How Online Reputation Management Drives Ecommerce Growth
How Online Brand Reputation Management Drives E-commerce Website Conversions
Did you know that 84 % of them of customers, rely heavily on online review websites as well as recommendations from friends and family before they make an online purchase decision? They use this as a way to protect themselves from making the wrong decision. And in recent times, we’ve seen a trade war between China and America where we’ve seen on TikTok. Where Chinese Original Equipment Manufacturer have come out to highlight that more than 80 % of the luxury bags are actually produced in China and not in the Western countries like Italy, UK and USA, they claim luxury leather bags are manufactured in China and then exported or shipped to the Westerns countries for them then to slap a Made in ITALY labels on it and that then charge very high prices. There is assumption that some bags that are sold for $34,000 are actually produced for $1,400.
I’m not going to mention any brand, but I’m just going to highlight that these has been relentless attack on the credibility of luxury brands which highlights the importance of online reputation management and how its impacts on e-commerce growth and website conversion. The agenda of this blog is broken down into four sections.
- What is online reputation management?
- The importance of online reputation management.
- How to protect your brand with online reputation management.
- The impact of online reputation management on your e-commerce conversions.
What is online reputation management.
Online reputation management is the process of you understanding the narrative around your brand. A lot of businesses do not online reputation management strategy in place so the first thing you need to do is monitor your online reputation across all platforms. Its extremely important that you know positive and negative narratives and conversations is happening about your brand in real time. Some organisations do not even know what review positive or negative that is being posted about their brand online on review websites like Trust-pilot. Some organisations are not even aware of video content that is being produced by disgruntled customers or ex employees or someone looking to negatively damage your brand reputation.
The best e-commerce strategy is to have systems in place to understand how search engine and social media platforms are interpreting your brand personality and image. This is not about SEO. This is about you understanding the narrative about your brand on search engines, the narrative about your brand on social media, the narrative about your brand on review websites and the narrative about your brand from customer feedback, word of mouth, which is difficult to measure and monitor. So online reputation is monitoring all this narrative. There are different tools that you can use to monitor that in real time. And I would encourage you if you don’t have that set up and you need help with setting up online reputation management, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help you.
The next thing when it comes to online reputation management is how do you actually influence the online narrative? You have a way to monitor what is being said about you and you have a way to then create a counter argument, a counter narrative to clarify what is being said about your brand online. When I’m talking about online reputation management, it’s not really isolated to businesses alone.
There’s personal brand online reputation management and a different sector online reputation management. There’s online reputation management for financial services, for the government, for pharmaceuticals and different types of organization. This is really important because it would affect your business growth. It will affect your bottom line. I’m going to talk about that later on in this podcast. So now let’s look at, OK, you now look at influencing your brand narrative. I’m going to talk about how you’re going to do that later on as well. Online reputation management also means managing your brand mentions. I’ve talked about this in three phases, monitoring the narrative, influencing your brand narrative, and then managing those online reputation management. There two ways for you to manage your online reputation management.
There is one way where you have you are proactive about managing your online reputation management. And the other way is when you’re reactive. Let’s take the example of the luxury industry. They’ve been attacked severely on TikTok by Chinese artisan that claimed that 80 % of luxury products are produced in China. There is the reactive approach where luxury brands would then create content to counter and to clarify that narrative about the Chinese comments about luxury brands. But what are they doing at the time of this recording? Luxury brands are only denying that that is actually true. I have some products which you could class as luxury products, and I know for a fact that this product are produced in the UK.
How do I know this? Because I go to the factory shop to make the purchase for this product. I’m talking about shoes in particular. I’m not going to mention name of these brands, but I can confidently say that there are a few luxury brands here. I live in Northampton in the UK. Northampton is the shoe capital of the world. There a lot of shoe factories here in Northampton. So I know for a fact that top brands that are luxury brands are actually manufactured here in the UK. But the problem with this luxury brands that know that their products are not manufactured in China, but in the UK, they don’t have any strategy, any online reputation management strategy to protect themselves because the attack or I’m calling an attack because It’s not 100 % true that most of the luxury brands are produced in China.
So it’s like a general attack on the luxury industry and any e-commerce store that is classified at luxury in the West will be affected. So what I’m trying to say here is your online reputation management strategy, the reactive management strategy needs to respond if your luxury brand or even if in your e-commerce or your regular e-commerce store. When you have a narrative brewing online about your business, about your product, about your service, you can react to change and clarify that narrative. But if you do not have an online reputation management strategy or a consultant like myself to help you create that reactive strategy, that becomes a problem for you.
