Every business works hard to keep a positive image and make its clients happy. In a bid to meet the clients’ needs, they provide various products and services for them. However, some scenarios may come up to affect the reputation of the business. Situations such as negative reviews, false stories, and others do affect the business reputation
As a result, online reputation management is a key tool that helps to manage these situations. It helps brands to maintain a positive image and reduce negative feedback amidst online controversial topics. So, how do you incorporate this digital tool into your business? How can you use it effectively to manage your online presence? Let’s find out in this article.
What is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a host of tools and strategies that shape the brand’s image on a digital platform. Whether you have a business or manage a personal account, ORM gives you strategies to develop a positive online reputation for the public. It is a way of managing what pops on the feed or search result when someone searches for your business’s name or a personal account. According to BrightLocal research, a positive online reputation helps customers trust businesses, converts searchers into leads, and boosts local search rankings.
Online reputation management allows you to monitor and curate content on manys digital platforms. Besides, it. allows you to respond to negative reviews that involve your brand. In many situations, you can track and remove digital threats, minimize negative reviews, eliminate content infringing on your intellectual property, and have control of your online presence. In addition, it helps you to track and eliminate negative content such that it doesn’t affect your brand’s image and tailor the feeds by removing content that damages your company’s reputation.
Tools for Online Reputation Management
Since online reputation management is essential to the growth of your business, you will require some tools to execute the plan. These tools not only help to maintain a positive image but also makes the whole process a lot easier. For instance, if your business is a large type situated in many locations, you will need something to serve as a watchdog, analyze texts, monitor feedback, and suggest solutions. This effort can be simplified using tools that incorporate AI for small business. Here is where these tools come in. Unlike humans, these tools track the responses of hundreds of consumers without leaving any unchecked. Some of these tools include:
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis is an online tool that uses data-driven methods to analyze and understand opinions. It utilizes natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning to classify written contents as either positive, negative, or neutral. In marketing, the sentiment analysis focuses on the consumers’ reviews on social media, blog posts, forums, and more. Companies leverage this tool to understand the reviews of their clients and meet their needs and help inform their Ideal Customer Profile.
Social Listening
Social Listening means tracking and analyzing conversations related to your brand and industry to influence your marketing decisions positively. Unlike sentiment analysis, this strategy involves humans who analyze the reason behind a conversation, how it came up, and what people think about the conversation. With social listening, your brand can improve its content marketing strategy, craft better campaigns, and outpace competitors.
For instance, let’s imagine you own a pizza shop and you overhear your customers’ conversation about your products. One concludes that he loves the veggie pizza but also points out that the sauce on the pepperoni isn’t enough. As the owner of the business, this conversation should intrigue and invite you to survey what others think about the pepperoni type. Listening and acting on this conversation is what social listening entails.
How Sentiment Analysis can Help with Online Reputation
Sentiment analysis is an incredible tool for online reputation management. It gathers data from various sources – social media, search engine results, survey data – to give insights that guide your marketing decisions. It tracks these data to help brands take actionable steps that will influence their marketing strategies.
With sentiment analysis, brands can know what consumers like and do not like about their products and services to create room for improvement. Besides, it serves as a customer agent tool as it filters customer’s feedback and allows you to attend to negative ones as soon as possible. Responding to negative reviews quickly reduces the damages inflicted on the brand’s reputation. However, sentiment analysis can analyze and shape these damaging narratives in advance to shift them from negative to positive.
Our Reputation Manager allows small businesses to use powerful AI and machine learning tools to analyze what is being said about a business and whether the sentiment of those phrases is positive or negative. Further tools can show whether a term is trending a more positive or more negative direction. This is great insight for business owners and a powerful tool to help drive an improved customer experience.
How Social Listening Can Help with Online Reputation
Just like sentiment analysis, social listening gathers and analyses data to help business owners make better marketing decisions. However, it is a bit different from sentiment analysis such that it requires humans to execute the task.
Social listening gives you vital information revolving not only around your brand but also the industry. That is, you leverage the information gotten from your industry to prepare your business against any potential disruption. In addition, you can use this information to craft better content and other relevant marketing strategies to upscale the business.
As you craft better marketing strategies, you can also check out your products that need innovation. One thing about social listening is that it informs you about the good and the bad side. You shouldn’t take the bad side as hatred. Instead, you should work better, innovate existing ideas to make your business valuable. This process allows you to target more audiences, raise brand awareness, generate leads, and increase your revenue.
Also, let’s not forget consumer experience. Customer service is a critical aspect that can make or mars your business. Nothing works better than a referral given by a client who has tried out your product.
With social listening, you can leverage this opportunity by providing excellent customer service to old customers. By opportunity, we mean you retain existing customers, target new ones, and gain publicity.
Bottomline
Online reputation is critical to every business and it’s important for a business to participate in the online conversations that are shaping its reputation. Tools like Reputation Manager can help small business owners do this almost effortlessly.
