Online Reputation Management Archives -

A Beginner’s Guide to Brand Reputation Management in 2024

In 2017, United Airlines faced a massive reputational blow. A video circulated of a passenger being forcibly removed from an overbooked flight. The incident was captured on a passenger’s phone. It quickly went viral and sparked outrage across social media and news platforms.

The fallout was immediate and severe. It led to the following impacts.

United Airlines’ stock prices decreased
Its customer trust decreased
The company faced a lot of negative media coverage.

The airline gave many apologies. However, it faced significant damage to its reputation. The incident also highlighted how quickly a brand’s reputation can be damaged.

This guide provides the strategies and tools necessary to protect and enhance your brand’s reputation. Read ahead to learn how to manage your brand’s reputation effectively.

What is Brand Reputation Management?

Brand Reputation involves active monitoring of how your target population perceives the brand. It includes a range of strategies that aim at shaping and maintaining a positive image of the brand.

This includes managing:

Online reviews
Engaging on social media
Optimizing search engine results
Handling public relations

Effective online reputation management helps build trust, increase credibility, and foster strong relationships with customers and stakeholders. By continuously monitoring brand sentiment and proactively addressing issues, businesses can protect their reputation and ensure it reflects their values and goals.

Need for Brand Reputation Management

Companies act quickly when it comes to their brand’s online reputation management. But why is this so important? What is the need for such extensive brand reputation management?

#	Reason	Explanation
1	Maintain Trust with Users	Managing reputation ensures that a brand maintains a trustworthy and credible image. This is crucial for customer loyalty and retention, as around 57% of consumers are likely to spend on brands they are loyal to.
2	Attract and Retain Your Customers	A positive reputation helps attract new customers and retain existing ones, as people prefer to engage with brands they perceive positively. This can be part of your remarketing strategy.
3	Reduce Negative Publicity of your brand	Proactive reputation management can help mitigate the impact of negative publicity. It can also protect the brand’s image during crises.
4	Increase the value of Brand	A well-managed reputation can significantly enhance the overall value of a brand. This can lead to a higher market valuation and competitive advantage.
5	Improve Engagement with Customers	Effective reputation management allows positive customer engagement. This can lead to better reviews, recommendations, and organic growth.

10 Types of Brand Reputation Management

A well-developed brand reputation management strategy is important for maintaining a positive public image. If you are thinking of building a good brand reputation management, here is how.

1. Develop a Content Strategy that Aligns with Your Brand

Start by developing a content strategy that aligns with your brand’s values and goals. Create high-quality and relevant content that provides value to your audience and reinforces your brand’s expertise.

This includes blog posts, articles, videos, and infographics. Regularly update your content to keep it fresh and engaging.

2. Optimize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Rank your Website

As part of your organic SEO practices, Optimize your website and content for search engines. This will ensure that positive information about your brand ranks higher in search results. Use relevant keywords, optimize meta tags, and build high-quality backlinks.

Implementing effective SEO practices will improve your brand’s online visibility and push negative content further down in search results.

3. Social Media Reputation Management

The year on year growth on social media platforms is 8%. As part of your online reputation management, try to actively engage with your audience on these platforms. Do these three things regularly.

Post content
Respond to comments
Participate in conversations.
Use social media listening tools to monitor brand mentions

4. Use Micro Influencer Management to send a Positive Brand Message.

The next step is to partner with micro social media influencers who align with your brand’s values and target audience. Influencers can help amplify your positive messaging and reach a broader audience.

Choose influencers based on their credibility, relevance, and engagement metrics. You can also collaborate on content that shows your brand in a positive light and allows for authentic endorsements.

5. Online Review Management to Monitor and Respond to Comments

For effective brand reputation management, monitor and respond to online reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and industry-specific sites.

Acknowledge positive reviews and thank customers for their feedback. Make sure you address any negative comments because around 60% of consumers say that when they see negative reviews, they do not feel like using a brand.

6. Public Relations (PR) to Manage Public Perception

Develop a PR strategy to manage media relations and shape public perception. Try to use press releases and media inquiries to build a relationship with journalists.

Address any negative press proactively by being transparent and authentic. Building strong media relationships and handling public relations effectively can help maintain a positive brand image.

