Online reputation management is the process of establishing one’s digital presence, maintaining it for a long time, and preventing any further damages to one’s reputation. In today’s world when a simple tweet can go viral and tarnish one’s reputation completely, it’s important to take preventive measures so that people perceive you as a reputed person.
Starting from the brands to individuals, everyone is concerned about their reputation on online media. Because people can perceive them negatively due to any unfavorable incident. If you want to succeed as a brand and want to foster your business growth, then reputation plays a crucial role.
That’s the reason why major brands to individuals are intrigued to know the online reputation management process to understand the nature of the work and its impact on people’s lives. But, if you think that reputation management is just the work of a few months and you can enjoy the benefits for a lifetime, you’re mistaken.
Why? Because it takes regular monitoring of online activities to keep the reputation in check. If any unfavorable activities occur, a reputation management expert will resolve the issue as soon as possible. If you’re wondering whether you should be aware of the online reputation management process or not, let’s take a look at its importance.
Table of Content
- ORM Process: Gaze The Step By Step Process
- Importance Of Online Reputation Management
- How ORM Process Can Benefit Your Business?
- Conclusion
Importance Of Online Reputation Management
The importance of online reputation management is best learned when you’re being trolled. Yes! It may seem hilarious but people learn the significance of managing their reputation on the verge of reputation damage. Unless they get trolled, the sales of their business get affected, people don’t learn. If you’re not one of those and don’t want to face the curse of reputation damage, it’s important to know the significance of online reputation management.
Online reputation management is a process where the professionals help you create an astounding presence on the internet. It means whenever someone searches your name or your brand name, they will only receive positive information. So, people will perceive you as a reputed individual. Right?
But, people tend to take it negligently and pay the price later in their life. It’s because if your brand is not creating a positive impression on people, its sales will be affected. Over time, you will notice fewer sales and slower business growth.
How ORM Process Can Benefit Your Business?
If you’re still wondering how the ORM process benefits one’s business. Let’s take a look at the following to understand it.
1: Improved Perceived Value
A well-managed reputation helps a business to further strengthen the marketing campaign that ensures a great impression. People when perceiving you as a trustworthy business partner, which increases the sales and returns on investment.
The ORM process is designed in such a way that helps to build a positive brand image by understanding the customer touchpoints and using them to create a strong first impression.
A comprehensive strategy helps a business to effectively counter the negative propaganda of its competitors and establish a strong presence over its competitors. It means there will be higher chances of client conversion and a satisfied number of customers. You can establish your business as an authority in your field by managing your reputation with a professional.
2: Higher Trust Of Your Customers
Whether you run a retail business where the customer’s trust in your business matters a lot or you sell a certain product or services, it’s important to gain the trust of your customers to improve your sales and revenue.
A brand with a good reputation always leads to higher trust. People when reading the positive news about your brands, they tend to form a positive opinion which further leads to higher trust.
Research states that 70% of people trust consumer’s opinions more than the paid advertisements. It means that the more positive reviews you gain, the better it is for your business.
3: Good Reputation Leads To More Sales
Companies with good reputations tend to attract more business. It’s because people can trust the products with positive reviews and ratings more than the products with negative reviews and ratings.
It’s not always about the products, even if you’re a service provider then also customer’s opinions matter a lot. Because people will review your company and find out the negative or positive information about your brand.
Depending upon its responses, people will be choosing you. So, if you have maintained a positive reputation all over the internet, there are chances that people will start inquiring about your services.
But, if there are negative responses all over the internet about your services, then it’s quite natural that people won’t be able to trust your services which naturally brings down the sales.
4: Get The Best Talents
Companies with a good reputation don’t only get a higher number of customers but also they get the best talents to operate their business.
It means whenever you are looking for deserving people to handle some of your business responsibilities, you can attract the best talents in the industry as you have established a positive reputation. People would love to be a part of it.
Every employee wants to join a company that has a positive reputation on the market. And more than half of the research about the company before joining the company.
It means if you have a negative reputation for your brand, people will less likely be interested to join your network. Meanwhile, your competitors will attract the experts as they might have a good reputation. This will lead to slower growth of the business over a while because you won’t have the necessary people to handle the operations with efficiency.
5: Reduced Risk of Reputation Damage
When you take control of the entire ORM processes and build a strong shield against your brand name, there will be fewer chances of reputation damages. People will not have the potential to take a chance to damage your reputation as you have already built a strong shield. So, there will be fewer chances of reputation damages in the future which could damage the growth and revenue of a business.
