Do you ever consider what people think about your business?
With AI processing massive amounts of information online, companies can perform more analysis of who they recommend than ever before. You need to include online reputation management as part of your startup and marketing strategy.
We’ll discuss:
- What Is Online Reputation Management?
- Why Is Online Reputation Important?
- How To Manage Your Online Reputation
- Online Reputation Management Tools
- Tips To Manage Your Online Reputation
What Is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management (ORM) focuses on monitoring, influencing, and managing how people perceive your personal or business brand online. ORM includes:
- Tracking brand mentions
- Managing customer reviews
- Creating useful content
- Building and maintaining brand awareness
- Containing public relations nightmares.
Why Is Online Reputation Important?
Your online reputation is important because:
- Consumers trust reviews.
- Search results improve with stronger reputations.
- Damaging news or posts are handled effectively.
- Customers present new opportunities for growth.
Online reputation management spans across marketing, customer service, and public relations roles in larger organizations while many small businesses may need to the business owner to focus on managing their reputation.
How To Manage Your Online Reputation
Time needed: 8 hours
Manage your online reputation with these easy steps:
- Understand your target market.
You need to understand your target market to successfully manage an online presence. You’ll get better results faster by speaking their language, communicating on the social media and online forums they use, and solving their problems.
Getting target market research is easier than ever. For instance, you can provide ChatGPT a simple prompt to get lots of information about your target market. Try using the prompt below:
“Define the target market for a house cleaning company in Las Vegas.”
Check out the results.
Learn more about market research. - Define your brand guidelines.
Defining your brand is an important part of online reputation management. You want to define what you will and won’t do, the perception you want to create, and the value you will provide to people.
Your brand guidelines are what you measure success against. When your brand guidelines and your reputation match, you are successfully managing your online reputation. - Create and implement a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing focuses on creating useful content to help attract potential customers. AI makes it really simple to create a content marketing strategy and then create the content. Some prompts you might want to use include:
Suggest a list of 4 blogs to write about (subject) to attract customers to my business in (your location) based on my website located at (yourdomain.com).
Suggest 30 short-form videos I should create to post to social media to get potential customers attention based on the information on my website located at (yourdomain.com).
Write the blog titled “Title” using the style of blogs that (author/company) writes on (example domain).
These three prompts can help you create a month’s worth of content in a matter of hours. You should use AI tools to repurpose content when you can because it makes it quick and easy to create new content. - Setup systems to manage your reputation.
Using the right software is a crucial part of managing your online reputation. You’ll want software like:
Google Search Console: Use to manage your website’s presence on Google.
Analytics Tools And Pixels: Use Google, Meta, and other tracking pixels that connect your website data and data from other website to provide you a more full picture of customer interactions.
CRM: Use it to keep all your customer interactions in a single location. I personally like HousecallPro for local service businesses because it’s easy to setup.
Review Automation Software:Use review automation software to automatically request reviews after a job is complete. This is included in Housecall Pro.
Online Reputation Management Software: These tools monitor social media mentions, reviews, and sentiment analysis from one location. - Provide stellar customer service.
Once you have your goals, systems, and marketing in place, you need to provide customer service that delights the customer. The customer experience is what will make them talk either positively or negatively about you.
A good customer experience means you:
Let them know what to expect.
Show up on-time
Look and act professional.
Provide what you promise.
Let them know about any costs before doing work.
Don’t make a mess or damage anything. If you do, fix it.
Provide any after service information needed. - Ask for reviews.
When you are done with a job it is critical to thank them for choosing your company. You should also tell them you appreciate reviews and will be sending a request after you leave. (The request should be sent automatically when the job is marked complete).
This will help you build your reputation and get more customers. - Track performance.
You’ll want to use your software to measure things like search appearances, clickthrough rates, website visitors, quote requests, jobs booked, conversion rates, reviews, brand mentions, and sentiment analysis.
These will help you understand how well you are doing at matching your promises. - Analyze results.
Review all the information you gather from various sources and compare it your brand promises and goals. You want to understand whether other people say the same thing about your business that you say about yourself.
When they do, you’re managing your reputation well. When they don’t companies like Google and AI will see a disconnect between your promises and reality and will be hesitant to refer customers to you. When this occurs, you need to adjust something to make them match. - Improve your reputation.
There are several ways to improve your reputation.
Implement strategies you aren’t currently using.
Adjust your promises to match what customers are saying.
Eliminate points of friction that reduce the customer experience.
Increase your marketing expenditures and content creation.
The more you improve the reputation, the easier it will be to get customers.
