The opinions of internet users considerably influence brand building and company image. When making purchase decisions, people often consider information about the store, products, or services, which they find online. A phenomenon called ROPO (Research Online – Purchase Offline) is now a standard in the shopping process.
According to the 2018 study of Polish consumers aged 18-24, more than 77% of the participants look at products and reviews online before shopping at physical stores. The most commonly visited places for searching for purchase recommendations and opinions are:
- Google My Business listings
- Fanpages and groups on social media
- YouTube channels
- Online review aggregators
- Price comparison websites
- Marketplaces
Accessing the feedback from happy (or not so happy) customers is extremely easy. Despite this fact, many companies still undervalue monitoring comments and posts about them. Most businesses don’t haven’t implemented mechanisms to quickly react – especially to unfavorable comments and opinions, which harm their reputation.
Neglecting ORM (Online Reputation Management) leads to harmful long-lasting effects. A ruined reputation strongly decreases the trust consumers have for your brand. This results in fewer sales and poor financial performance.
To help you prevent this, we have prepared…
5 proven ways to handle company reputation on the Internet:
1. Regularly monitor the Internet
Keep track of what people say online about your brand. The opinions about your company may appear in unexpected places, which is why it’s worth using the right tool. If you prefer to do it by yourself, remember to thoroughly inspect the most important places mention above.
2. Actively build your brand
Promote positive and neutral content. Use your own media, for example, a company’s blog, YouTube channel, social media fanpage, or other, consistent with your brand’s image. Show the users that you’re an expert in your industry. Dominate the first page of the organic search results of your brand’s keywords.
3. Thoroughly check the usage of your brand’s name
Regularly monitor, whether your brand’s name is registered on social media or as a domain by someone else. This helps you make sure that no one impersonates your company and spoils your reputation online.
4. Regularly react to the comments and reviews
Paying attention to and answering the reviews on social media fanpages is quite easy, unlike the listing on Google My Business – especially, if your company has many locations. Don’t leave any opinion unanswered, no matter whether it’s positive or negative. Lead the conversation with the reviewers, ask them for insights: what was their favorite thing about your service or what you could improve. This kind of feedback is a valuable source of knowledge about your customers’ needs and expectations. Business Location Services is a tool that helps you easily manage your listings.
5. Fix the damage fast
Quickly respond professionaly when dishonest or defaming information about your company appears online. You can, for example, demand that the author or an administrator deletes the entry from the website. In the case of social media, you can report the violation. Deleting the false Google My Business listings is particularly burdensome – this is something the Business Location Services tool can help you with, too. Well-managed data also improves SEO – your content’s position on Google.
Of course you can say, “ain’t nobody have time for that!” It’s true – continually monitoring activity on the Internet is necessary, but also laborious. Remember, that you don’t have to manage Google My Business on your own – you can use our knowledge, engagement and Google partnership. We are Google’s Partner for many years and we have the highest Premier status. How can we help you?
- Our service for managing company location is optimized primarily for the companies that have many sites or branches. Our experts manage dozens of thousands locations of different industries throughout the world. We have learned all the tricks – from creating the first Google My Business entry to the categorization and taking over of entries in Google.
- The same goes for the reviews – our review panel shows the data from all of your locations. Your team can directly answer customer reviews through the panel. The ratings can be filtered by different criteria and they can be downloaded for deeper analysis.
- We offer an API that sends the data from your systems directly to Google through our location services platform. You only keep the data in your systems.
- No more fake entries and duplicates – we delete them, because they hurt your ranking and SEO. Your locations are improved and updated in Google Maps.
Work on your reputation
Mindful Online Reputation Management involves a range of activities that are worth investing time and money into. Your investiment returns as a larger stream of new customers who give you their trust and existing customers who give you their loyalty. In this case, the long-term profits outweight the costs. If you care about your company’s image and reputation, don’t wait to implement the activities suggested above. We will be glad to help you with this.