Here’s how to use these digital marketing channels to start building and managing a healthy online reputation for your business.
Decide What You Want Your Online Reputation to Be
With ORM, the first step is to decide what you want your online reputation to be. Do you want to be perceived as an industry authority? To adopt the position as the market leader? Or be known for your responsiveness and excellent customer service?
Assess Your Current Online Reputation
You can begin by determining what your actual reputation is. Ask friends, family,clients, business partners, and stakeholders what comes to mind when they hear your business’s name. What do people already think about you? Does your digital presence match your reputation in your offline network? Listed below are five tools that will help you research and evaluate your digital reputation.
The Brand Grader: The Brand Grader (from Mention) provides an understanding of your brand’s online presence for free. It will identify the most influential blogs and news websites that have published content featuring your business in the last 30 days and also show recent mentions from social sources. The tool also gives you a score that helps you identify strengths and weaknesses of your business’s reputation.
Go Fish Digital’s Complaint Box: Go Fish Digital has designed a free tool that lets you browse more than 40 different complaint websites at once and provides you with a list of negative reviews. Although there’s no guarantee of completeness, using the complaint box is a convenient way to get first impressions of any negative reviews or comments you’ve received online.
Mention: Mention is a platform that scans more than 1 billion sources from social media networks and forums to blogs and many other web properties. You can use it to track your brand, competitors, and customers by using different search criteria.
Google Alerts: With the help of Google Alerts, you can keep track of new content published about your business. In addition, you can monitor industry news and follow your competitors. This helps you identify new guest blogging and commenting opportunities. To set up an alert, all you need to do is search for a certain keyword and decide how often you want to receive notifications about new content via email. You can also define content sources such as news websites, blogs, or videos, and choose a preferred language and geographic region.
Talkwalker Alerts: Talkwalker Alerts calls itself a “Google Alerts alternative.” With the free help of Talkwalker, you can monitor everything online regarding your brand and track your competitors’ activities, recent events, and so on.
Craft a Social Media Policy that Supports Your Reputation Goals
The next step for building an A+ online presence is to have an effective social media policy in place. Social media policy refers to how a company and its employees interact online. Here are a few key points to keep in mind when creating your policy:
- Don’t allow staff members to freely post whatever comes to mind, particularly if the content is associated with your business. One reason for that is to protect your reputation. The other reason is liability. To keep things simple, you could tell your employees to label all of their posts as “personal” or create a pre-approval process for content, if necessary.
- Sensitive data should never be shared with the public, including financial, legal, and private client information.
- A captivating online reputation is all about professionalism. This also applies to publishing content on social media.
- Reserve the right to edit or delete potentially harmful content.
Design a Social Media Content Strategy to Promote Your Desired Reputation
A social media content strategy outlines the subjects and topics your business or brand wants to focus on, the use of keywords and media types (articles, video, podcasts), and who’s responsible for content creation and implementation, which doesn’t necessarily have to be the same person. Here are some key points for your social media content strategy.
- Identify Your Social Media Goals
- Decide Which Social Platforms Will Help You Reach Your Ideal Customer and Attain Your Goals
- Consider Your Competitors’ Social Presence and Social Platform Demographics When Integrating Social Platforms
- Research Content Ideas
- Establish a Content Publication Schedule and Assign Tasks
- Respect Your Audience
- Monitor Results
Enhance Your Reputation with Blog Posts (Owned Media)
The key to success articles that rank high on Google, generating additional traffic with high engagement is to consistently publish content that provides value. Thorough keyword research and high-quality content increase your chances to push undesirable content further down on the SERPs. Here are a few tips and tools to help you publish quality content that supports your reputation.
- Use Relevant Keywords
- Strengthen Your Headlines
- Write for Readability, Not Search Engines
- Include Images
- Analyze User Metrics
Pursue and Manage Your Online Reputation
Now that you have the basics in place, it’s time to execute. Engage on social media, publish appropriate content on your blog, and use the tools from Step #2 to continually check in on how your brand is perceived online.