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.

Digital Marketing Tips to Create a Strong Online Presence for your Brand

To create a strong online presence for your brand, you need digital marketing. That means getting your business fully online unless you want to miss out from getting valuable potential customers. If you are not already using digital marketing for your business, there is no better time to start than now. That is the quickest way to build a strong online presence for your brand. Now that there is a rising trend of mobile searches coupled with the huge influence of social media, how your business is faring online has become very essential. A good digital marketing strategy can help your brand to command a strong presence online.

As part of that strategy, here are some simple things you can do to create a strong online presence for your brand. 

Market with a User-Friendly Business Website: Your business website serves as your online window to do business in virtual space. That is where you receive and serve customers who are looking for what you are offering. For that reason, your business website must be user-friendly and mobile compliant. It pays to optimize it to make it more user-friendly. The site must be professionally- designed with your marketing message on it very clear, concise, and persuasive enough to attract customers. It must load easily to make it more user-friendly. You can improve its online visibility by using simple SEO techniques to optimize it for improved ranking in Google SERPs.

Make a Digital Marketing Plan: To embark on digital marketing for your business, be sure you have a workable plan. A good digital marketing plan will help you choose the correct approach for your business’ goals. Even if such goals have to do with building your brand, improving customer relationships, and or increasing your website traffic, they should be very clear and your marketing plans must fully focus on them. By setting up proper tracking methods and analytics, you can accurately measure results to determine the ROI in your business. That’s about the only way, you can easily discover what is working according to your plans and what isn’t. These results will enable you to reframe your marketing approach and direction as needed.

Create Valuable Content: Content creation is a veritable marketing method of attracting traffic to your website. As part of your digital marketing strategy, you can create good content by way of informative blog articles, how-to guides, infographics and others. By consistently, and regularly posting relevant and useful content on your website, you can attract interested customers and rank better in search results. For good results, your content must be consistent with your brand and authority, while providing useful information to the customers. You can consistently experiment with different types of content and post more of what works better. That is what helps to get the kind of results to enhance your online presence and visibility.
 
Advertise on Social Media: Because of the specialized features in social media platforms, you can specifically target your local area with ads. Segmenting ads for better results is also possible with available social media features. With social media ads, you can be very specific about the demographics you are targeting. These include useful segmentation details like age, needs, gender, education, interests, etc to make your marketing message more effective.

Collaborate and Connect Widely: Connecting and networking are good for your online presence. If you try to show up and act up often, people always remember you and endeavor to reach out to you as often as they can. To make your website very visible online, you can conduct live sessions, live streaming, giveaways, and special offers that greatly enhance your online visibility.  This helps you to better connect with your customers and other complementing businesses to enhance your online presence.

Measure Performance with Analytics Tools:  It is difficult to know how well your marketing campaigns are doing if you are unable to measure your performance efforts. Performance measurement is one great way to know what is working and what isn’t. Armed with such information, you can decide on what changes and or adjustments you can make for better performance. Free online tools like Google analytics come in handy here to analyze all the digital marketing efforts you are making in your campaigns. From the results you are getting from the analytics, you can decide either to change your plan or to modify your approach for better results. By using your analytics data as guide, you can always take effective marketing decisions. That way, if you regularly monitor your traffic/leads/conversions, you can have sufficient information to make changes as needed. If you discover something that is not working as expected, you can make changes to implement what works better.

Actively Engage with Your Customers: Your customers are the reason you are in business. Never you forget that.  Engaging them actively online is one great way to enhance your online presence. If you actively engage with your customers, it fosters great relationships with them. That helps you to, better understand your business from your customers’ perspectives. You can engage your customers better by showing real concern about their needs and responding to their reviews faster and more professionally. Even if their reviews are positive or negative, you must take note of the feedback, and respond quickly but very politely. You can actively nurture your customer relationships by sending them regular emails regarding the latest deals, giveaways, or special offers from your business. This is yet another great way to boost your online presence.

List Your Business on Google My Business: Listing your business on Google My Business greatly enhances its online visibility. If you create an account on Google My Business, and you add all the relevant business details like hours of business, business address, telephone numbers, email etc, this info helps searchers to do business with you when they hit on your account. It helps to enhance your online presence a great deal, because when a user searches for a service that your business offers, your business name will appear alongside similar listed services in the Google lists.

Nurture Good Customer Relationships: While actively searching for new customers, make sure you retain old customers. Repeat business is always a better business than new business. Repeat business is what you get from old customers. More so, it is by far easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. This is the reason you must always work actively towards customer retention.  By actively providing excellent customer support and taking customer feedback seriously and professionally, you can build better customer relationships. Building lasting relationships with your customers, nurtured with trust and loyalty, is key to customer retention.

Get Your Business on Social Media: To enhance your online visibility, make sure your business is on popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and others. Your website helps to provide an identity for your business on social media while social media helps to provide the right environment for the business to actively engage with customers. The key to huge visibility on social media is to post good and informative content regularly to keep your page updated. Instead of posting only updates related to your products and your offers, you can post customer-related matters as well, to humanize your brand.  You can post behind-the-scenes matters relating to anniversaries, customer testimonials, birthdays, giveaways, worthy causes your business is part of, and posts that show your brand’s personality and values.  You can also actively engage with your audience by posting a combination of different content formats using photos, images, videos, infographics, etc. All these help your online visibility a great deal.