According to a study from General Electric, 81% of consumers do online research before they make a purchase. That’s a huge group of potential customers you’ll miss out on attracting if the online presence for your business is weak, negative, or nonexistent.
The good news is, establishing and managing a positive online reputation doesn’t need to be a complicated or time-consuming process. Here are some strategies you can use to ensure your organization’s online presence makes people want to give you their business.
What all goes into a business’ online reputation?
A company’s website, social media accounts, and digital marketing campaigns are a big part of its online presence, but those alone aren’t the only factors that determine its reputation. What other people say about your organization can be just as influential in how your brand is perceived. This includes things like:
- Customer reviews and ratings
- How the company responds to reviews
- Mentions on social media
- News reports and articles about your business
- Online activity from current and former employees
While you can directly control what gets posted on your social feeds and website, the same can’t be said for these other aspects of your online reputation. This is why it’s important to stay informed about your online reputation and what potential clients or customers see when they search for your company.
Tips to effectively manage your online reputation
1. Conduct periodic reputation audits.
The first step to managing your online reputation is to know just what customers and other people are saying about your business. That is the goal of a reputation audit. It’s a chance to assess the level of brand awareness with your target audience and to gauge how people perceive your brand based on what they say about it online.
The steps in an online reputation audit can include:
- Finding and analyzing mentions of your company on social media
- Analyzing reviews and discussions of your products and services and which aspects of your business are viewed positively or negatively
- Performing a Google search for both your business and your main competitors
- Analyzing your competitors’ market presence and content strategy
- Checking employee review sites like Glassdoor to assess your reputation as an employer
While you can do this manually, there are also tools you can utilize to automate mention searches and find them more efficiently. Social Mention is one option that monitors over 80 social media sites for mentions completely free.
2. Set up alerts to see when someone mentions you online.
Auditing an online reputation can be a time-consuming process. Setting up alerts lets you automate the process of tracking down online mentions of your business, allowing you to more efficiently stay up-to-date with your online reputation.
Google Alerts are one easy-to-use and free tool you can employ for this purpose. Simply type your company name into the alert field and you’ll get an email notification whenever someone mentions your business. You can set this up to notify you as mentions happen or to compile them and send them along daily or weekly.
3. Claim all of your business listings.
Claiming your business listings gives you more control over the information customers see when they search for you online. At the very least, it ensures the services, hours, and other details in these listings are accurate. It also allows you to respond to reviews and more effectively engage with your customers online.
Some of the main sites where you should claim your business listing include:
- Google My Business
- Bing Pages for Business
- Apple Maps
- Yelp
- YP (Yellowpages)
- The Better Business Bureau
It’s free to claim a business page on all of these platforms. If you don’t find your business there, you can also create a listing for free to expand brand awareness and ensure customers can find your business wherever they search.
4. Proactively encourage reviews and engagement from happy customers.
People are more likely to review a company without prompting if they felt a strong emotional response because of their interaction. Unfortunately, negative emotions tend to linger longer in most people’s minds than positive ones. This is why customers who had a bad experience with your company are more likely to independently leave a review to let other people know about it than satisfied customers.
You can counteract this effect by proactively asking for reviews at the end of every customer interaction. A quick follow-up text or email after a sale can help to increase the positive things being said about your company online. In a 2022 survey, 71% of consumers said they were likely or very likely to leave a positive review when asked. You can push this rate even higher by offering incentives like a discount on their next service as a thanks for that review.
5. Be responsive to online customer interactions.
When you do get negative reviews, all is not lost. How you respond to that feedback can make a big difference in whether you keep that person as a customer, and can also help to attract more people to your business. Studies show that more than half (56%) of consumers have changed their opinion about a company because of how they respond to reviews.
Responding to positive reviews is easy—you can simply thank the person for their business and kind words. The trickier part for many business owners is how to respond to negative reviews.
The number one rule to follow is not to get defensive or argue with the customer, even if you think they’re wrong. Instead, you should acknowledge and apologize for the issue with a personalized response. If it’s a problem that can be fixed, contact the customer through a private channel with a solution after you’ve left a brief response to their review.
If it’s something you can’t easily fix, like a negative customer service interaction or issues caused by a late delivery, reach out to the customer to find out how you can make it up to them—maybe with an offer for free or discounted service in the future, or a similar gesture of apology.
The bottom line is that people like to feel like their feelings are seen and validated, and that’s true whether they share them with an individual or a company. Engaging with your customers online is one way to do this, and can go a long way toward building a stronger online reputation for your business.
