Start Managing Your Online Image: A Beginner's Guide By Rannkly

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." 

~Warren Buffett

With the advent of a more digital world, where everything is available at your fingertips, managing your online reputation has become very important. Depending upon the traditional ways to market your brand is not enough anymore. 

So if you’re someone who’s been in the business for a long time or you’re just starting out, you should know answers to these very important questions: what is online reputation management, why is it important, how can you get started, and what can you do to fix it?

The what, whys, and hows of ORM will be covered in depth in this blog, so keep reading!

What Is Online Reputation Management?

Online reputation managementhas created quite a buzz nowadays. It’s basically a new way to manage your business. It is the process of managing and improving how your customer perceives your brand online. With the rise of social media, it’s more important than ever to make sure your online presence is positive.

But it’s not limited to ensuring your reputation is positive just like traditional marketing. It's a more proactive approach, where the emphasis is on the customer's experience rather than your brand. 

Online reputation management is the process of creating and maintaining the name of your brand online. The trick is to know what is being said about your brand on various social media and other platforms and find out ways to improve the negative reputation in order to increase customer satisfaction. Not only will this increase your sales or popularity but also help you gain customer trust and loyalty resulting in customer retention.

There are a few ways to do this, such as monitoring what’s being said about you online, responding to negative reviews and comments, and actively promoting positive content about your business but we’ll cover them in more detail later.

Why Is It Important To Manage Your Online Reputation?

In today's world, almost everyone turns to the internet before buying a product, so it is imperative for them to see a positive image of your brand online. People consider various factors before making a purchase and one of them is reviewed. So you don’t want people to write anything negative about your brand as it's a major determinant in buying decisions for a customer.

According to research, positive and negative reviews have a great impact on product sales. 99% of people check reviews before buying a product and 96% of people look for negative reviews specifically.

Not only this but taking into consideration customers’ valuable feedback and addressing it makes them feel heard which in turn boosts their confidence in your product. And this is where ORM comes into the picture. 

So if you believe you can do without reputation management, think again. 

Getting Started With Reputation Management

Don’t worry if you’re not sure where to start when it comes to managing your reputation online. We’ve put together some simple steps for you to get started. Keep in mind that ORM is an ongoing process, so once you get started be sure to stick with it.

Here are some simple steps you can take to get started with online reputation management:

1. Up-to-date Rating Platforms And Social Media

Various rating platforms such asFacebookand Google+ are a great way to get your message out there. But let’s face it, not all of us have the time to update our profiles on these platforms on a regular basis.

The fact is, if your profile is not up-to-date, you’re not going to get the kind of results you want. Many businesses take these platforms and social media for granted. Even if your website is up-to-date, it’s important that you optimize your social media as well as other platforms as well. If you don’t update your profile or you don’t post on your social media regularly, you will not get referrals or traffic.

Ensure that your online profiles are up-to-date before you start managing your online reputation.

2. Monitor Your Online Presence Across Various Platforms

It’s important to keep an eye on your online reputation. Before taking steps to improve it, you need to conduct extensive research and find out what are customers saying about your brand. 

You can get an idea of your current reputation by checking reviews on different rating platforms and social media. This can be simply done by checking your website on google and other search engines. 

You can also use Rannkly to analyze your reputation if you want deep insight into your current position. Log in to your Rannkly account and start tracking different KPIs right away.

On the Dashboard, you can check your review sentiment score and get a brief overview of whether the reviews you’re receiving are more positive or negative. This tool also gives you an all-time rating of your brand on different platforms, such as Google and Facebook, and an average rating trend over the months.
 

For a detailed report, you can go toReview AnalysisSection and observe the sentiment trend of your customers over the days or months. This will give you an understanding of the areas you’re doing well in and the areas where you’re lagging.
 

You can also analyze the pain points of your customers and the keywords that are most used in the reviews. This way you’ll be able to identify specific problems your customers are facing and develop strategies to resolve them.
 

When you have gathered enough data, you will have a clearer picture of what customers see when searching for your brand online.

3. Respond To Reviews And Comments

Even just one negative review can have a big impact on customers - it can hurt your brand's trustworthiness and stop people from making a purchase.

That’s why it’s important to stay on top of your negative reviews and address them quickly. Research says customers who have their complaints dealt with in five minutes are more likely to return and make future purchases. Addressing negativecustomer feedbackprofessionally and offering solutions shows that you care about customer satisfaction and are committed to improving. 

There are a few different ways you can choose to respond to your customers. The most basic and cost-effective way is going to different platforms and replying to reviews manually. However, this process can be time-consuming and tedious, especially if you have a large number of reviews to address.

Another option is to use Rannkly, which allows you to easily respond to your customers without putting in a lot of effort and time. Rannkly enables you to see all your reviews from different platforms on a single dashboard. It also provides three ways of responding to customers: Manual Response, Template Based Response, and Response Using AI.

• Manual Response:Writing manually is one way to respond to your customers. In this case, a template or AI will not be able to respond to the response because it requires special attention.
   
• Template-Based Response: Rannkly provides different templates of responses so you can customize each one according to the star rating.
  
  For example, if someone leaves you a 1-star rating, you can set the template “Thanks for the honest review. Apologies for the issue. Please allow us to fix this by mailing us your contact details with a reference to this review, at [email] and we promise to contact you & resolve this at the earliest.” and the next time there’s a 1-star rating, the response will get generated automatically based on the template that you’ve set.
   

• Response Using AI:Rannkly’s AI can help you automate responses to customer reviews. The AI would analyze the keywords used in the reviews and generate a response automatically.
  
  This response will be just as personalized as a manually generated response, giving customers a great experience.
  
  Apart from responding to existing reviews, you should also encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews and recommendations on review sites, social media, etc. The strategy you develop and the engagement you have with your customers will have an enormous impact on your online reputation.

4. Create High-Quality Content

Posting valuable, informative content on a regular basis will showcase your brand in a positive light. This included posting blogs, infographics, videos, and other types of media. To increase the appearance of your content on search results, you can perform keyword research and find out what people are most searching for and what’s currently trending.

The best way to spread the word about your business is through social media. Actively posting on social media and engaging with people has proved to be incredibly beneficial for businesses. 

Monitoringsocial mediais equally important as monitoring reputation on rating platforms. It’s important that you track different KPIs such as page views, post likes, etc, and analyze the trend so you have an understanding of where you’re lagging behind and where you need to improve.

This will also give you an insight into whether the content you’re posting is creative or not and what content have people found to be more interesting. 

This can be done manually but as the saying goes “ Time is money” that’s why we recommend you use Rannkly where you can do all the things that we’ve mentioned more easily and hassle-free.

Rannkly analyses all the data of your social media and gives you easy-to-understand data on the same so you don’t have to go to different platforms and measure the data manually.
 

5. Take A Proactive Stance

Rather than waiting for negative reviews to appear before you take action, you should stay ahead of potential issues and threats, and be proactive in managing your online reputation.

It’s important to monitor your online presence regularly by using Google Alerts, online reputation management software, or social media monitoring tools. Being active on social media and posting content heedfully will go a long way.

You should try to be consistent and transparent in your online communications, and avoid making false or misleading claims or statements.
 

Online reputation is an important part of maintaining a successful business. In such a time, where we are advancing towards a more digital world day by day, it’s important for businesses to maintain their reputation online and be able to respond to reviews and comments about their company, products, or services.

It’s not easy to create a positive online reputation, but with a little effort and following the tips we’ve mentioned above, you can really make a difference.