A disaster for your brand reputation can feel like the end of the world. Your online reputation influences how potential customers perceive your business. Customer perceptions then directly impact your bottom line.
The truth is that even the most reputable businesses get negative feedback. Big businesses with solid reputations can also suffer online reputation damage that goes out of control.
With the right effort, you can get your reputation back on track. More importantly, you can lay the foundations for consistent online reputation management. That way, you are always ready for any incidents that can affect your reputation. Let’s delve into the approach you can take to correct online reputation damage.
Main Takeaways From This Article
- Repairing and maintaining your online reputation is not just about damage control. It’s about actively managing how your brand is perceived.
- You need a strong online reputation repair plan in case of negative reviews, false information, or an overall poor online image.
- Reputation repair involves consistent monitoring, engaging with your audience, and creating positive content that reflects your brand values.
- Effective online reputation repair can turn around negative situations. It can even enhance your credibility and trustworthiness in the long run!
- Using professional tools like Reviewshake can streamline the process and make managing your online reputation more efficient.
What is Online Reputation Damage?
Online reputation damage is damage to your brand image that comes from:
- Too many negative product/service reviews
- Negative video or blog reviews from review platforms
- Negative press coverage of your brand
When you get too much negative coverage of your brand, your bottom line can suffer. Customers will not trust your brand as much and will make fewer purchases. Search engines will also punish you by lowering positive content in favor of the negative content.
Any reputation management plan has to include a “Plan B”. This is where your online reputation repair plan comes in.
We always recommend that you focus on building up positive feedback. But we understand that you also need to prepare for different kinds of negative feedback.
Online reputation damage is inevitable, to some extent. We can’t make everyone happy. Also, we can’t always escape our competitor’s tactics, which can sometimes include smear attempts.
So, dealing with reputation damage requires you to create 3 new strategies:
- Monitoring
- Creating positive experiences and feedback
- Confronting negative feedback
9 Tips for Online Reputation Repair
Let’s dive into these tips and start transforming your online image today!
1. Monitor Your Online Presence Regularly
First of all, you need to keep a close eye on what people are saying about your business. You can stay on top of what people are saying with a system to identify and quickly address negative feedback.
Timing is essential for all online reputation management. So, this proactive starting step enables you to stay ahead of any negativity that can spiral into a PR crisis.
You can halt reputation damage before it gets to serious on multiple platforms by using:
- Search engine tools like Google Alerts
- Social media listening software
- Review management software platforms like Reviewshake
Alert systems ensure that you find out quickly when your business is mentioned online. They also offer some insight into customer sentiment and ensure you can respond to negative reviews quickly. But you want to be sure to also acknowledge positive feedback, rewarding and building customer loyalty.
2. Find and Respond to Negative Influences
When you’re monitoring your online presence, you may notice something strange. One negative mention of your brand can be the source of negativity spreading elsewhere. This can be a nightmare for any brand.
There are a few things that can cause a negative brand reputation to spread. In some cases, it’s a single problem with your product that has an outsized influence on your customers’ perceptions. In these cases, publicly addressing the issue and laying out the steps you will take is the solution.
In other cases, the negative online brand sentiment can stem from a single influencer or online review article. Imagine an issue that is intensely frustrating to them. Their complaints may have an outsized influence on how all their followers perceive the subject of their complaints. In some cases, they can cause a PR and social media crisis for your brand.
In these cases, professional, calm communication can transform a furious influencer into your best friend. Wherever possible engage with influencers and publications that are negative toward your brand. The purpose of your communication should be either:
- Clarifying any misunderstandings
- Laying out steps to remedy their frustration and find a solution
When you’re reaching out to influencers or publications, remember to:
- List out the key points of their criticism so you can address them one by one
- Be polite and respectful regardless of the tone of their criticism
- Gain a thorough understanding of their criticism from their point of view
- If you are going to respond, don’t wait too long
- Invite them to discuss the matter privately
- Discuss how you can fix the problem
- If it’s appropriate, lead the process to an opportunity for collaboration
Always follow up as soon as possible with details on how you’re addressing the concern
Keep the conversation solution-based and maintain necessary boundaries if they make the issue more personal.
3. Respond to Negative Reviews Professionally
Respond to negative reviews professionally, constructively, and promptly too. The professionalism in your communication shows that your brand values customer feedback and experiences.