Now, let’s discuss the ORM process in detail to help you understand the process step by step.
ORM Process: Gaze The Step By Step Online Reputation Management Process
The ORM process is generally classified into five stages. This includes the research stage, strategy, content, development, and promotion, as –
We will be uncovering each of these steps step by step so that you can gaze at the process that professional reputation management agencies apply. Let’s take a look at the following,
Reputation Research
In this research phase, generally, we conduct thorough research on the brand’s current reputation. We identify the subject at the initial stage. Generally, it’s either an individual or a company. Then the experts conduct detailed research on your business, services, reputation damages, current reputation, etc. let’s take a look at the tasks we conduct during this stage,
1: The Negative Content Search
If someone has already tarnished his reputation, then there might be negative PRs published against his name or company name.
This complicates the process of reputation work because the publishers don’t easily remove the negative content unless there is strong evidence favoring you. So, the professionals analyze whether the content can be removed during the research phase or it requires additional work. This further helps to develop a strategy.
There are legal solutions to remove the negative content if the third-party sites don’t want to remove those content. However, it’s best to take an easier approach at the beginning.
2: Gap Analysis
Gap analysis is also a part of the reputation research phase. During the gap analysis, professionals draw out the differences between the competitor’s results and your results. It sheds light on the areas where it needs to be worked.
3: Development Of Content
After the gap analysis, the experts draw up a plan. It includes the content they need to curate to push down the negative search results.
In case a person wants to just build up his reputation, then the content curation plan helps to give a clear direction as to what sort of content the web properties need.
Strategy Development
Once the research phase is done, the strategy development phase begins. During this stage, the professional online reputation management experts always consider the notes they have taken during the research phase. Generally, the steps in the strategy development include the following,
- Content replacement.
- Review improvement.
- Negative results suppression.
- Rating improvement.
- Promotion of content.
- Social media strategy development.
- Third-party content development.
Content Development
The content development stage includes the brainstorming of new ideas, the curation stage, the presentation stage, and the promotional stage. The stage is the most time-consuming phase in the entire online reputation management process.
Because without creating proper content, one can’t improve the reputation of any company. Even the most successful reputation management campaign depends on the curation of outstanding content to develop the web properties and to take control of the web properties.
Let’s discuss the stage of content development step by step,
1: Brainstorming New Ideas
During these phases, the content creators curate new ideas after understanding the challenges associated with the brand or the individual. The content must be connected to the brand’s persona and its customers as well.
2: Development
Once the ideas are in place, it’s time to develop the content. Initially, it starts with creating outlines of the content so that people can have a clear direction of where they are heading with the content.
Each piece of the content must be created while considering the brand’s or an individual’s persona. Professionals create a content calendar to make the process much smoother.
Once the development stage is over it is followed by the presentation where the content is delivered to the audience in various formats. It could be blog posts, social media posts, slide shows, web 2.0 articles, etc.
Web Property Development
Once you have done with all the above stages the next step is followed by the web property development stage where the experts identify, build websites, social profiles, to take control of the web properties.
Normally if people don’t have an online reputation it’s either because they don’t have social profiles or they’re not active on their social handles.
It’s important to keep your audience updated about the latest happenings through social media profiles because it’s the way to connect directly with other people.
However, once you connect with a reputation management agency, they will monitor the web properties with the help of reputation monitoring tools. Because these social profiles are vulnerable to attacks from competitors. So., it’s always better to keep it checked.
Promotion
The final stage of online reputation management is the promotion of search results. Without providing the right sources to the right people, there will be no positive results on reputation management.
So, it’s important to promote positive content to push down the negative content. It’s the most complicated phase of the entire reputation management process because it takes undivided attention and unique strategies to promote positive content so that it reaches the right people.
Generally, it takes social media and third-party sites with high domain authority to promote the content to increase its reach. Reputation experts also prefer to leverage a flexible strategy for this phase because the success of a reputation management campaign largely depends on content promotion.
Conclusion
Seeking professional help during this online reputation management process is the most beneficial for businesses as individuals as it takes expertise and experience to take control of the web properties.
If you let a noob handle the work, you may end up damaging your reputation completely. So, before anything major happens to your reputation, you must let a professional handle the work.
Because reputation is the key to successful businesses these days. Without having a positive impression on your brand, you can’t expect a huge turnover because people won’t leverage your services if they can’t trust you.
If the blog seems helpful to you, comment and let us know your experience on online reputation management.
