business because they feel they can trust the quality of its products and its after-sales support. That trust is built mainly on the strength of reviews and feedback from your customers.

A quick Google search of companies that operate in your niche will bring up the businesses that have the highest star ratings. Because of changes to the Google algorithm, a single one-star review can have a massive impact on your business. On the other hand, a five-star review from a satisfied customer can convince potential customers to give your business a chance. This means review management has a real impact on your sales figures.

Review Management

Aside from boosting your Google search performance, you can also use reviews as social proof on your home page and product landing pages. Good reviews will show up in search results and improve your online profile. 

The first step in claiming a presence in Google is to create a new Gmail account specifically for your business and claim your Google My Business profile. From there, you can ask your loyal customers to leave their feedback.

Search Engine Optimization

Online reputation management helps your business improve its search engine ranking. Performing activities related to ORM, such as claiming business listings across online platforms such as LinkedIn or Google My Business, increase your brand’s online presence. Encouraging your customers to post their reviews and write testimonials will help push your brand to the first page of the search results.

SEO-related activities also help you boost your online reputation. If you write guest posts on high-authority websites, you gain important backlinks, build your credibility, and enhance your reputation. 

Online Referrals

Experts estimate that as of 2019, 65% of customers came to businesses via online referrals. If your reputation is strong, your clients and those in your network will recommend you. 

Customer feedback management is an important part of ORM in digital marketing. While it is impossible to get purely positive feedback all the time, responding to negative comments and using intelligent email scheduling for these responses will send a signal to potential customers that your business is working hard to provide a satisfactory user experience. 

Brand Visibility

While people claim that bad publicity is still publicity, that is not the case in industries where the competition is stiff. There’s always someone else offering a similar product or solution. 

Your brand’s online reputation might be the one factor that sets you apart from the competition, so you need to take ORM seriously if you want to increase visibility and improve customer awareness of your products. ORM in digital marketing includes publishing blogs, social media posts, and forum posts about your brand and products – content designed to enhance your brand’s standing as a leader in its niche. 

The only visibility your brand should be aiming for is positive visibility. Online reputation management helps you achieve that visibility and maintain it.

How To Identify the Status of Your Online Reputation

Before you can implement ORM in digital marketing, you need to know where your business currently stands. Here are four things you can do to assess your online reputation and draw up a plan for reputation management.

Search for your Business on Google

Your search results tell you a lot about your business. Run a Google search for your business, your product name, and the people who work for you, then look at the first five results (not counting paid ads). 

  • Is your brand in the first five results? If not, you will need to revisit your SEO strategy.
  • Are those results generally positive? While you won’t get positive reviews all the time, you need to ensure that Google shows a favorable first impression of your business.
  • Is there any additional evidence that your business is good at what it does, like thought leadership pieces or guest posts?
  • Are there any other pieces of content in your first five results that need to be addressed right away, like unfair allegations against your company?

You should also check that your business information, such as its address, business hours, website, and contact details are correct on Google My Business. If not, it’s time to update it.

Check your Brand’s Social Channels and Hashtags

Your social media channels are also an important component of your online branding and reputation management. People will use your pages to check out your business information, leave reviews and comments, and engage with your brand. Use this checklist to run an audit of your social channels:

  • How many followers does your brand have?
  • When did you last create a post?
  • Do you respond to comments? If so, how often?
  • Does your brand reply to messages? If so, how long does it take (not counting chatbots)?
  • Do you feel that your posts truly reflect what your brand is all about?

Besides your own branded social accounts, you need to check what people on social media say about your company. 

You can search your brand name and company hashtags and see how many people are talking about you. If they are talking about your business, is it positive? If not, do any of your followers defend your brand, or do other negative commenters chime in?

Browse Through Review Sites

Much of your online reputation comes from the comments your customers (and critics) leave on review sites. You need to take a close look at these sites to get a sense of overall customer sentiment towards your brand. Here are a few ways to do that:

  • Check your Google reviews. How many stars do you have? Do you respond to reviews, and do you have a strategy for these responses?
  • Look at your Facebook reviews. How many stars does your Facebook page have? What is the overall tone of the reviews your customers leave? How quickly does your social media team reply to these reviews?
  • Does your business have a presence on Yelp, Angie’s List, TrustPilot, and similar sites? If not, do you have any plans for creating one? What is your strategy for dealing with critical comments?
  • How does your business rank as an employer? Do your current and former employees have good things to say about how you manage your business, or is it a mixed bag? While Glassdoor is not a product review site per se, many customers will think twice about making a purchase from a business that treats its employees poorly. 

