Why Online Reputation Management is Important to your E-Commerce Business

Every e-commerce business is usually concerned about its online reputation. That is what brings about Online Reputation Management (ORM). ORM is important because it allows online businesses to stay in control of their online reputation. It characteristically helps to control the narrative online particularly when it becomes negative. Even though unlike traditional public relations, ORM usually works quietly in the background focusing directly on the more technical aspects of maintaining a business’s online presence. Here is how ORM directly benefits your e-commerce business:

Establishing Trust with Customers: Customers interact more with a business and do business with it when they trust the business. Customers always want to at home with real people behind a business that respond to their inquiries/concerns. ORM helps to establish and nurture the required trust that manages to keep these customers.

Boosting Visibility: ORM helps boost your business’s visibility. This it does through various online channels you may choose to promote your business through. Using ORM, you can boost visibility for your business through social media and Google reviews. ORM is usually handy to provide an organic method for your business to appear high in the SERPs of search engines. This is yet another great way to boost visibility for your business.

Attracting Buyers/Customers: ORM helps to enhance a positive online reputation for your business. It thus helps to attract buyers/customers. Most shoppers prefer doing business with brands they trust and believe in. This helps to build brand loyalty for your business.

Damage Control: If you do business online, your business will inevitably take a hit at some point. How you respond to such scenario can make or break your business reputation. If it happens, what you do hinges on damage control which is easier with an effective ORM strategy. ORM strategy is handy because it serves as a very effective tool for addressing concerns and re-establishing trust.

Increasing Revenue: Significantly, businesses with better reviews, more stars and higher visibility almost always do better financially than those that ignore their reputations. A concerned business can always take advantage of ORM and work to improve its business online presence. Doing this is a surefire way to increase revenue in the business.

Providing Feedback: If you want your online business to continue to thrive and do better, do not ignore customer feedback. You must endeavor to care about and to listen to customer feedback. This is irrespective of whether the feedback is positive or negative. You can rely on ORM strategy to provide an avenue to obtain feedback from customers in a quick and efficient manner.

Now, how really do you begin to take on your Online Reputation? It’s a simple process that begins with identifying and responding to customer feedback across a variety of online channels. Start with a diligent Audit. This involves trying to figure out what is currently being said about your business online. It’s about the same idea as Googling your own business on the internet. Except in this case, your focus should mainly be on what pops up regarding your business. Pay good attention to the SERPs of search engines to access a plethora of information relating to your business. Specifically, you must:

•Focus on the results on page one, since that is what most people look at.
•Review all the places where your business name appears, such as online forums and social media.
•Open an incognito browser window and search for your business in Google.
•Take a good look at your Google Business Profile. This will show you any reviews, ratings and comments from customers.

From all these sources, you can carefully compile all the relevant data about where your business is mentioned online and what customers are saying, whether accurate or inaccurate, positive or negative. Next is to develop an ORM strategy to tackle the situation.

Effective Tips to Successfully Manage your Online Reputation

Online reputation management in today’s digital marketing world is about managing your brand's image and reputation so that you can effectively reach potential customers and customers. It encompasses the control of information flow about your brand to give it a good online image and to enable it compete strongly. From experience, no matter what you do about your brand and how well you do it, there is no guarantee that your brand will not end up on the receiving end of some bad news that can dent if not out rightly damage its reputation. With good and prior information management, that unhelpful scenario could have been prevented or managed better. You can take care and protect the reputation of your business well in advance if you deploy proper online reputation management techniques. The following tips can be of help in that quest.

Clearly Identify What You Want to Achieve: If you want to develop an effective online reputation management strategy, you must first identify what you want to achieve. You must set clear goals right from the outset making sure these goals are achievable. Your objectives must also be clear. Clearly identify what you want your brand image to be like and what kind of reputation you want for your business. You can set these goals by directly focusing on your target audience in terms of their demographics, psychographics, and geography. Your goals must match the overall goals of your business and not just your marketing campaigns. That way, you can better channel human efforts and resources to managing the reputation of your brand and business. 

Choose the Right Strategy: Choosing the right strategy is hugely important for your brand and business.  It is imperative to determine right from the outset how you want to manage your online reputation and then choose the right tools and platforms suitable for it. It is difficult to miss the mark if you correctly choose the right tools and platforms to manage your online reputation.

