Reputation Management: How to Protect Your Brand Online in 2022

Gaining a reputation is hard but easy to lose- this is a classic. A good brand image helps businesses a great deal to gain trust. What is more – reputation management helps to enhance sales by looking into the preferences of your customers.

Maintaining a positive brand image can include both online and offline tasks these days. In connection with that, your reputation depends to a great extent on your online status.

Nowadays, businesses allow customers to review their services online. So potential customers can refer to those reviews and decide whether they want to take a particular service or not.

What is more, customers read an average of 10 online reviews beforehand, relying on a local business. You can see that- your brand image online makes such an impact on one’s decision to purchase. And, it’s indispensable to monitor your reputation online regularly.

Let’s see what reputation management includes and how to manage the reputation online.

What is reputation management?

It’s a process of monitoring how potential customers perceive your brand. Their action chiefly depends on your brand image.

There is more to the process- you analyze the customers’ perception regarding your brand. And take actions accordingly to maintain a good image in the market.

Nowadays, people are focusing on online reputation management. Hence, for the most part, at present, reputation management is essentially online reputation management.

Let’s talk more about that in the next section.

Online reputation management

A single negative reputation will have an adverse impact on your brand image. On top of that, it can affect the bottom line growth of your organization. In fact, a prospective business could lose up to 22% of customers when there is one negative writing.

In addition, browsing is the easiest option at this moment. Furthermore, anything you put on the internet tends to spread faster.

Overall, monitoring and influencing business reputation online is genuinely a challenging task. Particularly, online reviews are not in your control.

Gladly, you will find various tools and strategies in order to protect your brand reputation in 2022. Also, here you will learn about some of the most efficient reputation management software.

Reputation management software

By extension, it’s a smart choice to employ good software to start monitoring online reputation. And this software can mainly serve small and medium businesses.

Because these businesses possess limited PR arrangements. That’s why – you can mitigate negative reviews by utilizing one of these software.

There are many things a reputation management software can help you with. The most iconic benefits are- watching closely what is people saying about your brand. And the feedback will avail making your service better.

As well, I will give away details on strategies you can implement for managing your corporate reputation. Let’s find about 5 reputation management software.

1. Yext Reviews

You might already know that – inconsistent information can affect local SEO negatively. That’s why – it’s critical to confirm that all of your business information is included consistently.

Considering that, Yext Text allows you to sort out any issues with business information consistency across each site. As a result, you won’t have to resolve them separately, making the work a lot easier.

Moreover, you can manage all of your social media accounts. That will enable you to respond to authentic customer reviews. So, you can ensure that you have control over your true online reputation.

This software will help a great help for small and medium along with major enterprises. It has an impressive client base, including Marriot Hotels and T-mobile – two prominent businesses.

Price: $199 every year

2. ReviewTrackers

This software is adept at collecting online reviews from over 100 third-party sites. For instance, Google, TripAdvisor, and Facebook.

On top of that, you will get notified instantly when a customer posts a review on any online platform. Therefore, you can be plugged into all customer feedback!

Besides, you can track the trending issues and topics to show you a bigger picture related to customer issues. What is more, you can track your competitors. Apart from these, you will carry out performance analysis as well.

Enterprises like – Sears and Triple A are using this software. As well, small and medium businesses will derive benefits from using the software.

Price: Depends on the size and need of a business. (Request a demo here)

3. Podium

Nowadays, you need to manage reputations on various sites, such as – Facebook, Google, Yet, etc. Undoubtedly, it’s overwhelming to manage reputation on all these sites.

Luckily, there is software like Podium. It lets you observe customer interactions and online reviews in one place.

Not only that, you can request reviews online and provide a reply to the reviews. Also, this software has features for texting with prospects.

In case you can’t properly implement this tool, Podium has a support team available in online chats, over-call, and email. Small and medium local businesses will get the most benefits from this software.

Because these businesses interact via texts with their leads, prospects, and customers manually.

Price: Depends on business size and model. (As for quote here)

4. BirdEye

This reputation management mainly serves software companies. More specifically, it’s for the companies that offer software as a service (SaaS). Amazingly, over 50k Saas businesses are using this software.

Moreover, it gathers reviews from over 150 sites. Consequently, you will get the complete picture of your online reputation.

The software will allow you to monitor, reply to, and promote reviews just in one dashboard. In addition, you can utilize BirdEye for requesting customers’ reviews on desktop and mobile. Also, BirdEye has its messenger tool.

You can supervise social media accounts with this software. That will help you to gain information about customers of your competitors. You can create surveys for further analysis. Thus you can improve the customer experience.

Price: Depends on the size and need of a business. (As for quote here)

5. Cision

This cloud-based communication tool will let you know about all online mentions. And people usually mention brands in online stories on social media.

Remarkably, you can reach customers from various platforms, such as traditional, digital, and social platforms.

In general, these are business marketing channels. Hence, you will be mentioned frequently in these channels, which are important to keep an eye on.

Cision is packed with many helpful features. For instance, it offers proactive public relations strategies. For example, it will assist you in finding contacts for pitches.

Also, you can figure out the influencers best for your industry to spread the intended message. Consequently, you can build the desired brand image.

Price: Depends on the size and need of a business. (Ask for a quote here)

4 Tips for developing a reputation management plan

I will provide you with a general reputation management plan. Note that the reputation management process is never the same for two businesses.

Hence, you can just refer to the tips here and adapt them for your service. In addition, reputation management is not something that you do once in a lifetime, and it’s DONE! Means- you need to do it always as long as you are running a service.

1. Research and audit

You can’t start the work without deep research. In other words, you need to know what people are thinking about your brand. You need to search for comment threads that involve your business at this stage.

So, that’s one way to know what people are saying about your service. Moreover, just one conversation won’t be enough. So, you need to seek out several conversations to discover various perceptions of people related to your brand.

2. Develop a reputation management strategy

After knowing the different points of view of your brand, you need to work on its improvement. To do that, you need to prepare a plan.

Let’s say you have found out that whatever people are thinking is unfavorable to your brand image. Now, you need to develop a plan confirming a better customer experience. Check the list below to know what you can do to establish a better brand image.

• First, recruit someone to track online conversations for administering research for your business all the time. Your customer service and marketing teams can do the work best because their tasks are customer faced.
• After that, you need to decide on which reviews, comments, and mentions you need to reply to. In that case, you must identify which sayings are from authentic customers. Moreover, you won’t be able to reply to all customers. For that, you can follow some priority standards.
• Next, you need to ensure you have a consistent tone. For example, you have responded to a comment in a tough tone, but positive messages included. Regardless, it will know use.

3. Take actions depending on what people are saying

If you want to bring any real change to your service, you must act according to your customers’ expectations. For example, negative perception needs attention. Also, negative remarks let you know what you are doing wrong. On the other hand, positive remarks say what are you doing right.

4. Practice tips 1, 2, and 3 continuously

I have already mentioned once that reputation management is a continuous process. So, you need to do it always because any issue can arise related to your brand across all online sites. That’s why you need to be ready to tackle them.

Concluding thoughts

What your customers, future employees, and investors think about your company is your company’s reputation.

And these factors will be influenced by a single comment or post on social media. So, make sure you have a strategy to handle issues related to your brand image.

It’s so sensitive that a lot can happen in 24 hours if you fail to address a specific negative comment. Besides, it will look like you don’t care what your customers think about it.

Overall, it’s a daunting task! Hence, you can use the software I have suggested and maintain the proper brand image.