What are the drawbacks of having a bad reputation online? A bad online reputation costs you four things at once: the trust of customers who research you before they buy, the good employees who check what your company looks like before they apply, your ranking in search engines like Google and Bing, and the sales that quietly go to a competitor whose reviews read better than yours. None of that damage announces itself. It shows up as a slow decline you only notice after it has already cost you money.
It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. Warren Buffett
In the current world of digital advancement, the online reputation of every business is crucial to its survival in the longer run. A consumer’s trust and certainty profoundly affect a company’s ability to keep doing business at all. Keeping that reputation intact is not a vanity project, because the business itself is at stake. Even high profile personalities and elite companies have to monitor how buyers and followers react to them, continuously, right across the internet. In earlier years, reputation was measured by how satisfied your stakeholders were. That perception has shifted decisively towards a customer centric view: what matters now is how people, generally the customer, perceive you and your brand online.
What causes a bad online reputation in the first place?
A company lands up with a bad internet reputation when there is a breach of trust on the customer’s side, and that customer goes online and writes a negative review about you. There is a review destination for practically every business in the market now, and on all of them customers are talking about and examining the services and products a company offers. A negative review spreads quickly and easily, and it damages the reputation of the company while it travels. That is exactly why monitoring and responding to negative reviews matters so much.
Below are the main drawbacks of having a bad reputation online, and what each one actually costs you.
How does a bad reputation create scepticism about your brand?
We are in a world where businesses talk and work around the idea of building faith in consumers through their engagements on social media channels. Those ideas have opened up genuine opportunities: brand association, brand equity, brand loyalty and much more. But while advertising a product, businesses often give customers false hopes that they later find difficult to fulfil. That leads directly to mistrust. Once a customer stops believing what you say about yourself, every one of the opportunities above becomes very hard to build. Scepticism is expensive because it makes all your future marketing work harder for the same result.
How does a bad reputation cost you employees?
We all prefer to buy products from companies with a good reputation in the market. In exactly the same way, we all want to work for a company with a good reputation, online and offline. People already working for a company with a bad reputation start to question the products they are selling, and that doubt eventually turns into resignations. Your employees are an intangible asset, and a bad reputation deprives you of them. That is why an online reputation monitoring system has to do two jobs at once: build up the positives and clean up the negatives, so the company keeps the people it has already trained.
How does a bad online reputation damage your search results?
A terrible online reputation can pull your website’s ranking down on engines like Google and Bing. Clients and customers are far more likely to go ahead with products or services they find on the first three pages of results, and most of them never jump to the second page on their first search. A terrible online reputation can push your site onto the third or fourth page, or even further back than that. At that point you are still online, but for practical purposes you are invisible to the people searching for exactly what you sell.
How much revenue does a bad reputation actually cost?
80% of customers look at and analyse the reviews on your products and services before buying anything from you. Positive reviews do play a role, but negative reviews land harder: they affect the sentiment of a potential customer and their willingness to associate with your brand at all. Reviews are word of mouth for the online world. Negative publicity has a huge tendency to decrease your sales and hamper your reputation over the long run, and the loss is transactional. It comes out of revenue, month after month, until the content that caused it is dealt with.
Why is repairing a reputation harder than protecting one?
By now you will have understood how costly and time consuming brand reputation monitoring becomes once the damage is already done and no preventive measures were taken at the right time. The expertise needed to deal with a company’s reputation is generally difficult for a company to build and maintain by itself. Online reputation management is the discipline of addressing damaging content associated with your brand, and of using customer feedback to solve the underlying problems that are hampering your online brand reputation in the first place.
Who should handle online reputation management for your company?
With outsourcing having become normal practice in the 21st century, many companies now bring in an agency to provide online brand reputation management services. Reputation management agencies supply the technical expertise a business rarely has in house, and they help you hold on to a strong reputation sensibly rather than reactively.
Online Reputation Manage has a team of specialists and the full set of tools for effective online reputation management. We deal with everything connected to your brand’s value in the online community. We also have a blog on Techniques to Improve Online Reputation if you want the repair playbook in detail. That online community includes search engines, online forums, blogs and, of course, social media. Between them, our specialists serve a diverse client base that reaches all the way up to the Fortune 500 list.
What should you do next?
Treat your online reputation as an operating risk, not a marketing extra. Monitor what is being said about you, respond to negative reviews promptly, fix the underlying problem the review is pointing at, and get the content that is genuinely defamatory or fake removed. Online Reputation Manage has removed more than 4,000 complaints, collected more than 5,000 reviews for clients and served 300+ happy clients, with a 98% success rate on the work we take on. If a bad reputation is already costing you customers, the sooner it is addressed, the less of it there is to undo.