Focus on the Right Platforms: The best platforms to choose and focus on are platforms where your target audience habitually hangs out online. Doing so helps you to effectively reach the audience with your marketing messages. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes are reputed to have audience preferences, from young adults to middle age persons and so on. LinkedIn is particularly reputed for middle age professionals. So, if you want to manage your online reputation on any of these platforms, you must know the kind of marketing messages to use on each of the platforms to help your online reputation.

Choose the Right Marketing Tools: You can effectively use a well optimized website, blogs and even forums to manage your online reputation. If as part of your strategy you plan to use blogs or forums to manage your online reputation, be sure that your content is well-written and optimized for SEO purposes. That way, search engines particularly Google will rank the content high in their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic back to your website or blog since the material will benefit from better online searches.

Focus on Long-Term Results: When choosing an online reputation management strategy, it is best to think long term. No matter how good your strategy is, the effects will not be immediate. It may take weeks or even months to see positive impacts from your campaign efforts. Experience shows that when the effects start coming out, they are likely to continue for quite a while. So, do not get discouraged if the results you expect do not come immediately. It is best to think long term because the results will come anyway provided you are doing your campaigns correctly. 

Stay Up-To-Date on Your Social Media Platforms: With over 4.5 billion active users on social media, that’s one huge market out there online. An effective online reputation management strategy should therefore include staying up to date on your social media accounts. Social media platforms are busy 24/7 and all year round. A lot goes on in these platforms around the clock. Therefore, you can miss out on a lot of important information if you don't sign in often enough to check what’s going on. Make it a habit to always know what's going on with your social media account(s). If you are too busy or engaged somewhere and you cannot stay updated, consider hiring someone to keep an eye on your social media accounts for you. It is usually a good decision and investment for very busy executives who choose to do so. By staying up to date, you can easily see when something needs changing or updating and you take steps to fix it immediately before it attracts negative comments that can directly impact your online reputation.

Diligently Monitor Your Brand Online: If you want to have a good idea what people are saying about your brand/business/products/services, it is important you diligently monitor the brand/business/products/services online. You can use social media monitoring tools and Google alerts to get info about any comments about your business online. If you set up Google alerts for instance, you receive timely notifications whenever someone mentions your business name on the web. You can quickly trace and know where to make amends if the comment or observation in negative for instance. If you run an online shop, its dashboard analytics tools information can give you the right insights to determine whether or not there are any issues with your webpage load speed and if there are any broken links within pages or product listings that require immediate fixing.

Keep a Keen Eye on Negative Reviews: Yes, as you get positive reviews, it is inevitable that you’ll also get negative reviews. Even if you choose not to respond to positive reviews, be sure to quickly respond to negative reviews. Acknowledge and appreciate customers who post negative reviews and assure them that their concerns will be quickly addressed. Make sure you do so promptly as you have promised. Never ignore negative reviews outright. If it becomes necessary, never fail to sincerely apologize for what people see as not right. Take pains to always explain what went wrong and with a firm promise to have it fixed immediately. Doing so helps your online reputation a great deal.

Respond Timely to Reviews: You must make it a business habit to respond to reviews promptly. Make sure your responses are well thought out, should be sufficiently welcoming, respectful, and helpful to your customer concerns. This way, your responses will greatly help mitigate the impact of negative reviews particularly from users who write malicious or defamatory content in their reviews. Never take negative reviewers as adversaries. You must find ways to accommodate all reviews and respond to them promptly and intelligently. Doing so helps your online reputation in many ways.

Set Up Google Alerts: Google Alerts are a great way to track people's opinions online about your brand or product. Presently, one of the best and most reliable ways to keep track of what people are saying about your brand/products is through Google Alerts. Once you set up the alerts in the configuration you want your info, Google thereafter never fails to alert you when it hits on the information you want. You can also effectively use Google alerts to monitor your competition and what they are doing. Google alerts can also help you to stay on top of industry trends by alerting you about new info as it is coming in. So, if you set up Google alerts on things that really matter to your business, it helps your online reputation a great deal.