7. Crisis Management to address damages to Reputation

Prepare a crisis management plan to address potential reputational issues. Identify possible scenarios that could impact your brand and develop response strategies for each.

Establish a crisis management team and outline clear communication protocols. During a crisis,

Respond quickly,
Be transparent and authentic
Be consistent with your message

8. Customer Experience Management to increase Repeat Customers

You need to enhance the customer experience so that they return to your brand. Invest in training your staff to provide exceptional service, streamline processes, and address customer concerns promptly.

Gather feedback through surveys and reviews to understand customer needs and improve your offerings.

9. Brand Monitoring to Review and Improve

Next, you need to continuously monitor brand mentions and sentiment across various platforms. Use brand monitoring tools to track discussions, reviews, and social media mentions.

Analyzing this data helps identify trends, address emerging issues, and gauge overall brand perception.

10. Employee Advocacy that trains Employees

Encourage employees to act as brand ambassadors. Foster a positive work environment and provide training on representing the brand effectively.

Empower employees to share their positive experiences and engage with the brand on social media.

When is Brand Reputation Management at Risk: How to fix it?

Scenario	Explanation
Product or Service Failures	A product is released with defects or doesn’t meet expectations. The customer is dissatisfied.
Public Relations Crises	Involvement in a scandal or controversy. This can include offensive remarks by an executive, resulting in negative media coverage.
Customer Service Failures	Poor customer service, including unresponsive support or unresolved complaints. This can lead to negative reviews and social media backlash.
Social Media Missteps	Posting insensitive or inappropriate content that is widely criticized on social media.
Data Breaches and Security Issues	A data breach exposes sensitive customer information, leading to privacy concerns and loss of trust.

Build an Excellent Brand Reputation Management Strategy with Market Pro

The market today is highly saturated. To stand out, you need to ensure that you adopt a proactive brand reputation management strategy. You need to ensure your brand marketing receives no backlash, bad press, or reputation damage. This can be exhausting to do in-house. This is where Market Pro comes in.

Market Pro offers diverse services such as social media management, PR services, and content marketing. By creating a fool proof strategy for you, we ensure that your brand is protected at all costs.

Online Reputation Management | Definition, Strategies, and Importance

Gone are the times when businesses didn’t consider handling their online reputation. But now that’s not the case at all. With the rise of countless platforms where people can leave reviews, comments, and feedback, it’s nearly impossible for businesses to keep tabs on everything.

Let’s imagine a single negative review amidst a sea of positive ones. Where do you think the consumer’s or search engine’s attention goes? To the negative one. A single negative review can possibly deter a brand’s overall reputation.

This demands an immediate solution. Businesses must protect their reputation from false information or deliberate attacks, and that’s where Online Reputation Management (ORM) becomes essential. Buckle up and read ahead to ensure how you can save your brand’s reputation with practical measures.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Online reputation management involves businesses’ activities and efforts to paint a positive image of their company’s digital presence. It helps firms cope with negative agendas and false information by turning them into positive experiences and improving their consumers’ perception regarding their online presence.

Businesses work on straightening negative reviews and experiences by remaining active and vigilant on their social profiles and review sites while handling their Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PR campaigns for better results.

Why is Online Reputation Management Important?

A famous Chinese proverb says, “The reputation of a thousand years may be undermined by the conduct of one hour.” This quote is undoubtedly a guiding pointer for any brand looking to thrive in the digital space.

Online reputation management is not limited to handling prospects’ complaints or bad experiences or turning around false agendas on social media or other review sites. They also collectively create a strong online reputation for their brand’s search engine presence. The better their search engine presence is, the higher the odds of ranking higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Online reputation management ensures businesses have positive reviews on Google and other listing sites. Their vigilance on listing sites, especially search engine platforms, encourages buyers to take their brand presence seriously and makes them a preferable choice to buy in the future.

How To Make The Best Out of Online Reputation Management?

Like any other marketing strategy, online reputation management strategy also requires detailed research, tactics, and techniques to generate a strong influence. Some of the tips below can help businesses protect their brands’ presence:

1. Examine Online Reputation Score

Examining online reputation management scores means auditing a business’s public image and identifying all the elements that showcase its good or bad reputation from the customer’s perspective.

