There has been a paradigm shift in the way customers view businesses and the products they offer today. The digital era has made your brand’s online reputation synonymous to how your product is perceived offline. Customers today jump online before making a purchase to check ratings. And it doesn’t stop there. A research by Catalyst Digital revealed that 94% of customers use search during their life cycles and around 72% place their trust in what they find online as well. With this level of reliability on online searches, brand reputation management is clearly of significance for businesses as this directly correlates to new clients and buyers in reality. This is actually quite pivotal as studies have proven that even an increase of 0.1 in your brand’s star ratings online can result in up to 25% increase in conversion rates.

Owing to the same and understanding the need of a positive online persona, the reputation management industry has grown into a complex system. In today’s age we have a plethora of components and digital assets that constitute a brand’s image online. These range from blog posts, interview features, and press releases to images, video resources, and vlogs. Adding to the variety of assets is the dynamic nature of technologies, platforms, and algorithms. In the year 2018 alone, Google made 3234 improvements or changes to its ranking algorithm according to which pages get ranked on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Keeping up with these ever changing updates can be a challenge while trying to curate a positive brand reputation. With all these factors and the number of websites where your organization might be mentioned, your brand reputation can get quite overwhelming to keep up with. As a leader of an organization, it might be the best use of your resources and energy to engage a professional agency, whether you are looking for personal brand reputation management or your business’s online reputation management.

What Can a Reputation Management Agency Do for You?

A good reputation management agency can help you seamlessly curate and/or manage your brand’s image, build a healthy stack of testimonials which attract a larger client base, build trust, and become your foundation in case of a reputation crisis. The best reputation management services for you will depend on your unique brand story, products or services, and what you hope to achieve.  

Reputation management services can include a wide range of different elements that differ from agency to agency. Each agency has their unique strategy to maintain and boost online reputation. Below are a few of the most popular services:

• Content Creation: Agencies who specialize in content creation have a major focus on curating positive, high-quality content for your business. This is one of the best ways to create a narrative surrounding your brand 一 one that you control. Updating search results with regular and positive content is also a good way to suppress any negative stories already out there. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important technique that these agencies often employ in order to rank your content favorably. 
• Social Media Management (SMM): A social media agency creates, updates, and manages engagement for your business’s profile on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. This is an ideal way to build community and engage directly with your customers. 
• Review Management: As mentioned, reviews are one of the ways to showcase the trust you have built with your satisfied clients. The agencies who have a focus on this aspect of online reputation management reach out to your customers to request reviews, promote the positive ones, and reply to negative ones on platforms like Google, Yelp, Glassdoor and more. 
• Crisis Management: Reputation Management service providers who specialize in crisis management can be extremely useful if your business has a number of negative stories online. They can assist you in mitigating the bad press and rebuilding your positive image again. 
• Monitoring and Reporting: Agencies can use various brand mention tools to get notified when your business is mentioned on the web across platforms of discussion and information. This can help you be better aware of the overall sentiment of online citizens regarding your brand and alter your reputation management campaign accordingly. 

Some of the best reputation management services are not exclusionary, instead they render a mix of the aforementioned, providing a comprehensive reputation management and/or repair campaign. 

Similarly, some agencies will provide proactive service while others will provide reactive reputation management. Proactive reputation management builds a core foundation of positive assets that position your brand in a favorable light. Reactive management becomes necessary when one has to suppress or remove negative content from being easily visible to a potential customer. 

How Do You Choose the Best Reputation Management Service for You?

The service that you choose should fit in your unique story and help you create the online version of your business vision. To be able to choose the right online reputation agency for your organization, you first need to set your goals and chart out what you are looking for at the end of a successful reputation management campaign. Define your own vision of what you wish to achieve, set your benchmarks, before you look for who can turn that into a reality. 

Ask yourself what you wish to attain. Are you a new start-up wanting to be seen and curate an image online? Are you looking to promote and make your digital assets more visible? Do you wish to create a community of loyal customers on social media? Or do you wish to fight back against a case of internet defamation? The service and agency you need will depend accordingly.

This does not mean that you need to know exactly what you want and precisely how you want it done. A reputation management agency will help you analyze your current position 一 do you have a positive, negative, or non-existent image on the web? 一 sketch out a plan for the future that includes both long-term hopes and short-term goals.

At the same time, it is a good idea to take stock of both your resources and current standing yourself. For example, look at the reviews you already have or the followers you wish to have.  Try to have specific goals and criteria to measure an intangible aspect like reputation.

This will also help you in setting a budget you want to allocate for your reputation management services. Most reputation management consultancies have a customized price chart depending on your needs and goals which can be split into monthly, three months, six months or yearly plans.

What are the Characteristics of the Best Reputation Management Service Providers?

The best reputation management services understand your goals and objectives and customize their campaign accordingly. Often, they will also encompass both proactive and reactive reputation management strategies in their process, and will use only white-hat SEO techniques. 

Usually, these consultancies themselves will have a quite good online reputation that portrays that they walk the talk. Most importantly, the best reputation management campaigns are customer-centric and continuous. Curating and maintaining a brand’s image is an ongoing and ever-evolving process which has to be adapted as the needs change and the situation develops.

Some factors you can keep in mind while comparing different reputation management consultancies include the price range, the services or features they provide, their past ratings and success rates, their customer support, and what makes them unique. 

Your brand reputation is an integral part of your business plan and being proactive about maintaining a positive image can give you great returns. Allocating adequate resources to the same and consulting brand reputation management experts is a smart move for any organization in today’s online world.