The reputation of a brand can make or break a business. Third-party review platforms, such as Yelp, Facebook, Google, and others brought a whole new layer of metrics for businesses and organizations to analyze in order to make their brands stand out from the competition. In the very recent past, we have seen how an audience can impact brand reputation, which in-turn has a ripple effect that causes investors to offer or pull funding, influences stock value to rise or plummet, and causes audiences to grow and shrink. Additionally, a brand’s reputation can, for good or ill, become newsworthy, which further influences how the public perceives a business or organization.
What Is ORM?
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is how the world views your brand. If you want to see how this works, pick a brand or product. In Google, start typing “Is [brand or product]” and the predictive text in the bar will list some of the top related searches. Obviously, search results that have negative connotations are not good for any brand. Similarly, no results are also not good, because it means a business or organization does not even register on people’s radars. You can leverage ORM to get your brand noticed and position your organization in a positive light. Think of it as a credit rating. No one wants bad credit, but having no credit at all is sometimes worse. Building a strong and healthy reputation opens the door to more opportunities and can lower your overall marketing expenses.
Gauging Your Brand’s Online Reputation
In addition to performing basic searches to see what results your brand gets, there are a few other places to check:
- Google Reviews: Has anyone reviewed your organization? What do they say? Are there any themes spanning the reviews?
- Social Media: Does your brand exist on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.? How many followers are there? Has growth stagnated or dropped? Is there any engagement with your posts? Have visitors left reviews?
- Glassdoor: If you have employees, they can write anonymous reviews of your business while they are working for you and after they leave. Keep in mind that because Glassdoor is anonymous, this creates a large grey area where people can leave artificial reviews to bolster or lower the reputation of a brand.
Building and Managing Your Online Reputation
ORM is integrated to virtually all aspects of digital marketing. Building and managing your online reputation has as much to do with SEO and paid advertisements as it does with blog posts, social media, and engaging with your audience. Looking at brand reputation management from a high level, a few of the integral components include:
- Paid Media: Sponsored posts, lead gen, and other paid marketing methods to proliferate your brand and grow your audience.
- Earned Media and Traffic: A brand’s relationship with media outlets, bloggers, investors, influencers, and more who are willing to post positive content without any incentive.
- Shared Media: If you thought “synergy” was a passing phase in marketing, think again. The ability to tie your brand into charities and communities, or to co-brand with other organizations can do wonders to propel a positive reputation.
- Owned Media: From thought pieces to blog posts, reviews, videos, infographics, podcasts, and more, the content you generate and own will improve your rankings and give you control over your brand’s narrative.
Learn More about Brand Reputation Management
To learn more about reputation management, building or repairing your online reputation, or repositioning your organization online, contact the team at Outpace Digital Marketing. We will work with your to audit and analyze your online reputation, and then implement an ORM strategy to get your organization the results you desire.