How Do Your Products Stack Up Against the Competition?

Aside from review sites, you could also look at websites that compare your products and services with the ones your competitors sell. How do your products stack up against the competition? This information will help you improve your products and determine how you’ll market them.

Set Up Reputation Monitors

Unless you have a huge team that operates around the clock, you can’t monitor everything manually. Therefore, you will need a tool to monitor your reputation in real-time. 

For example, Google Alerts will “scrub” the Internet for mentions of your business, key people in your company, and your products. Just set up your relevant keywords, and they’ll be delivered to your inbox. You might also use another reputation monitoring software like BrightLocal or Qualtrics for more advanced metrics and settings. 

These solutions will alert you to potential issues with your reputation and allow you to take action before they start inflicting significant damage to your business. 

Bottom Line

As long as your business is in operation, people will always have something to say about it, and not all opinions will be positive. Doing online reputation management will help attract customers and address criticism by emphasizing your business’s positive aspects and addressing its critics. 

ORM in digital marketing is not something you do once and then forget. Like all the other aspects of your marketing strategy, it needs constant monitoring and continuous improvement to ensure that your reputation stays positive. Regardless of your industry, you need to protect your reputation and convince potential customers that they’re dealing with a brand that knows what it’s doing.

Bio

Owen Baker is a content marketer for Voila Norbert, an online email verification tool. He has spent most of the last decade working online for a range of marketing companies. When he’s not busy writing, you can find him in the kitchen mastering new dishes.

Digital MarketingDigital marketing in today’s technologically advanced world means much more than just having a business website. A company needs to capitalize on every opportunity to achieve effective marketing techniques in a highly competitive business environment, from social media posts to email campaigns.

Marketing is a constantly evolving field, so it’s important to have a working knowledge of the elements of a solid digital marketing campaign so you can adapt your strategy to your business model.

Digital Marketing and SEO

SEOOne of the most important parts of marketing is SEO, or search engine optimization. Search engine companies are constantly revising their algorithms to ensure a level playing field, and SEO experts are always looking for new ways to get their companies on top of the rankings.

Basically, search engines index websites and rank them based on their content, update history, relevance to search terms, and user interaction. It’s important to consistently evaluate your website’s search engine rankings and assess your SEO. Good SEO can guarantee your potential customers will find you when searching for terms relevant to your business.

PPC Advertising

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is another important element of digital marketing. Advertisers pay for ad space on a website or in search results for specific terms, and the advertiser pays the host whenever a user clicks on the ad. This can be a great way to ensure your website and digital marketing materials get in front of the right users.

Affiliate Marketing

Another great way to promote your brand is to work with other businesses related to your industry. Cross-promotion, or affiliate marketing, can help you get a foot in the door with established partner companies’ consumer bases and expand your sphere of influence. It’s important to consider potential partners to make sure you’re doing business with people who share your values.

Digital marketing has tremendous potential for any size company, and it is essentially a requirement for modern business in the digital age. Think of the efforts you’ve made on the digital marketing front and look for new ways to reach your customers online.

With well over 1 billion users, no matter what your market niche is, you’re bound to find targeted customers on Facebook. Luckily, Facebook offers relatively low costs advertising solutions with easy-to-create ad campaigns that you can use to reach millions potential customers.

Facebook adsUsing Facebook Ads you can promote your pages, your posts, websites, opt-ins or just about anything else you can thinks of. Facebook calls this your campaign type and you can have as many active campaigns as you want.  The ads will display either in the news feed itself or inside the right-hand sidebar. This placement is also your choice and depending on what type of ad you are displaying.

The budget for your ad is easy to control and can be adjusted anytime. Your ad can run for a set length of time or until your daily maximum is reached. You can pay based on impressions or clicks and success can be measured on a analytics dashboard. Using Facebook ads can lead to more traffic and higher conversion for your products and offers.