The next approach to online reputation management is what I call the proactive approach. I’ve worked with organizations in the past where they’re exclusively online reputation management agencies. And back then we had private clientele, high net worth individuals. I’m talking about billionaires here, not millionaires, where we create a strategy around protecting the personal brand.
as well as protecting clients in financial services. So these online reputation management proactive strategy is something that you create to make sure that your brand narrative, you are the one telling your brand story as opposed to someone selling that story. I’ll talk more about how you can do this in the next chapter, in the next section. So
Importance of online reputation management.
The attack by Chinese manufacturers on western luxury industry will impact on the trust and credibility of the major ecommerce brands as well as other premium brands that are not necessarily luxury products. The ripple effect will linger for a very long time because existing and aspirational luxury consumers now have that trust problem with those products, because whenever they’re trying to buy a product, they’re like, actually, is this product worth the price? So the importance of your online reputation management is you need to have a strategy in place to build to repair damaged trust for your product and your service.
Then another important thing from online reputation management perspective is its impact on trust and credibility. Online reputation management is important because a negative reputation would affect the trust of your customers towards your product, service and overall brand credibility. Online reputation management is also important because it will helps reduce the friction in the purchase decision making process. Every customer that comes to your ecommerce website or to your physical store location will need to go through a decision making process influenced by their perception of your brand based on online narratives. If in their purchase consideration stage, they find negative narratives about your brand, there’s damage to your credibility, which makes the purchase decision making process longer and a higher reluctance to buy from your store. But if they didn’t see those issues crop up, from online, then it will reduce the decision making process. Another thing you also need to look at is online reputation management is important because I’ve seen brands highlight the negative credibility of their competitors. Why are they doing this? It’s not really ethical, but I’ve seen brands do it where they accentuate those scandals of the competitor because that then increases your customer coming to you. So what I’m trying to say is when you ramp up or you highlight the negative narrative of your competitor and you can even mention it as part of your website content and even you ad creatives. Highlight what makes you different to your competitor by subtly highlighting the negative narrative about your competitors. So when your customer is making that decision, they’re able to see reasons to choose you over your competitors. It’s able to deter potential customers from buying from your competitor.
Then another importance of online reputation management is the importance for crisis management. I mentioned earlier on about the scandal where Chinese manufacturers were claiming that 80 % of the products, the luxury products are produced in China. If the luxury market, the luxury e-commerce store have had a crisis reputation management strategy in place to be proactive and prepare for any potential attack on their reputation, then they would have that strategy in place and that asset in place to roll it out. How do you plan for possible attack on your reputation and how do you know what and when such crisis will happy? It’s the same question you would ask when it comes to the real world. How does a country know that it’s going to be attacked by its enemies? They don’t, but that does not stop them from putting in place missile defence system and all type of defence counter terrorism, counter attack defence mechanism to protect the country. The same principle applies to e-commerce store. The same principle applies to businesses. You need to have a proactive defence mechanism for your online reputation. You need to anticipate what kind of reputation attack or damage are you prone to from a brand perspective. What skeletons do you have that might be discovers?
How do you plan to protect your brand? One issue that has happened over the years consistently as consumers have always questioned the sourcing of materials for products, consumers have been wary of the impact of products on the environment and slave labour being used in less developed countries to manufacture goods. People want ethical sourced product. So an e-commerce store that is proactive with the online reputation management knows that there is a potential and a possibility that their sustainability and their acquisition or product procurement process is open to online reputation attacks. These is why you need to consider creating an online reputation management strategy to protect yourself.
If luxury brands were proactive to the possibilities of reputation attacks by Chinese OEM, they would have been prepared with an online reputation strategy to counteract the negative narrative from Chinese OEM. When you’re looking at crisis management, you need to map out potential areas where you anticipate attacks to your brand, where you’re prone to attack from a reputation perspective.
Then another thing you need to look at when it comes to online reputation management is you need to have a brand presence that is evergreen. Irrespective of reputation attacks, its important to build a strong brand equity overtime which makes your brand less prone to sudden reputation attacks. The strength of your brand will protect you from that attack. Lets look at the Chinese manufacturers attacking luxury brands reputation again. Luxury brands have by default always highlighted the existence of fake, counterfeit, duplicates and dupe replicas of their brand being produced in China. This narrative has been consistent across the board but no strategy was ready to counter the narrative from China at the time. People have always felt that, there’s always a fake of a luxury item. The luxury industry could easily ramp up that narrative to show that whatever the Chinese are saying about them producing 80 % of the product, there’s a truth to it because the 80 % that is produced is actually the problem that they’ve been talking about in the industry. It’s actually the duplicate, the counterfeit that is being produced. Then you then create a different narrative where people are like, hang on a minute, maybe there’s some doubt in this assertion narrative coming out of China about Luxury leather bags. Maybe those 80 % that is allegedly produced in China are duplicates and replicas of the original. Again, I don’t have enough information, but I’m just trying to help you understand that when it comes to online reputation management, you need to have a plan to protect your brand. How do you protect your brand?
