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Business reputation: how to create a positive image of the store

19.01.2023 18:09
Olena Kovalenko
Olena Kovalenko

Accounting and Automation Systems Specialist. Editor.

Natalia Mitroshina
Natalia Mitroshina

Author and content analyst on trade automation

Ілон Маск - репутаційний лідер в інтернеті

Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of managing public opinion about a brand, business or person on the Internet. Reputation management covers a set of measures to create a positive image of the company, respond to all public comments, both negative and positive, and constantly monitor reviews and mentions of the brand.
In this article, we will consider the following questions:
  1. What is online reputation management?
  2. What tools are used to create a positive image.
  3. Why it is important.
  4. How to manage brand reputation on the Internet.

What is online reputation management?

Reputation management, both online and offline, will help to increase people's trust in your online store, build credibility in the trade niche, form a loyal community around the brand, and, as a result, increase sales.
Although online reputation management (ORM) overlaps with public relations (PR), they are not the same thing. 
PR uses tools to create a positive brand image both online and offline. Online reputation management achieves the same goal by cooperating with the media and bloggers, responding adequately to situations in the country, thereby influencing public opinion.
Internet marketing tools help to adjust the perception of your store on the Internet:
  • SERM - reputation management in Google search results, work with reviews,
  • monitoring of comments and mentions of the store in social networks, forums, and industry websites,
  • promotion of locations in Google My Business,
  • publishing contextual advertising on Google,
  • promotion in social networks,
  • work with the media and mass media,
  • SEO-promotion,
  • influencers and opinion leaders.

ORM media channels

Let's start with the most popular tool for improving online reputation - media relations. There are four main media channels:
  • Paid media
  • Earned media
  • Shared media
  • Own media

Paid media

Paid media uses any format of online content that requires payment for placement, such as contextual advertising in Google Ads, social media advertising, sponsored posts, and promotions from influencers and famous public figures.
Paid media is beneficial because you have full control over the narrative, i.e. the story you want to convey to the consumer. But it's definitely not the cheapest way of ORM.

Earned media

You can post about your business on third-party sites that are related to your business (mostly for free).
Formats of external media:
  1. Press publications of current news, promotions in your store,
  2. articles in blogs of other sites that have similar topics to your store or that are aimed at promoting brands (possibly for money),
  3. forums (usually posting reviews about your product),
  4. industry-specific third-party resources (e.g., otzyvua.net, reviews of sellers on Prom and Rozetka)
  5. independent review sites (e.g., Google).
Publish reviews about your products and useful content in your field to reach the widest possible audience that might not even know your store exists. The easiest way to post commercial or native articles is through an intermediary site called Collaborator. It cooperates with many advertisers and selects platforms for publications depending on your needs.
In general, external media highlight the brand in a positive way and gain the trust of online visitors.

Shared media

Social media is content about your store that is posted on social media by any user. However, it can be not only positive posts, reposts of your page content, but also complaints and negative comments. Low store ratings on social media can seriously damage a business's reputation.
Therefore, keep a close eye on the mentions of your brand on other pages and respond promptly to negative customer comments.

Own media

Own media belongs to the owner of the online store. It can be a website, blog, Facebook page or group, Telegram channel or chat.
To increase the reach of your own media platforms and improve your store's ranking in Google search results:
  • Create relevant, useful content for your audience that will answer common objections and problems customers have in using your product.
  • Optimize your on-page SEO strategy to ensure that your content appears on the first page of Google search results.
  • Increase the link mass of your website by linking to you from authoritative resources.
  • Increase your presence in local search results.
Add an RSS feed to your website and, if you publish content regularly, register it with Google for Publishers to get your news into Google News.
This way, users will see your brand's valuable content when they search for keywords related to your store.

