The internet has given an equal platform to one and all for expressing their opinions. The active consumers of today utilize this medium to share their experiences of your products and services on different digital platforms all the time. What your customers say about you online and perceive about you has a ripple effect – it impacts the buying decisions of other prospects. Online reviews today are considered as personal recommendations and can largely influence your sales, whether your business is small or large. This is why online reputation management and perception management is more important than ever before.
The digital mediums act as direct interfaces with your customers. While positive reviews can help you gain more visibility and value, negative ones can help you gain feedback for improvement. All this while, you must be ready for crises management to protect your brand from the repercussions of negative reviews.
The Talespinners have decades of rich experience managing online reputation of businesses. There are four areas we primarily consider:
- Paid media – Includes all online content that requires payment to feature your brand. This covers Google Ads, sponsored posts etc.
- Earned media – This is the coverage your business receives without you paying for it. Press releases, external articles, forums, external blogs etc are few examples.
- Owned media – Is the digital content you directly own and publish yourself. This includes your website and owned blogs.
- Shared media – You publish content on your social handles and your customers also post reviews/complaints on the same. This is shared media that includes content owned by you and users as well.
Using these four as a baseline, we follow a 5-step approach for online reputation & perception management of your business:
1) Perform an audit of your current online reputation – We look at above described four areas extensively to determine your current standing. What perception does your current content and design give to users? What do your customers say about you? How do prospects perceive your brand? These are some questions we try to answer.
2) Establish the online reputation and perception management strategy – It starts with setting up your online reputation goals. Perhaps there’s no noise about your business online and you want to create it positively, or maybe a lot of negative reviews show up as people search your brand name online, or simply you aren’t able to address the online complaints of customers well. Whatever is the case, we pick that as a starting point and determine an end-result, using which we create a plan of execution.
3) Dominate search engine results for brand searches – With some SEO magic, we make sure your website is visible as the first option when someone searches for your brand directly, and the following links are relevant and positive as well.
4) Encourage positive online reviews – We help in channelling the positive experiences of your customers into tangible, digital comments. Increased positive reviews also help to outweigh negative ones, if there are any.
5) Managing negative reviews wisely – We ensure timely handling of any negative messages and complaints and always have a crises management plan in place.