Wrapping Up

Building your brand reputation online is one of the smartest things to do if you are a digital marketer. If online users perceive your brand/business in positive light, it helps the growth of your business. The foregoing techniques have been tested and tried by marketers who take online reputation seriously and they work. The positive results they give lend them to other marketers/businesses who also want to build their online reputation. They can help you too to build a very good image for your own brand/business if you try them out.

Effective eCommerce Business Tips

If you market online, particularly eCommerce, be prepared for stiff competitions because of the millions of others online doing similar things you do. You can succeed though if you listen to experts who are always willing to give some business tips to eCommerce stores owners. Many eCommerce stores are usually individualized. They require no costs to set up their stores and start selling from popular and reputable eCommerce platforms. Others can set up their own online store and sell out of it if they have the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to do so successfully. If either or both of the situations arise, business tips from experienced marketers are always very helpful.

Here are some four tested and effective tips to help you succeed in your eCommerce business.

Diligently Build Your Online Reputation

In online marketing particularly in the running of eCommerce store, online reputation matters a great deal. You can take quality time to build your online reputation diligently when you start marketing online. By posting quality content regularly and spreading it widely on many channels particularly social media channels, your posts will stimulate robust reviews online. Many customers first read reviews of businesses before purchasing from them to ensure that the businesses are legitimate and trustworthy. That becomes a plus for your online reputation. Your online reputation is a very essential part of the process of converting ordinary online surfers to leads and even customers of your eCommerce store. Satisfied customers never fail to tell others and the reputation grows exponentially from there.

Create High-Quality Product Photos

In eCommerce business, high quality photos of the products you are selling are very important. By having them on your website or store, they help to attract traffic to the store. The better the photos, the more the attention they get and the more traffic they attract. Some eCommerce stores now use 3D photos showing all sides of the products they are selling in rotation. Such rotations can even be 360 degrees thereby allowing the potential buyer to see every aspect of the product on display. Such views play a significant role in their buy decisions. 

 

Get a Good Brand Logo
 
Every business needs a good reputation to do well. Branding helps that reputation a great deal. A good logo is a very essential piece of your brand. If it is attractive and memorable, it helps you to build brand awareness fairly quickly. Online, when people see your logo, they easily remember you what your business is and what you do. If you do not have the skills to design a good logo for your eCommerce store, there are online services like fiverr.com or upwork.com you can use to get a good logo.

Highlight What Makes Your Store Unique

This is part of your eCommerce store identity and online reputation. You can skillfully identify what sets your store apart from others and put it into words. If well drafted, this statement can conveniently serve as an essential value proposition for your business. It helps to tell customers at a glance what you do and why it matters. If it is quick and compelling, it will be good to get quality traffic to your eCommerce store.

6 Ways to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation

In the digital world of the internet, every business is struggling to get noticed. Your own business cannot be the different. The level of success your online business gets is directly proportional to its online reputation. With millions of players out there in the digital marketing world, it is really very important for the success of your business if you can deliberately do some things online to enhance its reputation. These things are not just related to your website alone but also to review sites and directories as well. Online, any site that has some basic information about your business no matter how little has some kind of influence on your online reputation. This is why when it comes to the internet, business details are key to your reputation. Your business cannot afford to have even one bad review or inconsistent/inaccurate directory information which can negatively influence customers’ impression about the business.



These here 6 ways are highly recommended by expert marketers as potent ways to enhance your business reputation online.

1. Identify and Fix Major Errors

If you’ve been in business for a while, because of human frailties and activities, it is fairly common to have a few changes here and there leading to some information inaccuracies. You can periodically go over your website to fix errors relating to changes in contact addresses, emails, phone numbers or any obvious misspelling of any vital information you provided earlier. This is necessary to avoid hurting your Google Local listing. In addition, you can take a bit of time to check all links to your website with a view to confirming if they’re all functional and directing visitors to the right pages as expected. This is very important because broken or lost links automatically translates to lost traffic, lost opportunities and lost revenue.

2. Periodically Audit Your Online Business Info

Time changes, so are things particularly information relating to your business. Nothing in the digital marketing world remains static for too long. Things change with time and circumstances and your business must be fully prepared for it. To test if your business is visible online, you can on your own search your business name on Google. The results you get can be highly informative for you to know what to rejig, correct, redirect or place better to enhance better search results. From this internal audit, it is easy for you to discern how easily your potential customers can find information about you and your business online. The easier it is to find your business online, the higher its online reputation and visibility.