A simple outline of the steps are as follows:

  1. Choose your campaign type (purpose of your ad)
  2. Choose where your ad will display (in the news feed or on the right sidebar)
  3. Set up a budget with a daily or lifetime limit
  4. Use either the Facebook ad creator or the power editor to create your ad
  5. Select your target customer base
  6. Watch your statistics on Facebook’s ad center dashboard
  7. Test and improve your ads for even higher success rates

One of the most unique features of using Facebook ads is the amount of targeting you can do for desired customers. You decide who sees your ads based on demographics and even hobbies. This helps you attract only those people who are likely to be interested in what you’re offering, saving you time and advertising dollars. Modifying your targets will change the amount you have to pay for the ad so this is another way you can control your costs as well.

As with any professional marketing campaign you will want to test your ads in order to increase your traffic and opt-in rates over time. Facebook ads are a great way to boost your business without spending a ton of money from your marketing budget.

Social Media: A Review

Ten years ago, if you would have mentioned the term “social media” to an Internet friend, they would have had no idea what you meant. But in the year 2014, nearly everyone with an Internet connection has heard of sites like Facebook, adding momentum and force to the social media advertising trend.

Social media is big business, and financial figures state that social media is scheduled to generate 11 billion dollars in total revenue by the year 2017! In 2013, social media made a total of 6.1 billion.

So, you can see how social media is poised to become an incredible force in online advertising in the very near years to come, and why you should seriously consider incorporating a social media marketing strategy for your business.

Social media keywords on pieces of paper all cut up on a table.

A Brief History Of The Most Popular Social Media Sites

StumbleUpon – Founded in November 2002 by Garrett Camp and a few other associates, as of April 2012, StumbleUpon now has more than 25 million registered users.

Facebook – Founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. As of March 2013, Facebook has a total of 1.11 billion active users, globally.

LinkedIn – Founded in December of 2002, LinkedIn boasts a total of 259 million users across more than 200 countries as of June 2013.

YouTube – Launched by three former Paypal employees in the year 2005, YouTube is now one of the most popular video sharing / social media comment sites ever. YouTube was purchased by Google for 1.65 billion dollars in 2006.

Tumblr – Founded by David Karp in the year 2007, this social media site is home to 205.9 million blogs.

Foursquare – This local search and discovery network site was launched in 2009 by Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley. As of 2014, it has 45 million registered users.

Twitter – Founded in 2006 by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone, as of 2014 Twitter now has over 500 million users. 271 million of these are “active” users.

Google+ – Launched in 2011 by Google and open to everyone, as of 2013 there are 540 million active, registered users.

Some Interesting Facts About Social Media You Might Not Know

  • 60% of Google+ users log in at least once a day to check on their accounts.
  • 23% of Facebook users check their accounts multiple times, 5+ times per day.
  • 2 new members join the LinkedIn network every second!
  • A total of 58 million tweets are sent every day!
  • The Google +1 button is used 5 billion times daily!

How The Future Of Social Media Is Shaping The Face Of Modern Business

Individuals connected throughout the world via social media.

Sharing information and what you like is what social media sites are all about. Google allows us to +1 a site, and show the world how much we appreciate a specific page. Facebook allows us to “Like” a page, and thusly increase Internet awareness of a specific page or site.

Additionally, we can leave comments on social media pages that contain helpful insight, allowing social media business owners to improve the quality of the products and services they offer.

Social media pages are also highly capable of going “viral”, which happens because of a chain reaction of events.

First, a social media page will post an original and unique piece of content.

Second, it becomes popular because of the valuable, unique, funny, or otherwise noteworthy characteristic of the content.

Third, the popularity of the unique content is shared with friends and acquaintances until many thousands of people visit and agree that the content is noteworthy enough to share. And it’s at that point, that a social media page has officially gone, “viral”.

With sites like Facebook having over a billion registered users, there’s no stopping social media and how it’s scheduled to play a part in fostering business. Social media sites are wonderful for allowing any Internet user to share pages they find valuable and to spread the word about content they find beneficial.

It can seem kind of tedious right out of the gate with a brand spanking new Instagram account. You post all these fantastic selfies but no one is liking them, what gives?! Have no fear, if you’re in this situation, this blog will really help you.

Content is king

Screenshot of Instagram app displaying a photo from user daniel_kruzel.