Why reputation management is important for your business

According to the analytical resource Semrush.com, almost 60% of consumers said they avoid shopping at stores that do not inspire trust. Here are some reasons why reputation management is crucial for sales:
Influences purchase decisions. Over 90% of shoppers said they analyze online reviews before making a purchase. This means that your customers may never come to you if they come across a negative mention of your store online.
It helps to deal with negative reviews. Negative comments are inevitable, but you can use them to change these reviews for the better. Customers whose complaints on social media were resolved in less than five minutes tended to spend more money on future purchases.
Provides valuable feedback. If you receive the same complaint multiple times, it looks like there's a problem that needs to be addressed. Start collecting information about your products and services, the overall customer experience, and implement changes based on the feedback.
For example,
In 2017, United Airlines lost more than $1 billion in market value after a video of a passenger being removed from an overbooked flight went viral. The video received more than 1 million mentions on the Internet in one day and more than 100 million views. Talks about this incident have not died down to this day.
The American holding company Nestlé also faced a failure in reputation management. 
In March 2010, Greenpeace posted a viral video on its website and later on YouTube, accusing Nestlé of excessive use of palm oil in its production. The organization called for the company to stop buying raw materials from suppliers involved in illegal deforestation in Indonesia. Deforestation, according to Greenpeace, leads to the extinction of the orangutan species and also provokes global climate change. The video message equated eating chocolate with killing these monkeys.
Instead of solving the problem, Nestlé only made the situation worse by asking YouTube to remove the Greenpeace video complaint. Finally, after lengthy negotiations, the company promised not to buy palm oil from these producers and was forced to temporarily close its public page due to negative comments. However, according to experts, if the corporation had responded immediately to the accusations and admitted its guilt, its reputation would not have been tarnished and it would not have lost control over its social media fans.
It only takes one situation where a brand's words or actions do not meet public expectations or are ambiguously interpreted to turn online reputation management into a reputational nightmare. In the event of force majeure reputational losses, formulate your tactics in advance: respond immediately - the first hours after the incident are the most important, do not substitute concepts, do not shift responsibility, and be honest.

How to manage online brand reputation

To avoid the consequences of negative reviews, work proactively:

1. Audit your reputation in search results (SERM technology)

Before implementing online marketing tools, conduct a large-scale audit of your brand's online reputation. SERM (search engine reputation management) is a method that will help you find out what the online community thinks about your store and determine where changes and influence are needed.
Pay attention to the top sites in your industry for key queries. Check out Google search results: ratings, employee reviews, customer reviews, comments, images, your website, social profiles, etc. You can collect more information about your store by using:
  • keywords in programs - Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Alerts, Semrush's Media Monitoring, Serpstat,
  • Google search tips, Kwfinder,
  • web analytics in Google Analytics,
  • manually.
Divide these sites into those you can control - your media and pages - and those you cannot control - third-party sites.
Important. Keyword results may vary depending on the geography of the search. For a qualitative analysis, it is better to take 5-10 popular key queries that will bring up the most popular pages about your company.
If there are a lot of unwanted comments about the store, SERM, if properly organized, can push the negative out of the search results by shifting the focus to positive content.

2. Track brand mentions

You can track brand mentions by analyzing all online sources - social media pages, forums, third-party business profiles, and industry sites. In particular, you can set up Google alerts for your brand name and use special programs such as YouScan, LOOQME.
You can use the media monitoring application Inoreader, which automatically collects mentions from all these platforms. This saves time and gives you an accurate picture of what people are saying about your brand, what they are sharing, and how they interact with it on the Internet.
We recommend transferring the data to Excel and categorizing the brand mention platforms by tone type - positive, negative, and neutral.

3. Develop a communication policy

The best results can be obtained when you systematize your actions. Make an instruction in which you write down answers to the most common objections and negative comments from customers. Also, specify the rules of communication for your employees and support staff - they should have a common "tone of voice", the same position and response strategy.
An example of erroneous communication, lack of understanding of basic things and a sense of reality among employees:
Communicate with your audience in terms they understand. Create a "thesaurus" with the words that are allowed in your company, which are not allowed, does your brand use slang and emojis?
You can also take into account the specifics of a particular communication channel. Be quicker to respond to comments from followers on the social network where they express their opinions most often. Usually, people are more willing to share their impressions on Twitter than on Facebook. 

