Many companies are steering their brand influence towards reputation management to keep up with this new landscape. You need to pay attention to the following digital marketing services to serve your brand’s reputation well.

But First, What Is Online Reputation Management (ORM)?

ORM is a process that a company undertakes to control and improve how others perceive its brand. This is achieved with an internal team or an outside firm, and it is now playing a critical role in business strategies. Studies have proven that three out of four consumers trust a company more if it has positive reviews. In contrast, countless social media horror stories have led to a new field of business: brand reputation management. This field is expected to turn into big business soon.

PESO: The Brand Reputation Model

Gini Dietrich, a marketing and public relations blogger, has developed the PESO model to identify the four media types that build a brand’s identity and authority in today’s digital landscape. PESO has become widely popular in the brand management and marketing industry because it shows how each channel works independently and how they work with other avenues. PESO stands for:

• Paid Media: These involve digital marketing services that a company pays for. Television and radio used to be the standard form of paid media. Still, today it consists mainly of several kinds of digital media, such as PPC ads, social media ads, and search engine marketing (SEM).
• Earned Media: These digital marketing services are a type of publicity. It’s free media that wasn’t paid for but instead came organically to a company when they do something impressive (good or bad). This often comes in news coverage, reporting, mentions, and links in online stories.
• Shared Media: These are digital marketing services that revolve around content posted on social media. Most of this revolves around user-generated content (USG), including images, videos, and text (such as reviews) regarding a company or its products that users of various online platforms have posted.
  Media shared between businesses includes co-branded commercials, business logos on packaging, or advertisements for a specific product.
• Owned Media: Lastly, owned media is one of the more significant parts of a company’s digital marketing services and allows them to reach and influence consumers more often. They have their human resources and infrastructure to run their website, blog, e-commerce store, etc.

The Importance of Online Brand Reputation

Before the Internet boom of the mid-2000s, people’s opinions on a company generally had to travel by word-of-mouth—another person had to tell the story and communicate the message. Today, ideas travel faster than ever, thanks to social media. Positive messages can boost a brand, and negative ones can be a PR nightmare. No one likes reading bad reviews, but they’re sometimes necessary for a company to improve. With people having the freedom to say what they want online, companies can lose control over the brand reputation.

Following these opinion generation and distribution changes, reputation management has gained importance in marketing and corporate strategies. At the same time, ORM has evolved from an event-driven approach to a more planned long-term program—one that goes beyond reacting to mentions of your brand online by helping tell your brand story, creating engaging conversations, and creating custom content that will help build trust online among all users.

Monitoring social media is not the only component of ORM; it is also about developing a strategy to engage with and inspire conversation around your brand online through digital marketing services that position your brand, create content that will help drive traffic back to your site, and turn followers into customers.

The Top Digital Marketing Services for Brand ORM

Now that we’ve understood why ORM is important for your brand, let’s get to the nitty-gritty. We’ve whittled down the top digital marketing services brands need to apply for a good ORM strategy. These insights are inspired by Neil Patel, a guru on the matter who’s listed the best ways to achieve success in this field.

1. Establishment of Respect

To build trust, you have to interact with your audience and provide them with valuable content and knowledge for free. They will develop a greater emotional connection with your company if you do this.

Ensure that these facts and information come from reputable sources such as national departments or ministries, not just blogs that churn out the same material. Always look for the primary source.

2. Transparency

Transparency means all employees can talk about company products, answer customer questions honestly, ask customers for feedback, and not hide criticism—but address them publicly.

3. Reputation Tracking

Scheduled alerts notify you when your brand has been mentioned on social media, allowing you to respond if the comment is negative. It can also introduce you to new business. Many people ask questions about brands on social media when evaluating whether or not to buy from that company. That’s an opportune time to jump in and show them how your company can help with that issue.

This feature also empowers brands to note their strengths and weaknesses, empowering them to work on those based on actual customer data.

4. Prompt Responses

While some complaints are easy to address, others may take more thought and research. However, you should always respond as quickly as possible. You can bet your customers do if you hate being seenzoned or ghosted. A simple response like, “We have received your message and will respond soonest,” is better than a late reply with more information.

5. Criticism Response

Putting yourself out there online makes you open to criticism. How you respond builds your brand reputation. The Startup notes five ways you can respond to online complaints:

• Making fun of yourself (self-deprecation shows humbleness).
• Admitting your mistake (everyone makes mistakes, so why not admit it?)
• Making light of the situation (this tactic only works if you offer a solution).
• Use humour to alleviate tension (this can highlight your personality, as long as you provide a solution).
• Playfully denying or rejecting the criticism (the customer is wrong, so you’ll want to deny it—but do so in a light-hearted way so as not to prevent escalation and irritation.)