Just because you’re posting A LOT of content doesn’t mean you should be getting likes. Even though the latest selfie at the beach may be glamorous to you, does it really look great to others? Look at the composition of the shot, is it flowing or is your face the ONLY thing in the frame? A good reference when composing shots (yes, even for Instagram) is to follow the rule of thirds.

The other thing to consider in relations to content is make sure that the lighting is good. Yes, you have lots of filters and third-party apps you can use to correct the image but without a strong starting point, you won’t be able to succeed.

Short and eloquent description

Screenshot of Instagram app users photo.

Lets start by saying that every person has their own unique style of content writing. Some like short and direct while others like to tell stories. For the case of Instagram it is important to remember the saying “a picture says a thousand words.”

SEE MORE: Why blogging is still important in a world of micro-blogging.

With that being said don’t have the description describe the image. Individuals are looking for the users unique perspective on what this image invoked within them, pushing them to create a caption that holds the emotion behind what they saw before the lens.

Hashtags – Yay or Nay

There is a lot of debate about hashtags currently among social media marketers. To many and you’re pushing limits, to few and you’re breaking a rule. The typical agreed upon number of hashtags for a  post now is between 2-3. With Instagram however, you can push that a bit. Don’t hashtag so much that your content disappears but between 5-10 hashtags are appropriate. If you can use less though, do so!

SEE MORE: Three things to KNOW about hashtags

When choosing hashtags pick ones that will add value to your content. For example, a photo of a cup of coffee from a local coffee shop in Santa Monica, CA, make sure to utilize #local or #santamonica. People search for hashtags all the time, which is how they will discover your posts and you.

Screenshot of Instagram photo.

When it comes down to it, all these things will help you gain followers! However the other important factor here is to go out and discover others photos on Instagram. Yes, finding your friends and liking them is great, but search for hashtags of niche interests you may have and start liking photos from there you like and following repeat IG’ers that you like.

It is not a quick thing to grow your following organically but following these tips will certainly help get you going in the right direction.

Looking to grow your online presence with Instagram and other social networks but not sure where to start? Contact us today for a free consultation.

Have a question for the author or want to add your own tips, do so below in the comments. 

Social networks are very popular these days. Everyone seems to have accounts on various networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest. Because of how popular these social networks are, it is not surprising that many businesses have deemed it necessary to be present in these networks to improve their market reach. You can use this to your advantage if you want to start your own business online or if you want to make your online business become more visible. Social media marketing is very useful and cost-effective, which is ideal for small business owners and those who would like to have a marketing campaign without spending a fortune.

Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and other social networking sites are great avenues for lead generation. Sure, it may look like it’s very simple to start a social media campaign. However, to be competitive and to achieve optimum benefits, you need to use effective social media strategies.

Here are some things you have to remember when using social media to your advantage.

Avoid Spam

What you post in Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites should be useful for your target audience. You can post articles, news, sales products, new products and other related posts. Don’t easily get discouraged when you only start with a few people in your network. People won’t flood in your page immediately. Friends and followers will come as you establish your reputation online. Be sure also that you know the policies in the social networking site you are using. In Facebook for instance, spam is not allowed. Your account may be blocked if you have too many friend requests in a span of two days.

Focus on Maintaining Good Relationships with Your Customers

Remember that you are using Social Media to build and maintain relationships with your customers. Interacting and engaging with followers and customers is important to build trust and to improve your reputation online. Most people will sign up for every social networking site. However, instead of overwhelming yourself with too many social networking channels, it may be better to just focus on one or two channels first. Not logging in to your Twitter or Facebook account will only make you lose potential customers. Once you have established yourself in one channel, you can then move on to another one.

 Make Use of Videos and Pictures More

Videos and photos get the attention of viewers more than just texts. Always keep your customers in mind when you use social networking sites to promote your business. Make use of multimedia like promotional videos and pictures. Social networking channels when used properly will allow your company to increase profits. Satisfied customers will recommend your page to others. However, it is also true for unhappy clients. They are even more likely to post about their discontent about your company than the satisfied clients. To avoid making mistakes, you can always seek advice from professionals.

Need help starting a social media campaign for your business? Contact eBizUniverse at 1-800-379-2829. You may also fill out our contact form to send your inquiries.