How to protect your brand with online reputation management
The first thing you need to do is to set up online reputation tracking. You need to be able to track every good, bad and ugly mention of your brand online. You need to be able to track in real time every positive and negative review, every social media post, every news, every video upload, everything across all search engines about your brand. There’s some tools that would claim to be online reputation management tool, but what they’re actually doing is managing your Google My Business pages. That is not online reputation management. Online reputation management goes beyond managing your Google My Business page and your store location pages review monitoring and updating. You need to monitor all these brand narrative related activities online.
The number two things you need to do to protect your brand online is to bury negative assets and narratives. Bury negative review as quick as possible before they gather momentum to hurt or damage your brand perception from the perspective of new and existing customers. The negative review about your brand will be posted online and will potentially be picked up by search engine and it will rank on page one for your brand term across search engines. What you need to do as a business leader or owner is to make sure that you create enough cross platform assets online to dominate your online brand narrative. On review websites, you need to have someone in place to respond to those reviews, to respond to those negative feedbacks on review websites. You need to be authentic about how you do this.
You’re not just going to go about denying or deleting comments and things like that. You need to be able to answer those questions in a way where it shows that you are doing the best for your customers. What I’m trying to say is people do not expect you to have five star review across the board. If I go online to buy something and I see a brand or website that has just only five star review for me, that’s a red flag. What I want to see What most customers wants to see is your top three or five five-star reviews and then your top three worst reviews. Those worst reviews is to understand the negatives instances about your product or services and how you responded to it. What I’m what I’m trying to look for and what the customer is trying to look for here is, is this toxic or dramatic customer? I mean, the customer that has too much drama that is difficult to satisfy, is it actually an authentic negative review? People can actually read between the lines and some brands make the mistake of posting and “manufacturing” positive reviews about themselves. That is counterproductive and I would encourage against that approach.
You also need to prepare a proactive crisis management plan, as I mentioned earlier on. So how does online reputation management impact your website conversion? First, a positive online reputation management, a positive online equity will attract new customer. We all hear about the best way to get new customers and the cheapest way to get new customers is through positive word of mouth. Positive word of mouth will attract new customers. It will also give you grand exposure and some of this positive review will come from even a third party voice. Other people that have heard good things about your product will be tempted to even create content that is then reaffirming what your customers have said. That’s where you have user generated content even on third party websites and another thing you need to understand with online reputation management is it influences the purchase decision from your branded keyword perspective. When you’re doing search engine optimisation and digital marketing, Google ads and even social media, there two types of keywords. There two types of phrases. There is the generic non branded keywords and then there’s the branded keyword. Your online reputation would positively increase the conversion of your branded keyword. If you have a bad reputation, it will then reduce the conversion of your branded keyword and even the traffic search for your branded keyword. Because when there is no word of mouth attracting people to your brand, then the search for your branded keyword will be lower.
Then another thing you need to understand, the impact of online reputation management goes beyond just keyword. It also affects your customer acquisition costs. The cost at which you are able to get a customer would drastically increase if you have a bad reputation. It will reduce if you have a very positive reputation. You also need to understand that your online reputation, your brand reputation based on how effective your online reputation management strategy is will impact customer loyalty. Loyalty is born out of your brand. When people have bought something from you after they’ve bought something for you, it’s pop. When people have bought something from you. after they’ve bought something from you, there’s a high chance that they might not have seen negative review or negative comments about you. That chances of them buying again from you reduces if they stumble across a negative review or negative feedback about your product or service after they’ve purchased. That repeat purchase will not happen. That repeat purchase will increasingly happen if what they hear about your brand after they’ve made that first purchase is all positive and positive and positive reaffirmation about your brand.
My name is Fermi Olajiga. I’m a Growth Marketing Consultant. I have worked on online reputation management for high net worth individuals and I’ve worked on online reputation management for financial services, e-commerce brand and other types of organization. This ties in into a growth marketing strategy. So if you’re looking for someone to help you increase the conversion of your website, your e-commerce through online reputation management, reach out to me. One thing I always try to highlight across the board is conversion happens in the mind of your customer. Conversion does not happen on the website. The website is just a place for them to complete a purchase. Your physical store location is just a place for them to complete the purchase. If they’ve had negative reviews, negative impression about your brand, they will come to your website through Google ads, through paid advertising, and they will not buy. Why did they not buy? Because your online reputation management is not what it should be. So for luxury brands out there that have suffered from the news from Chinese claiming to have create a. So. So for luxury brands out there that have been affected by the Chinese manufacturers claiming to have been responsible for 80 % of the products, you need to have a good online reputation management strategy. You need someone that understands customer psychology, understand how that impacts brand. Reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help you. Thank you. Bye.