What Is ORM? Online Reputation Management!
R – Reputation
M – Management
Nearly 96% of respondents in a recent poll say that they are checking out a company reputation online prior to doing business with them. 96%. That’s virtually everyone.
Google Yourself
Want to see what the typical customer sees? Open an incognito window in your browser and do a search for your business. Check out the reviews. Look at the comments. Check out your employee reviews. Inspect the “Reviews from the web” section to see other key channels. Open the “Maps” section to see the reviews for ALL of your locations. Just because one location has a decent reputation, you may have several other branches with horrendous reviews. They all matter. Best of all, by improving scores across all locations you strengthen your overall company rating which is what really matters.
Benefits of Deploying an ORM Strategy
Respond to reviews that users leave about your business. When you reply to reviews, it shows that you value your customers and their feedback. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers can improve your business visibility and increase the likelihood that a shopper will visit your location.
What you CAN control, and what you CAN’T
“You can’t tell people that you’re great…you need your customers to do that.”
A good ORM strategy not only utilizes content that you can craft and manipulate, it also engages with customers…the ultimate judge of your capabilities. Your strategy needs to make it easy for your customers to leave you feedback. Using a partner with the tech to simplify this process will make your strategy easier to deploy and manage.
Smart Tech to the Rescue
While it can seem daunting to put a grassroots ORM strategy in place, thankfully there are tech solutions that can make the process much easier for your team. Instead of requiring team members to manually log in to various social dashboards to monitor and manage reviews, Reviews Up provides key integrations that offer notifications and assistance for inviting customers to leave reviews as well as notifying you when reviews need responding (another critical component to your ORM). In addition, the intuitive Reviews Up dashboard also offers help in crafting appropriate responses for both positive and negative feedback.
While it can be enjoyable responding to a glowing review from a happy customer, in most cases, it can be uncomfortable dealing with negative feedback, leaving many businesses to simply ignore it out of fear for being uncertain on how to handle it. Unaddressed online complaints should be addressed as quickly as they would if a customer was standing in your showroom. Not responding to negative feedback can really be a red flag to potential customers. Using a tech partner like Reviews Up makes these engagements much easier, allowing your potential customers see just how these important concerns are addressed. If a negative review is either a result of spam or a bad actor, the Reviews Up system automatically flags that review and reports it on your behalf to the platform. Malicious reviews from bad actors can also be dealt with by carefully crafting responses that let the public know that the review is in bad faith, and not from an actual customer.
The Takeaways
- An effective ORM strategy consists of using both components you control (website, social media, blogs, press releases, etc.) and things you don’t control (customer and employee reviews)
- Establishing an online reputation management ORM strategy is not something that can be considered optional for any business looking to prosper and grow.
- Use a tech partner to make managing the engagements much easier. Assistance in monitoring what is said about you, in addition to providing tools to effectively reply to all inbound reviews will make your strategy much more effective.
- The results of a sound ORM strategy will help you improve both search results and digital ad efficiency due to increased relevance.
- Bottom line: people like doing business with companies they can trust. Build trust with a sound ORM strategy and the sales will follow.
Activate ORM
Get an online reputation management strategy in place now.