Analysts have spent years researching the relationship between customer sentiments expressed online and their impact on overall brand health. Online brand reputation matters for a number of logical reasons. Attempts at mapping the financial repercussions of ORM haven’t proved easy. However, researches have confirmed and established a co-relation between ORM and its ROI in two ways.
ROI for Online Reputation Management – How it Works?
The two-way approach we were talking about includes:
Top-Line Revenue Growth
The top-line revenue growth is based on either selling more products or selling products at a premium and sometimes both. As you know well, selling more of your products or selling them at a premium does not come easy. Especially the latter is rare. Top-line revenue growth is driven mostly through review management.
Driving ROI via Review Management
Review management requires you to keep requesting, monitoring and responding to reviews from customers. This is a foolproof way to drive up the rating scores. Studies have also shown that 70% of customers do leave feedback and reviews when specifically asked to do so. Moreover, there seems to be a direct correlation between review volume and ranking on Google search. The greater the number of reviews is, the higher you rank on Google Search. What more? The higher you rank, the more people review your product, the more positive light is shed on your brand, the more people click and engage with your brand. A clear illustration of how ORM helps gain more leads and affects ROI.
Driving ROI via Social Media Engagement
According to Marketing Sherpa, 95% of people within the age group of 18-34 are more likely to follow brand pages on social media. And 71% of customers who have had a positive experience with brands on social media are likely to recommend it to their friends and family (Ambassador). Social media activities are clearly related to reputation scores even if it might not be apparent at first glance.
Bottom-Line Cost Savings
This involves reducing errors while improving customer satisfaction by addressing internal operations and processes. Making them cost-effective and mechanizing labor-intensive chores helps resolve this. We found the two most viable ways to do this and they are listed below.
Automating Business Listings
People search for information about local businesses seeking their location or contact information. And Google data tells us that businesses with accurate listings are twice as likely to feature on these searches compared to others. But imagine the intense manual entry hours that go into maintaining these listings. Especially so if your company has multiple branches and varied work hours and different locations.
Automating these efforts helps your business feature quickly while at the same time saving the cost that would otherwise go into labor hours.
Outsource Social Media Management
Advertising and managing your brand’s profile on social media has its ups and downs but it is an absolutely unavoidable chore if your business is to prosper. Research has shown that earned media (what others are saying about your brand online) can impact your stock market performance. However, this is a more intense task than manually entering business listings and requires human attention based on which strategic decision calls are being made. Having to manage the business, and then trying to figure out the precise customer base, their geography and their interests, can be a hectic task. This is where you can stop fretting and seek help from third-party sources. Or if you want to be involved in the process but need some support, you could seek tools for social media listening or social media intelligence which take care of the analytical bit.
Maintaining a solid plan for online reputation management isn’t an option anymore. It is being recognized universally as a necessity in this world of competitive rivalry. You are right to consider the financial risk versus return when investing in anything, including an online reputation. But, now you can rest assured that with the right technology and correct strategy, the return on your investment will be significant in both tangible and intangible ways.