3. Get Your Business Listed on Directories

Getting your business listed in online business directories is one great way to improve visibility for the business. These directories are very effective ways/places to spread the word and to connect with prospective customers who habitually use these directories to find what they want online. For many customers seeking to do business online, directories are favorite spots where they commence their searches. Having your business listed on these directories helps to confirm your professionalism in online business. That helps your business reputation in no small measure.

4. Create a Unique Digital Brand

A unique digital brand online is not just about your business name, address and contact information. It is much more than that. It involves everything that tends to stand your business out among the whole lot to make it easily recognizable by your customers and potential customers. It takes very deliberate efforts to design your website to make it unique and easily recognizable. With the use of your web designer Style Guide, you can on your own tinker with font sizes, colors, background and general appearance which help its uniqueness. Your business online reputation is greatly enhanced when it manages to stand out uniquely online for easy identification and recognition. Make sure your brand logo and brand colors match your website design and are used consistently anywhere your business is listed or merely mentioned in all industry directories and social media. All ads banners must be carefully selected to match the design and styling of your website with the same branding colors. Any changes you make after this unique design must be well aligned with the design you’ve chosen for the business and this must be done across all boards/platforms where your business information can be found.



5. Encourage Customers’ Online Reviews

Experienced marketers never cease to emphasize the huge importance of customer feedback in online business. Apart from the huge influence of reviews on referrals, they also help to influence search ratings. Online marketers have since discovered that reviews on Google can directly improve your SEO listings. In addition, responding to customers’ reviews help to boost your trust factor and online reputation. Asking for reviews from customers is about the best way to get them. Making it seamlessly easy for customers to provide reviews is one great way to enhance the process.

6. Promote your Business on Social Media

These days, social media is practically where everyone is at 24/7 around the world. Because of the huge popularity of social media, getting your business on the platforms greatly helps its online reputation. It is easy and free to create accounts in the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and you start to immediately promote your business to a very huge audience around the world. With the ease of use and sharing of information on social media, important business information can easily go viral. That helps to quickly build brand awareness for your business. It is also one very good and dependable way to drive organic traffic to your business. In fact, anything you manage to get social media to do for your business is a win-win situation for attracting inbound traffic to the business.

 

How to Avoid Online Reputation Crises

Every business no matter how small or big thrives on its reputation. That is what makes reputation a closely-guarded and well-protected asset in business. Building a reputation for your business takes time, very valuable time! It however takes a very short while to lose and with attendant devastating impact to boot. Online, the impact is better left to the imagination of everyone. There are many simple things you can do to avoid online reputation crises such as:

Being extremely vigilant: Nearly everyone is online these days and just one scathing review undetected early can do tremendous damage to your reputation! That is because of the extremely quick pace information spreads online. The solution is real vigilance on your part. Detect-respond-and-promise line of action easily helps your vigilance efforts.

Astute monitoring: When you detect challenges, it is not enough to respond and leave things at that. It pays to keep monitoring to see if there are further negative feedback which you can quickly attend to. Tip: Do not ignore to pay special attention to niche review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor where negative feedback can be really damaging.

Acting quickly: Regardless of whether online reviews recommend your brand or not, it pays to take quick action responding to them. This where your diligence and tactfulness can help you win back skeptics thereby enhancing your business reputation.

Being proactive: From experience, it is possible to anticipate customer reaction. The real reason for FAQ as part of your website displays. By anticipating customer reaction correctly, you can take proactive measures to shore up your reputation and avoid real damage. Appropriately deployed Analytics can help your online reputation if you know how to use them. If not, consulting experts is not a bad idea.

Routine evaluation/corrections: Taking a look back and going over what you have been doing online about your business is one way to get hints and clues about what works and what doesn’t to enable you make amendments and or corrections as you go along. Proper analysis of customer-feedback and online campaign results help a great deal here. A major benefit of constant review is to learn and that is what grows your experience. Nothing beats experience when it comes to doing business online. Just ask any professional marketer and you’ll get to appreciate my drift here.