Whenever you’re drafting a message to communicate with a customer, remember to:
- Start by defusing the situation
- Demonstrate empathy
- Address the precise issues raised in their review directly
- Avoid generic replies that appear lazy or insecure
- Keep your messages solution-oriented, pointing to the next steps to a solution
- Whenever possible, take your communication private and keep it there
Even if their review or messages seem unfair and harsh, avoid getting defensive. Escalating disputes into arguments will just cause more damage. So, try to be consistently professional and improve your customer service.
4. Encourage Positive Reviews from Happy Customers
The other side of the coin is encouraging positive reviews from satisfied customers. Negativity bias means many happy customers will forgo leaving a review. Unhappy customers, on the other hand, are likely to vent their frustrations with a review. So, you should make it easy and natural for happy customers to share their experiences.
The first thing to do is make sure you ask for reviews at the right moment. It’s best to ask a customer for a review when they just had a positive experience with your brand. Be sure they are encouraged to leave a review when they:
- Just made a purchase
- Recently completed a service
- Expressed their satisfaction in some other way
- Have had just enough time to use and enjoy the product they purchased
Second, you need to make sure the review process is as simple as possible for happy customers. This normally means providing direct links to your review pages on platforms like Google, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Give them a small list of easy-to-follow instructions to increase their response rates.
Third, personalize the customer’s experience. Mention specific details about their experience or purchase. Address them by their first name. These steps make your requests feel more genuine.
Lastly, consider offering customers incentives for reviews. However, you want to make sure your incentives:
- Are genuine and can be appreciated by customers
- Don’t violate platform policies
Using tools like Reviewshake can streamline this process, helping you gather and manage reviews efficiently.
5. Optimize Your Social Media Activity
When you see social media platforms, you probably see many great business opportunities. But you can quickly find that they are very negative spaces where people vent frustrations, and negative sentiment spreads. You can experience the positive side of social media by maintaining a well-managed and professional presence.
The positives of social media can outweigh the negatives if you remember to:
- Regularly add fresh content that reflects your brand values
- Showcase your products and services
- Give updates about your products and services
- Provide industry statistics or interest pieces and establish thought leadership
- Interact with users in your DMs and your posts’ comments
Consistently engaging with users on your social media channels:
- Keeps your audiences engaged with your brand
- Shows users that you value their input
- Demonstrates your commitment to maintaining a community
You can also use social media to gather reviews and testimonials. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive feedback on your social media pages. Highlighting these reviews can build trust and attract potential customers. Use platforms like Reviewshake to gather and showcase these testimonials effectively.
Lastly, don’t forget to take the basic steps to optimize your social media accounts! Add the correct information for your profile information and use relevant keywords in your bio and posts.
6. Create and Promote Positive Brand Content
Create more positive content. You can use consistent content generation to ensure your overall online profile is more useful and positive. Specifically, focus on high-quality content that:
- Highlights your authority and expertise
- Communicates your brand values
- Highlights your strengths and successes
- Provides meaningful knowledge and insights for your followers
To make the greatest impact with your positive content, focus on quality over quantity. Make every positive piece be more impactful than negative reviews could be. This sounds simple, but what you’re doing is creating impactful, SEO-optimized, competitive content.
Positive content that is competitive and overshadows negativity will have to include:
- Blog posts
- Pillar articles
- Videos
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Statistics
- Insights
- Your company’s relevant achievements
- Customer success stories and testimonials
- How-to guide articles
- FAQs sections
Customers are especially interested in proof that your products help others. Use real-world examples of how your products or services helped others to improve your trust and credibility. Ensure you display satisfied customer feedback on:
- Your website
- Social media platforms
- Email newsletters
7. Tackle Misinformation
Sometimes, negative coverage about your brand or products is simply false. Deliberate falsehoods are different from negative reviews based on real experiences and opinions. Lies can spread quickly, so you have to address it promptly.
The first stage of addressing false information is detecting it in the first place. This is another task that monitoring your online presence can address. You can monitor the largest possible space with an online reputation management tool. To be sure you catch as much as possible, you can employ platform-specific tools like Google Alerts.
