The consumer today is smart and advanced: he makes fewer and fewer rash purchases, more and more studies the product and, of course, the person who offers this product. If you do not control and improve the company’s image on the Internet, even the most promising project can fail. The topic of our today’s conversation is online reputation management. We will tell you why this is important and how to move from the «let them talk» mode to «let them talk the way we need».
Who needs to manage your online reputation and why
Business reputation is a comprehensive opinion about a company. This includes everything that is thought and said about the organization: the partners’ impressions of cooperation, and customer reviews about the seller and his products, and the opinions of employees (current and former).
Any mention on the Internet is a brick involved in the construction of a monolith called the image of the organization. The more negativity there is in the general reputational background, the fewer consumers and counterparties will want to deal with the brand. And vice versa.
There are at least three ironclad arguments why online reputation management is a critical marketing point:
- Sales and revenue growth.
According to statistics, more than 80% of active Internet users are guided primarily by reviews when making an order decision. What the seller says about his product or service is a secondary factor for customers. It is logical to trust the disinterested party more. Part of the audience even makes offline purchases only after searching and studying information on the Internet.
In the B2B sector, it is even more important not to lose face. The cost of a mistake when making large transactions is much higher than in retail, so partners are chosen carefully.
- Elimination and compensation of negativity.
There are so many people, so many opinions, and also tastes, worldviews, moods, after all. Very often, angry comments are the result of the author’s emotional state at that moment, they are erroneous and biased. And the stigma has already been placed, the reasons are of no interest to anyone. And this is not to mention black PR, which competitors sometimes do not disdain.
Reputation protection consists of balancing the brand image, not allowing negativity to prevail over positive points.
- Повышение клиентоориентированности.
Working on improving the external reputational background, the organization gets an excellent opportunity to develop and improve from the inside. There is no need to spend extra money on collecting data, in the opinion of the client, and analyzing it. It is already carried out as part of reputation marketing.
Studying responses (good and bad) is an effective way to form a clear image of the target audience, to find out its preferences, needs and «pains». And this is an ideal basis for improving the product and service, for adjusting and improving the business strategy.
So, the formation of an image is a process that must be kept under control, which must and can be managed. Next, we tell you exactly how.
4 Best Tools to Improve Business Online Image
Building an image of a positive and reliable brand is a strategy that should include the full range of tools available.
Advertisement
Competent advertising is the best way to make a positive first impression on the target audience, declare yourself and create the right association. Native advertising gives a good effect — unobtrusive, in the form of a kind or expert recommendation. Contextual advertising also works well for the image. Users tend to trust those they see in the SERPs.
Contact with the audience
Constant interaction with the target public is important for business. This is a presence on popular specialized platforms, maintaining social networks, and publishing interesting and high-quality thematic content. All this is a working way to maintain the interest and loyalty of the target audience, respond to pains and objections, and increase coverage.
Working with reviews
One frankly negative response can cross out dozens of positive ones. But here we are talking not just about deleting reviews of this kind, but about comprehensive work.
This is:
• encouraging customers to share their opinion about a product or service;
• Fast and high-quality feedback, regardless of the nature of the comment;
• control of the balance of praise with small remarks;
• solving problematic issues and further notifying the dissatisfied consumer.
The main task of feedback is to show that the supplier cares, that he is attentive to customer problems and, if possible, solves them, becomes better.
SERM
There are two such terms in marketing:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the general formation of a company’s reputation on the Internet;
- Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) – a narrower direction, control of search results about the brand in Yandex and Google systems.
Modern marketers have unified the terminology. Today, when we talk about SERM, we mean a whole strategy — a set of actions aimed at protecting and improving the online reputation of a business. But first of all, it implies the creation of an ideal picture in search engines.
A suitable example to explain how SERM works would be medical marketing (promotion of clinics and other medical and pharmaceutical institutions). For example, wanting to know more about the nearest dentistry, a person will enter its name in the search and get a list of excerpts from the sites. The first in the output will be Yandex (or Google) maps, the site and social networks of the institution itself, and then — profile portals like “prodoctorov.ru”, “doktu.ru”, etc. And “otzovik” — where without it! In fact, here you have a ready-made space for promotion and image building.
A large list of measures is taken, including marketing tricks, so that in the search results everything was “beautiful” The task of a specialist in SERM — to make the visitor see excerpts in the style of “was very satisfied” and in no case saw comments from the series of “no more”. The final goal is to create a sustainable positive image of the brand, which leads to attracting new customers, increasing sales and revenues.
P.S.
There is a wonderful aphorism: “Every man has as many reputations as the number of people who know him”. It is the same story with a brand. Is it worth giving up the precious image of the company to the will of the audience of many thousands, letting it go to its own devices? Practice shows that you can’t. If you do not work on your company’s reputation, others will certainly take care of it!
You can always entrust your online reputation management to a team of professionals from a marketing agency «Raspiarych» www.raspiarych.ru
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