Maintaining a good online reputation is important to improve brand recognition, increase sales or position yourself as an expert in any sector.
Managing online reputation is an essential task to avoid crises that could seriously damage the image of a brand or a professional.
A bad online reputation can damage the trust of users, which will ultimately be harmful to the business, as it will result in lost sales and opportunities.
Online reputation influences the purchase decision. 97% of users consult product reviews before buying a product or service. This means that maintaining a good online reputation is essential to grow a business.
In addition, reputation management provides valuable information about the business itself. For example, if you receive negative reviews and all (or most) of them repeat the same complaint, it is very likely that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Therefore, reputation management allows us to gather information about what works and what does not work or what customers do not like.
A common example of poor online reputation management is the confrontation that Nestlé had with Greenpeace. The environmental organization denounced Nestlé’s harmful environmental practices in a video. The chocolate brand, instead of tackling the problem head-on, asked YouTube to remove the video.
How to manage online reputation
To avoid reputation problems or crises, the first step is to. audit our online reputation. The objective of this process is to know how the name or brand is perceived and how customers talk about it. This audit gives an idea of what is being done well and where changes are needed.
To perform an audit you should. review the comments on the website, product and service reviews on ecommerce and business profiles (such as Google business profile), as well as on social networks.
With this information, a strategy should be created in which those should be prioritized. quick and easy actions to perform that have a high impact (responding to a negative review). Next, those that require a great deal of effort, but also have a high impact (resolving a reputation crisis).
Finally, it is best to leave the simple or filler tasks, and those that require a great deal of effort but produce a low impact for last.
Responding to all the reviews and comments on the different channels can be overwhelming work, especially when you need to deal with many negative reviews. The best thing to do is to develop a document containing communication guidelines, establishing some guidelines for responsesa tone that provides brand consistency to messages, and a strategy for dealing with a brand crisis.
It is also important to emphasize that time is money and the longer it takes to reply to a review or comment, the worse effect it will have on reputation. Therefore, it is important to use monitoring toolssuch as Google Alerts so as not to miss any mentions.
Finally, encouraging customers to leave a review is a way of actively manage reputation online and to improve the visibility of products or services. Positive reviews influence the purchasing decision and also allow products or services to be positioned, either on Amazon or Google.