Second, you need a plan for responding to misinformation. Your plan should follow these principles and incorporate these practices:
- Respond quickly so that the misinformation doesn’t spread unchallenged
- Stay professional and polite, no matter how egregiously the other party is lying
- Clearly state the facts using evidence to back up your corrections
- Avoid engaging in arguments and don’t recognize inflammatory comments
- Keep your responses correction-oriented, focusing on the simple facts of the matter
- In addition to public responses, reach out privately to individuals or platforms spreading misinformation
- Request corrections or removals where appropriate, with factual evidence to support your request
You can take direct action against misinformation on some platforms. For example, Google enables you to report content that is illegal or against their terms of service. Prohibited and restricted content includes fake engagement, impersonation, misinformation, and misrepresentation. You can remove bad reviews from Google in many of these cases.
8. Engage with Your Audience
You should engage with your customers directly on your website, email, and any platforms you’re active on. Engaging with your audience puts a face behind your brand name.
Your company’s customer engagement activities should include:
- Responding to customer inquiries quickly
- Participating in conversations on social media
- Responding to reviews on review sites
- Answering questions people ask publicly on all platforms
Another strategy is to create content that engages your audience:
- Asking open-ended questions and inviting answers
- Conducting polls
- Hosting live Q&A sessions
- Encouraging user-generated content
- Fostering online forums or other communities
- Seeking other opportunities to build connections with online audiences
- Personalizing your interactions, using customers’ names and stories
Once you have your strategy figured out, the next step is consistency. Develop a regular post schedule and respond to user content regularly. You can use social media schedulers and other tools to automate the process. Most importantly, create a process for finding the best content to share with them, including:
- Product updates
- News
- Promotions
- Demos
- Anything else that’s relevant
The goal of all these strategies is to build trust, loyalty, and engagement. You want to maximize the “warmth” in how customers perceive your brand. Ideally, this promotes user sharing and word-of-mouth marketing for you!
9. Use SEO to Push Down Negative Content
Utilizing professional online reputation management tools is essential for effectively managing and repairing your online reputation. These tools offer comprehensive solutions for monitoring, analyzing, and responding to reviews and online mentions, ensuring that you stay on top of your digital presence. Reviewshake is one such tool, a powerful platform designed to streamline and enhance your reputation management efforts.
Reviewshake provides a centralized dashboard where you can monitor reviews from over 130 platforms, allowing you to track customer feedback in real-time. This comprehensive overview ensures that no review goes unnoticed and enables you to respond promptly, whether the feedback is positive or negative. Quick responses demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction and can mitigate the impact of negative reviews.
The platform also automates the process of requesting reviews, making it easier to gather positive feedback from satisfied customers. By sending personalized review requests via email or SMS, Reviewshake helps increase the volume of positive reviews, enhancing your overall rating and online reputation. Additionally, the tool’s reporting features provide valuable insights into trends and areas for improvement, helping you make informed decisions about your business strategies.
For businesses serious about managing their online reputation, Reviewshake offers a range of features that simplify and optimize the process. Best of all, you can sign up for free and start experiencing the benefits immediately. By leveraging professional tools like Reviewshake, you can proactively manage your online presence, build a stronger reputation, and foster trust with your customers. Visit Reviewshake.com to sign up today and take control of your online reputation.
Use a Professional Online Reputation Management Tool
The best way to get the most out of reputation repair for the lowest cost is with online review management tools. Online reputation management tools help you pinpoint problems and opportunities when repairing your online reputation. They then help you maintain a great reputation going forward.
Online reputation management tools offer crucial features for reputation maintenance:
- Ongoing monitoring
- Sentiment analysis
- Review response centralization
- Review gathering
- Social media analysis
- Data analytics and reporting
Reviewshake provides a centralized dashboard where you can monitor reviews from over 130 platforms. You can track customer feedback in real-time and manage it from one place!
The comprehensive overview Reviewshake provides ensures that no review goes unnoticed. It enables you to respond promptly, whether the feedback is positive or negative.
Reviewshake also automates the process of requesting reviews, making it easier to gather positive feedback from satisfied customers. Additionally, the tool’s reporting features provide valuable insights into trends and areas for improvement. Reviewshake’s features help you make informed decisions about your business strategies.
For businesses serious about managing their online reputation, Reviewshake offers a range of features that simplify and optimize the process. Best of all, you can sign up for free and start experiencing the benefits immediately!
Start proactively managing your online presence with a visit to Reviewshake.com
