The world today has become a digital village. Today, most businesses allow people to shop online and leave reviews. This, in turn, has helped customers check online reviews of a product or service before spending money. According to a G2 Crowd and Heinz Marketing survey, 85% of customers prefer to rely on online reviews before purchasing. So, how do you use these reviews to your advantage as a business?
The solution is online review management software. If you aren’t sure if this is something your business needs, let’s dive in to learn more.
What is Online Reputation Management Software?
In business, an excellent reputation is crucial to growth. When a brand receives good reviews, more people trust and buy more from it. Conversely, bad reviews give a company a terrible reputation, and no one will buy from the business. ORM, or Online Reputation Management software, is a must-have for any company that wants to foster its brand online.
This software leverages technology to crawl social media platforms and review sites for brand mentions. If the software finds a new review, it sends an alert to the business owner via text or email. You can then highlight these reviews on your website or respond accordingly. Like any other software, the ORM software has several crucial elements, and they include:
1. Social Media Monitoring
The ORM you choose must have social media monitoring. This monitoring involves tracking and analysis of social media channel conversations. These conversations help businesses understand their customers, competition, and the industry. The exercise provides invaluable insights that guide you in marketing strategy improvement, content creation, product development, and better customer service.
You build a business reputation based on what people say about your company. Observing social media platforms lets you know what your past, current, and potential clients think about you. Most ORM software has a central dashboard that allows you to view and respond to online reviews while staying on the app.
2. Review Requests
The more reviews you collect as an e-commerce venture, the better for you. A review request is when you send a customer a request to leave a review about your business based on their experience. The request can be via:
- The reviews page on your website
- Social media platforms, where you can send a direct message or write a post asking for reviews
- Thank you pages on your website
- On your invoices or receipts
3. Competitor Analysis
You can do a manual competitor analysis by going through your competitor’s social media or website. However, this approach means you may miss out on crucial intelligence. This competitor analysis feature examines the competition’s market share, features, pricing, weaknesses, strengths, culture, and customer reviews. Your ORM should be able to do a complete and thorough competitor analysis. This analysis will help by providing valuable insights into what people are saying about your competitors. You can create marketing strategies from these insights to give you an edge over your competition.
4. Email Alerts
The best ORM should send you email alerts whenever someone mentions your brand. It should give you access to all brand mentions on blogs, social media platforms, podcasts, news sites, videos, and review platforms like Yelp. These mentions allow you to respond to any allegations and do damage control if need be. Your business depends on its online reputation. It would help if you stayed in the loop of what past, current, and potential clients say about your business, whether good or bad.
5. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis detects the mood of sentiment in a text. Businesses use this technique to detect customer sentiment in social platform data and understand customers. Sentiment analysis is an NLP (Natural Language Processing) technique that determines the nature of data. NLP checks whether the data is negative, positive, or neutral.
The ORP software performs sentiment analysis on textual data to help you monitor sentiments about your product or service in customer feedback. This feature also detects emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, urgency, etc. You can tailor and define your specific categories on the software to meet your needs depending on how you prefer to interpret your customer queries and feedback.
6. Excellent Customer Support
You want a tool that serves you well and offers excellent customer support when you need it. When you install the software, you need help until you can easily navigate the app on your own. If you experience any mishaps, you need to have 24/7 support that can swing into action to solve the issue. Customer support should be available by chat, phone, email, or text.
7. Ease of Use
The ORM you choose should be easy to use, with a gentle learning curve. The software should be something new employees learn within the shortest time possible. The dashboard and user interface should be as simple as possible, and the reports easy to read and understand.
8. Integration with Third-Party Tools
The ORM software should seamlessly integrate with any third-party tools you already use. You should not need to download additional plugins or apps to use the ORM. The software should work with crucial web builders like Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress, etc.
9. Pricing
While pricing should be a minor determinant, it is still a crucial factor. A pricey ORM does not mean it’s the best, but neither should you go for the cheapest. Choose an ORM whose pricing is commensurate with the features it offers. If you need more features, do not compromise on quality to save a few dollars.
Some ORMs do not cost much, yet they have a lot to offer in terms of features. Analyze the features you want vis a vis the price and decide based on your needs. Most software has a trial period; you can try a few before deciding.
The internet revolutionized how we do business. No business wants negative feedback or reviews online. A disgruntled customer is dangerous for your reputation. Online reputation management software solutions can help you respond promptly to negative reviews. You can also use your positive reviews to build your brand’s credibility.
