Many clients ask how to create a reputation management plan. The online world has no shortage of angry voices. And if you’re battling any crisis, you may have already discovered firsthand how quickly negative comments can spread across the web. Even something as simple as an inaccurate customer review can cost your business thousands of reach and dollars if managed incorrectly. That’s why every business owner must have a reputation management plan in place.
So, how can you create one? Good news: we have compiled the easy-to-replicate steps in this post. Have a look!
How to Create A Reputation Management Plan In 5 Steps
Ascertain Your Present Reputation
The first step to effective reputation management is accessing your situation. How bad or solid is your brand image online? What efforts would you need to improve your business profile? Or perhaps your standing is already rock solid!
So, to start, find where your business stands. That way, you can narrow your planning to specific and data-backed issues. That said, how can you ascertain your present reputation?
- Start from your loyal customers; survey their opinions
- Check social media and public review sites to get a head start.
Keep Monitoring Your Reputation
Reputation management is an ongoing process. In other words, you can’t even stop searching for reviews even when all you have are positive feedback. Because if you do, you won’t know when the “bad eggs” hit you. And funnily enough, just a below 4-star review can reduce your sales by 52%.
In essence, monitoring your reviews should be a core part of your plan. And about that, you should create specific lines of action. How so?
- Know where to look – if you sell services, then review sites would be the most likely destinations to monitor your reputation. But if you sell products, check online retail sites.
- Target forums on social media and blogs – find what they are saying about your business.
Pro tip: manually monitoring your reputation is a daunting task. Luckily, there are tools that you can use. Here are the benefits of using one!
Develop A Robust Response Strategy
The point of monitoring your reviews is for you to respond to them. For that reason, you should be detailed with your responses as much as the efforts you put into finding reviews to start.
About a detailed response strategy, note these key points:
- Will you respond to all comments about your business? Who will even decide that?
- If you decide to respond to a review, what position would your business take? More importantly, who will deliver the message?
For a solopreneur, you would most definitely be the one to deal with your response system. But for corporations, your business hierarchy would need further debating to decide the answer and responsibility that comes with it.
Either way, having reputation management tools alone might not do you much good here. In that case, you might need to understand the intricacies of managing customer interactions.
Pro tip: you can check our reputation management solutions at B. McGuire Designs LLC for help. We even have a model that can train and let you handle all the reins.
Craft Stories Around Your Reviews
After managing your negative reviews (in particular), ensure you follow through until the aggrieved customer is happy. Then, you can create compelling stories that will help you boost your sales.
Furthermore, turn to your trusted customers too for help. You can ask them for testimonial videos. Besides testimonials, even the reviews you already have can be the bedrock for digital stories. And while you are at it, create a content calendar. That way, you’ll be consistent.
Suggested reading: Digital Marketing Customer Journey Map – What Should You Know?
Measure Your Progress
The ultimate step of creating a reputation management plan is to check if it was all successful. So, after all the action steps, assess your situation to see if your business image has improved. Using tools like Reputation Manager Pro, you can easily monitor and respond to reviews, leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help analyze sentiment, and more.
We know that if you followed the tips in this article, you would see desirable results. So, go out there and start making the changes – all the best!
