Reputation Management for Business - Key Strategies You Should Be Aware Of

In the past, television and print advertising shaped consumer purchasing decisions. That’s all over now. Consumers have more control and, in most cases, will decide on the business they want to buy from by using information online.

This means you can only push your business toward success if its online image is squeaky clean. The big hurdle here is that many business owners have no idea how they can build their online reputation while also increasing brand awareness. 

The good news is you can use tried and tested strategies - the best of which we’ll show you if you continue scrolling down.

How Important is a Positive Online Reputation?

If you’re unsure about whether you should invest more effort into reputation management for business, here’s the truth:

Evaluating search engine results is where a large majority of customers start their purchasing journey. This means that the public perception of your brand directly influences a prospect’s future behavior. In a sense, you must start managing your reputation sooner rather than later if you’re to increase your sales. 

What Influences Your Online Reputation? 

Well, almost everything that is written about your business. This goes for the quantity and quality of online reviews, sentiments on social media sites, news articles, as well as visibility in business directories, among others.

While this seems like a lot of work, reputation management for business is more than worth it. 

First, a positive image will boost your sales, reinforce your brand, and most importantly, have a drastic impact on your search engine ranking. Plus, it’s by far the most straightforward method of building trust, which is something that will pay off in the long run. 

Impact of Poor Reputation

Reputation management for business can be even more important if your online standing takes a major hit. In the event you have a bunch of negative reviews or a news-publicized crisis that ruins your brand image, you’ll also feel these reflected in your revenue. 

According to data, negative reviews or press are enough for most customers to avoid purchasing from a business. Moreover, a single negative article at the top of the search engine results may cause the business to lose close to 22% of its customers. 

Granted, a few negative reviews may not hurt a large corporate business like McDonald's, but a small local company with a bad reputation? It may hinder its momentum and cause it to go out of business. 

Basics of Online Reputation Management for Business

There are different approaches to managing one’s business reputation. Yet, in most circumstances, the basics will pretty much involve:

• Evaluating your online reputation by analyzing the search results and social media pages
• Building websites, social media profiles, and blogs to develop more web properties 
• Creating positive SEO content (such as press releases or blog posts) to engage and inform your target audience
• Pushing positive materials to the forefront via content promotion
• Managing and generating online reviews

The good news is that your reputation management efforts have a lot of overlap with other digital marketing practices like SEO. This means you most likely already have the “infrastructure” in place to do things like managing your reviews, which will also provide a passive boost to your search engine rankings.

Key Reputation Management Strategies

So how do you start? Easy - start implementing some of the essential reputation management strategies:

1.  Managing your Google Business Profile

Google’s listing service allows you to claim a listing and populate it with key information surrounding your business. Actively managing your Google Business Profile and updating it with photos and relevant information will go a long way in boosting your image in a highly saturated online environment. 

2. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your pages to increase their search result standing. Since search engines like Google want to deliver the most relevant results to their users, they’ll boost web properties that incorporate on-page (and off-page factors) that help search algorithms with proper index information.

Ranking nationally is certainly an admirable goal, but local businesses should mostly look at local SEO, which can boost their positions with customers in their immediate area. 

3. Social media marketing

Social media channels like X, Instagram, and Facebook are essential aspects of a brand’s overall reputation. Social media platforms have an unmatched ability to provide additional promotional channels for businesses of all sizes and are one of the most simple ways to connect with their customers and share promotional content. 

4. Review Management

While generating positive reviews is certainly important, reputation management for businesses also includes tackling the problem of fake or harmful negative reviews. 

This means you’ll need to have a review response strategy that encourages happy customers to leave positive reviews. You know the story - you may have 500 happy customers who never sing their praises online, but one unhappy customer will publicly dish it all out (and sometimes even exaggerate). In fact, it’s not uncommon for a few mean reviews to snowball into a de facto catastrophe if left unattended. 

The easiest way to go about it is to use a review management platform like ReviewArm. This software allows you to keep track of all your reviews across different sites from a single dashboard. What’s even better is that each time you receive a review, you’ll get a notification so you can respond to the reputational threat right away. 

The selling point is the system that allows you to automatically send review requests via text or email to customers as soon as you close a sale. Thus, you can take advantage of timing and lock down positive reviews that have the potential to outweigh any negative reviews your business receives. 

Get ReviewArm and Start Managing Your Reputation the Right Way

Managing your business reputation can be a lot easier if you have the right tools. ReviewArm provides you with everything you need to reinforce your reputation, steer it in the right direction, and build a solid path toward business growth. 

Start supercharging your online reputation - contact us and we’ll discuss your next steps.