Online Reputation Management Tools
Online reputation management tools fall into different categories include agentic AI, social listeners, and social media management software. You’ll want to look at each one carefully to understand whether it does what you need.
Search Entity Evaluation & Resolution
This tool focuses on Relational SEO (Use referral code 7C0D84 if you sign up) and understanding all the different signals that Google uses tounderstand whether your business meets the requirements in your area well enough to be recommended.
This goes beyond keywords and backlinks to show:
- Needed certifications
- Licenses needed to operate legally
- Partnerships you should pursue
- Insurance you should have
- Places you should have business listings
Basically it helps you build an authoritative business by identifying gaps.between your business and businesses Google trusts.
You cana access the learning for free and the Pro subscription is $99.98.
Broadly
Broadly offers a variety of ways you can purchase agentic AI. The services range from $59 to $999 monthly. It’s the primary agentic online reputation management platform that discloses prices, which I find particularly important.
Podium
Podium offer AI employees for sales, scheduling, asking questions, marketing, and responding to reviews. They also offer additional lead generation tools.
Podium is primarily focused on the following industries:
- Automotive OEM
- Auto Body Shop
- Medical Spa
- Dental
- HVAC
- Plumbing
- Jewelry
- Furniture
- Appliance
- Mattress
Podium does not disclose it’s pricing.
Birdeye
Birdeye is another agentic AI marketing platform specifically meant for multi-location businesses. It has more styles of agents to use than Podium. Birdeye primarily focuses on the following industries:
- Automotive
- Dental
- Financial Services
- Healthcare
- Home Services
- Legal
- Property Management
- Self Storage
- Real Estate
- Retail
- Wellness
- Restaurants
You have to request a quote for pricing.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool with pricing ranging from $79 to $399 monthly. As the plans increase in price, the number of platforms you can use increase from 5 to unlimited. There are also additional features, but I don’t see how most of them are worth the additional cost unless you have specific use cases.
Yext
Yext’s primary differentiator is how many publishers you can connect to with it to manage your web presence. You’ll need a quote from them as well.
Brand24
Brand24 monitors for brand mentions and sentiment analysis across more than 25,000,000 sources. Plans range from $199 to $1,499 monthly and each plan increase keywords, mentions tracked, frequency of updates, and adds additional features.
Reputation
Reputation makes it easy to manage listings, reviews, surveys, social media, and support tickets from a single location. Pricing ranges from $80 to $150 monthly per location based on whether you need to use surveys.
Trustpilot
Trustpilot is a well trusted online review platform that has plans ranging from free to $9,600 annually. The higher plans allow more review invitations, brand assets, and other marketing tools.
Tips To Manage Your Online Reputation
Be Consistent
Your company name, logo, website, email, phone number, pricing, address, and company description should be the same on every website. In addition your communication style, frequency of posting, and branding should be consistent in posts, videos, blogs, emails, text messages, and in-person.
Deviation causes confusion and reduces brand messaging.
Monitor Mentions Daily
Spend some time every day to check what people are saying about you, answer questions, and respond to messages and reviews. This shows people you are paying attention to them and builds relationships.
Address Negative Reviews Promptly
Negative reviews can hurt your business. When you get one address it by showing compassion and find a way to fix the issue within reason.
Encourage Reviews On Multiple Platforms
You want to have good reviews in multiple places including Google, the Better Business Bureau, Nextdoor, and Angi. When you have lots of good reviews on multiple platforms it shows you aren’t just gaming the system, but running a good business.
Automation software allows you to create funnels where you can ask repeat customers for reviews on different platforms each time the buy from you.This will help spread out reviews quicker.
Invest In Protection Against Worst Case Scenarios
To protect your business make sure to:
- Create a response plan for major risks.
- Invest in business insurance and cybersecurity insurance.
- Keep a PR person and attorney on retainer.
While you should do everything in your power to prevent negative experiences, sometimes things happen that are beyond your control. For instance, the average cybersecurity attack cost $4.88 million in 2024 according to IBM.
FAQ
Reputation management costs between $500 and $25,000 monthly depending on the level of service you need. Expect to spend between $100 and $1,500 on software plus the labor costs associated with the work.
The high end is normally when a public relations crisis requires lawyers and other professionals.
Everyone benefits from managing their reputation, but companies, executives, celebrities, high paid job hunters, and public figures benefit the most from managing their online reputation.
Reputation risk management focuses on identifying, mitigating, planning, and creating policies to handle potential scenarios that could harm a person’s or business reputation.
Some of the most common threats to a business reputation include cybersecurity attacks, product failures, negative experiences going viral, and failures to comply with regulations.
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