4. Plan a crisis management strategy

You can prepare for a crisis in communication. Strategically, you should have a plan and a person with a high level of empathy and a sense of tact to communicate on behalf of the store. 
Regularly:
  • Keep up with the news in your industry. Changes in legislation, cultural changes, or technological advances can be a challenge for businesses.
  • Be present on those sites and social networks where your customers are communicating and sharing their experiences. Make a habit of regularly searching for information about the store or the names of managers on Twitter.
  • Prepare response templates to quickly respond to the negative comments we mentioned above. Make sure that no one copies and pastes the same response without personalizing it and delving into the context of the complaint.
Your response to comments can make or break your audience's opinion of the brand.

5. Encourage customers to leave online reviews

One of the best ways to manage your online presence is to encourage customers to leave honest reviews on Google and other sites such as Rozetka, Prom, Facebook, Instagram stories, and thematic groups. 
Positive reviews not only convince people to choose your store from hundreds of others, but also help you to increase your position in Google search. When someone searches for your brand, they will see these positive reviews. Posting positive content will also help to push down pages with negative reviews about your store in Google's search results.

How to encourage customers to leave reviews?

1. Share links to the review form in thank you emails or at the end of the chat on your website after the purchase.
2. Write clear instructions in a personal message on how the customer can write a review and leave a link to the form.
3. Offer incentives, such as a discount on the next purchase for a review.
4. Respond to all reviews so that customers can see that their opinions matter.
5. Leave a contact on your website and other channels for customers to contact your store if they have any disputable issues. This is a preventive measure to avoid a public conflict.
It is a common practice among marketers to order reviews to promote a brand. We do not recommend publishing fictitious reviews - they can be smelled a mile away. If customers suspect you of buying reviews, this will lead to even greater distrust and loss of brand reputation. 

6. Manage negative customer reviews

Before responding to negative reviews, evaluate the most problematic ones. Comments that rank high on the search engine results page can be a signal to look for negativity in other sales channels.

How to respond to negative reviews

It's best to respond to negative reviews quickly before they get out of hand. If the person who left the negative review is famous or has a lot of followers, the review can go viral. Address it immediately.
Apart from that:
  1. The most important thing is to calm your emotions. We advise you to take time out for a few hours to weigh the situation and think about the causes and consequences of your actions.
  2. Be polite in your communications, even if you really want to use informal vocabulary.
  3. Admit your mistakes if it is really your fault. You can use phrases like: "We understand your disappointment" or "How can we fix this?".
  4. Work with feedback both in public and in person - write to the client or call them. The most important thing is to listen and not interrupt, keeping the conversation going with a sincere desire to help and fix the situation.
  5. If your product or service has really disappointed the customer, offer a refund or discount to calm them down.
  6. Reach out to third-party writers. If someone has written a negative review or blog post about you, you can ask them to change the text. Provided that you have corrected the situation that led to the negative review.
  7. Improve your service/product. If you see the same complaint many times, consider making changes or updates to your product.
You won't always be able to work through all the negative feedback. But you can raise positive content above negative content on Google.

How to increase the ranking of positive articles?

  • Promote positive content: testimonials and product reviews on your website.
  • Transfer positive reviews from social networks to your website so that they are indexed by search engines. Attach screenshots of reviews.
  • Keep product reviews up to date.
  • Build brand authority by ordering backlinks to your articles.
  • Collaborate with influencers to promote your product.
  • Share positive reviews on your social profiles.
  • Share third-party reviews from other companies and brands about your store and product.

7. Create branded content

Branding is the consistency of all your messages and tone of voice in your content across all promotion platforms. The first thing customers see or hear about your brand will shape their perception. 
Therefore, for better memorization, you should make sure that your content and communications with customers are in the same style - color scheme, always the store logo.
Online reputation management is a continuous process. Be honest with your audience and they will reciprocate.

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