The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management

Every business aims to take care of its reputation and for good reason. A bad rep almost always translates to an unsuccessful business.

Several factors can affect an organization’s online reputation, which these days, can make or break it. Bad reviews, associations with malicious activity, and an insufficiently secured domain—these are just a few among the many things that can damage a brand’s online reputation.

What Is Online Brand Reputation?

Your online brand reputation is how people perceive your company on the Internet. Monitoring it shows what they are saying about your brand online. And since almost all businesses have gone digital, what we knew as brand reputation before has evolved to become synonymous with online brand reputation.

A tarnished online reputation can be detrimental to a business’s bottom line. If a lot of your customers lose faith in your brand, your sales would plummet. But there are ways to maintain a healthy online brand reputation, we named a few of them below.

Online Reputation Management Must Dos

Maintaining a healthy online reputation means managing your online reviews. While you can’t stop people from saying negative things about your products, especially on social media, you can show them that you’re willing to hear them out and do something about their issues.

You can also manage customer dissatisfaction by distancing your company from third parties whose reputation can affect yours. A supplier whose network gets breached, for example, could put you in range of the same risks.

And should your good name get used by phishers in their domains, the connection could hurt your online reputation, too.

Here are some ways your organization can stay safe from the dangers that a poor online reputation can pose.

Do Word-of-Mouth Marketing

In today’s digital age, word-of-mouth marketing happens mostly on social media. In case you haven’t noticed it yet, the more good things influencers say about your brand, the higher your sales get.

That happens because according to a study, 51% of consumers are more likely to believe brand recommendations from people they trust or look up to. Word-of-mouth marketing where product users relay their favorable experiences with your brand contributes to your business’s success.

Do Brand Perception Surveys

A brand perception survey can give you an idea if your branding efforts are effective. It tells you how your customers and the general public see your brand.

By asking consumers what they like about your product, you can maintain its quality, pushing them to continue their patronage. And getting answers to a question like what they don’t like, you can improve your offerings and change their minds, thus improving your sales.

The best part is, there are survey templates available online. You can use them instead of creating one from scratch. Sending them via email to addresses in your distribution list is a great means to gauge how your brand is perceived.

Do Social Media Listening

If you can’t beat them, join them. You know by now that pretty much everyone is on social media. When people like a brand, it’s quite normal for them to post about it. When they’re dissatisfied, you’ll likely know, too, from very popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter. So why not listen to what they have to say?

You can use social media listening tools to track tweets, posts, and comments where your brand is mentioned. Such solutions are widely available now and are an excellent way to monitor both good and bad feedback to improve your sales.

Do Business with Reputable Third Parties Only

Sometimes, it’s not enough to keep a clean home, your entire neighborhood counts, too. Even if your home is always well-maintained, if it’s located in what others would consider a bad neighborhood, then you can’t really encourage guests to come by.

The same holds for businesses. No matter how secure your network is, if you allow less secure third parties access to it, then your systems are at risk of compromise. Threats could travel from their network to yours.

That is the primary reason for third-party risk assessment, after all. Using risk monitoring tools is one way to solve such issues. They can reduce your company’s chances of losing sensitive data due to third-party risks.

Do Stay Away from Potential Trademark Infringers

Domain trademark infringement occurs when another person or organization registers domain names that contain your trademark or brand name. Possible reasons for that include:

• They wish to sell counterfeit versions of your products and pass them off as the real deal.
• They want to use your brand name in malicious emails for phishing.
• They hope to redirect your customers to their websites.

Avoiding domain trademark infringement is doable with a brand monitoring tool that provides a list of domains that may be mimicking yours registered each day. Should any of these turn out to be malicious, which you can check by consulting publicly accessible threat databases, you can easily report them for takedown or warn your customers about them.