6. SEO Page One Ranking

First impressions are essential for the first impressions people have with your brand. If reviewers are associating negative words like “scam” or “rip off” with your brand on a search engine’s first page, this can be a big problem that requires some serious cleanup (more on this in a bit). Good reviews lead to higher rankings on Google’s first-page index, where you want to be.

7. Digital Empathy

If you listen to the feedback from your customers, you can discover ways to improve your product or service, refine your marketing, alter manufacturing processes, and build your brand. You may lose that client, but the improvements and learnings gained will win you new customers, which will help you increase profits.

8. Proper Legal Action

While there is a right to free speech, even online, sometimes defamatory statements and other forms of false information could lead to legal problems. In these extreme cases, you might want to seek legal counsel and pursue a cyber investigation. Preventing negative press from blowing up could also protect your customer base.

9. Online Humility

Learning from your mistakes slows down when you make the same mistake more than once. Companies, brands, and industries have learned this lesson by promoting young interns to manage their social media accounts because they’ll understand the new medium (after all, they’re young!), and it’s cheaper! As a result, incidents happen that damage the company’s reputation. Hiring a seasoned social media expert who understands you and your business to avoid this!

10. Seek Professional Digital Help

And in connection with online humility, if your ORM efforts are not enough to protect or restore your brand image, you can hire a third-party professional to help you.

ORM Tips for E-Commerce Companies

If you’re ready to put the above digital marketing services to the test in your e-commerce platform, here is a list of what you should do first:

1. Secure Your Name

It’s essential to take stock of what’s already out there about your company as you begin branding. Google your company name (and perhaps critical players within the company, such as the CEO), and look through the first couple of results pages.

To begin cultivating a position on Google, you may need to perform some aggressive SEO (creating good content to outnumber the bad) or consult with a legal expert about getting false information removed.

2. Claim Your Online Territory

Your company’s domain name can help buffer against unfavourable results, bumping negative items off page 1 of a Google search (this is where most people stop looking). So, create official social media accounts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Google+, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Pinterest, to name a few.

Depending on your industry or business, you’ll want to branch out to web properties on professional networking websites like LinkedIn, Meetup, Quora, Yelp, and the Better Business Bureau.

While these are a lot to consider, you don’t have to use all these profiles; you just don’t want anyone to use them. Nothing is worse than finding your name has been taken or used for negative publicity or online theft.

3. Align Your Brand Identity

Your brand personality goes beyond the logo you’ve designed and the chosen tagline. It should be recognisable in all of your marketing material, from the website you develop to the social media posts you share.

4. Increase Online Presence

Follow a regular posting schedule and create positive content on your blog. This regularity gains more followers because you’re more visible and communicate with them constantly. Decide what types of content to post, including:

• How-to videos
• Tips
• Quizzes
• Did you know lists
• Engaging imagery
• Company news
• Product information and demonstrations.

Be sure to share other posts and stories that are of interest to you, and in time, other companies, brands, and industries will share your posts.

Share the content on your timeline and stories for maximum visibility when posting.

5. Connect with Customers

We’ve talked about this before, but I want to stress it again. It cannot be emphasised enough: engage with your customers. Today’s consumers want to feel connected with the brands they buy, and they like to think that their voice is heard. Interaction keeps them as customers, and that’s better than spending five times more to gain a new client than owning one.

Thank your customers when they have something positive to say, take their criticisms to heart, and respond thoughtfully (and then be a brand of your word).

Of course, you will encounter trolls who don’t have legitimate complaints. Instead, they’ll post derogatory or inflammatory messages to get a rise out of you. Don’t add fuel to the fire. Ignore them, and they’ll stop when you’re no longer taking the bait.

6. Enable Alerts

Monitoring accounts like Google Alerts keeps your ear to any conversations surrounding your brand, so you know the moment your brand hits search results. This allows you to promptly respond to harmful content, which looks good to people searching for your product (and may cause the harmful content to be removed). You might also monitor keywords or topics related to your industry or product; sometimes, people may post a question, and if you’re the first with a response, this looks good and can earn you new business.

7. Hire a Professional ORM Team

Reputation management involves the development of a strategy, the monitoring of social media content, and the posting of new content. A smaller business may not have the time or workforce to manage all of these tasks with in-house employees, so they could hire an outside firm to help. However, if time and human resources are not a concern and there is no outside firm to help manage social media profiles, it may be possible to do it all in-house.

Apply These Digital Marketing Services Today

In the US alone, 300 million people are expected to shop online in 2023. More than 90 percent of those online shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase, and 244 million Americans use social media to keep up with their friends’ purchases and online activity, suggesting that reputation management is indispensable for eCommerce businesses. When you protect your reputation, you preserve your customer base, allowing your profits to grow.

Prepare for this boom with digital marketing services from Stellified! We provide web design and online marketing to businesses, so their brands gain maximum visibility and profits. Visit our website now to learn more!