The main aim is to find where the brand is lacking in the public’s eye and from what volume it handles its brand’s perception. This helps them find breakpoints and create a planned strategy to solve them.

Monitoring comments and reviews is the primary term, but it is still essential in handling a brand’s reputation because User-Generated Content (UGC) has become more necessary than ever.

Some of the practices businesses should do are:

Visit their Google My Business (GMB) profile. Then, review their ratings, reviews, and feedback.
Review their social media platforms.
Visit review sites (e.g., Yelp, Angi).

2. Keep a Sharp Eye on Brand Mentions

Did you know 88% of users encourage buying from a product that gives replies to all of its reviews?

Businesses need to stay vigilant in this fast-paced digital space. Consumers don’t appreciate it when businesses reply to their reviews or important queries within several days. Companies must adapt certain measures to put a tab on their digital sphere.

However, remaining active on every platform or site is impossible. That’s why companies must invest in brand monitoring tools that centralize and organize all their brand mentions and related notifications in a single platform. These businesses save time manually visiting different sites like GMB, Yelp, and Angi. Instead a single app can help them monitor all the important sites.

3. Prepare a Crisis Management Strategy

Brands will likely face crises without warning in the future, so they are advised to always ace their crisis management strategy.

They need to be prepared in all domains, from firmly controlling brand mentions to handling public general reviews and demonstrating their strong stance on current global events.

To better manage their digital presence, they can access a few things in advance to cope with future crises. Some of them are:

Keeping their brand monitoring tools alert all the time.
Understanding which channels have more volume in terms of target consumers and contain better communication strategies for them
Be ready to flood the digital space with positive content or test drafts to handle negative feedback.

4. Focus More On User-Generated Content

Businesses need to focus on getting more reviews on their Google profiles and other review sites. This behavior shows customers how sincere businesses are about listening to their valuable feedback.

At the same time, this also helps brands rank in search engine results and discover more from their customers. Positive reviews on a business website allow consumers to trust the product and speed up their decision-making progress.

Some of the ways to encourage customers to review are:

Automate the follow-up process, for example, by using a pop-up form on their site to get reviews after customers make a purchase.
Simply send a review form in an email after the customer purchases.
Always engage and reply to their customer reviews to show how considerate and sincere they are in listening.

Reviews can seriously make or break any company’s online reputation. Businesses need to add this expertise to strengthen their online brand reputation management.

Suggested Read: A Complete Guide to Brand Marketing in 2024

Some of the Powerful Forms of ORM

After learning some significant tips for creating an ORM strategy, let’s discuss some of their essential factors below:

Social Channels

71% of consumers are likely to recommend a brand to friends and family after a positive social media experience.

Social media has become a new hub for businesses to interact and listen to customers more efficiently than other marketing channels. Companies can engage in meaningful conversations with their customers and listen to their queries and complaints more clearly than ever.

However, while social media is an excellent source for businesses to strengthen their relationships, it also possesses the potential to harm any brand’s digital presence. Online reputation management agencies utilize social media listening tools to convert feedback into actionable outcomes.

Review Sites

Review sites like Yelp, Trustpilot, or Google Profile mirror any brand’s online reputation. As time passes, consumers are becoming more skeptical about buying anything online, and reviews are one of the single most crucial things that resolve their doubts.

Businesses must add a review section on their website homepages, encouraging other prospects to acknowledge their authenticity. Moreover, companies must add their presence to popular review sites, expanding their reach and digital image.

Bloggers and Influencers

Influencer marketing is another form of digital publication for businesses. Companies hire influencers and famous digital bloggers to promote brands and spread the good word about their digital presence.

Influencers play a significant role in endorsing any brand’s digital presence; therefore, their selection should be made with explicit consideration, such as understanding their past experience with the Internet, positive influence, and relevance in their industry.

Streamline Your Brand’s Online Reputation With Market Pro

Online reputation management services are helping businesses to manage their online presence more clearly and effectively. Instead of relying on branded content and fancy marketing campaigns, companies create strategies that are designed to paint their brand’s positive presence among review sites, social media channels, search engine presence, and other influential sites.

With Market Pro, you don’t need to worry about managing your online reputation; with all the experts under one hub, we know how to light up your brand’s presence amidst the competitive bubble.