People have a lot of misconceptions about reputation management. Most of us, relate this terminology to social media monitoring. While some people think it is confined to public relations. And rest of us have no clue about the impact of reputation management on business and sales!

In this guide, we will see how reputation management plays a pivotal role in the business growth? And how the business of different landscapes can perceive value from it!

Customers Talk About You!

The time is gone when businesses were selling things online to a passive target audience. Today, the situation is a bit crazy. The customers are expressing their views about brands and product in a powerful way.

Regardless of the business size, with or without buying a product, people are talking about you via blog posts, tweets or Facebook status.

We have to admit the marketplace has changed radically. The users don’t bother looking at static brochures or landing pages. They want real information before buying an actual product. Addition to this, no business can survive without keeping regular engagement on social media.

Now, if you think you can run a business without taking people’s opinions, voices or reviews into consideration, stop right there! And think again!

When it comes to reputation management, businesses commonly face following two situations:

• Businesses without reviews ( positive or negative )
• Businesses with negative reviews

Businesses Without Reviews

While making the purchase, every customer acts as the smartest person on the planet. When you are running the business online or driving sales online, positive reviews affect the consumer behavior to a great extent. In fact, the customers judge you the way you have received the reviews.

When you are committed to delivering the top-notch product, then let the world know with the help of online reviews. Almost every customer seek help from the internet to get information. The online facts about your brand can be the crucial and influential aspect of your online visibility. In simple words, people will think of you as trusted brand if you have received positive reviews.

That’s why online brand management is important. You must collect, analyze and spread the every single word that has been said about you. Whether a word of mouth or social signals or forums or online content, it is your job to watch what are people thinking about your product or services!

Apart from obvious advantages, the online appearance acts as 24/7 advertising for a lifetime. If your website did not have a system to collect feedback, please get it now!

Business With Negative Reviews

Nothing is worse than a bad publicity!

Getting the positive reviews is not an issue if you have delivered high-quality services. But the situation becomes severe if you get bad criticism and negative feedbacks. This can impact the sales in a bad way.

Look, you need to understand, people want the best value for their investment. They will react if it does not happen. Sometimes, customer support is the only thing they need. Customers want businesses to understand that product must be made for them. And this notion will drive the sales automatically.

Reputation management also involves dealing and reacting to bad reviews. Never respond to the negative review in an aggressive way. This will do nothing except ruining your online visibility. Now a day, people are not confined to social media for sharing their bad experiences. They can approach local listing sites or reviews sites like Yelp to leave their harsh opinions. In worst cases, the customer may build a hate site!

How To Deal With Negative Reviews?

Negative feedback is a nightmare. Luckily, businesses can deal with this problem by using following strategies:

Aggressive SEO

When someone puts your name in Google, you need to stand on the front page with positive reviews to convert traffic into sales. Search engine always fills the 1st page with results from top sites talking about you. If the page is stuffed with bad ratings, the customer will shift to competitor’s site. So, how to avoid this situation?

The first thing to do is devising an aggressive search marketing strategy to enhance the ranking of positive content, either on third party sources or your sources. This is the first step towards restoration of your online appearance!

Removal Of Review

Next, you have to check whether the review is valid. If a customer is on point, solve the issue with brand or service as soon as possible. But if the customer has made a false accusation? or review has been left just to harm your reputation? Then you must seek legal help, as the customer is trying to defame you. Most likely, the review will be removed.

Reputation Management Case Study

One of our clients noticed a sudden drop in sales from a couple of months. His first thought was, it might have be seasonal. He expected the business to grow, as he was confident about his product. However, it did not happen. One day, while searching for his product online, he found that he has a couple of negative reviews online, which is why his sales had dropped. For some reasons, the delivery did not go well and the buyer posted a negative review of the product and warned the other buyers to think twice before making an order. Although his problems were taken care of, and his money was refunded, still the thread was open and it was doing a lot of harm to his business.

We then had a discussion with him and ran a campaign. It took us four months to get other articles on the first page. We could not take the thread down, but we were successful in pushing the negative review to the second page.

His sales saw an instant boom, and since then we became their digital marketing partner. Happy client.

Reputation Management: Should you care?

By now, you must be convinced of investing in reputation management. If you still don’t want to go for brand management, just ask yourself one thing! How many times have you seen a product with one star and still bought it? We bet, none!

The above guide was devised to give the brief introduction about online brand management. If you are facing serious issues regarding your online visibility and don’t know where to start, please connect with us! And let us resolve the issue for you!