The ORM (Online Reputation Management) is a set of digital marketing techniques responsible for managing the online brand reputation. It is about making an active and constant listening to everything that is said about the brand and being able to monitor it in real time.
The digital revolution and the rise of electronic commerce have made consumers increasingly demanding. Any business, whether online or offline, is exposed to criticism and user ratings and it is important to have all channels controlled (blogs, forums, social networks, digital press, etc).
But the ORM not only allows us to know what is said about us, but it goes much further. Thanks to listening, we can detect new market niches and new lines of business that might never have occurred to us. How? We’ll tell you below.
Listening tools – Keyword monitoring
The first step to perform the listening is to choose carefully the keywords that we want to monitor. For example, an ophthalmological clinic should monitor the name of its own clinic and the most outstanding services it offers with colloquial language (as users would look for it). In this way, instead of monitoring “refractive surgery”, it would be convenient to monitor “myopia operation”, “astigmatism operation”, etc.
Once we have the selected keywords, the monitoring is done through any listening tool of the thousands in the market. They are easy and intuitive, but they are not economical at all. Although, to break the ice you can start with a free one.
What can be achieved thanks to the monitoring of keywords?
1. Know more about your audience and know “where it moves through”. Below we tell you the case that happened to our client Mi Electro, e-commerce dedicated to household appliances sell. He found that in Foro Coches there were many users who talked about the good price that one of his TV sets had. Mi Electro did not know people were interested in this product since it was not one of the top brands. Thanks to this, he decided to include it in his Google Ads campaigns, and it turned out to be a success.
2. Find new business lines. Our client RH Hotels has hotels located on the Alicante and Valencia coasts. He discovered that many of his foreign guests commented in travelers forums that the stay had been great, but they were not happy with the transportation’s offer from the airport to the hotel.
RH Hotels decided to sign a collaboration agreement with the localities taxis of where their hotels are located and thus be able to offer their guests a discount of 30%.
3. Detect possible reputation crises immediately and react on time. To address them, it is necessary to have a well-developed contingency plan. A clear example of not having a well-defined action plan happened to Primark. A mother breast-fed her baby inside one of her stores; a sales assistant told her that this was not allowed and invited her to leave. The girl wrote a tweet telling what had happened to her and within a few hours, the social network was full of tweets in her favour. Primark did not realize on time and could not react to stop the situation. As a result, other mothers expressed their solidarity with the cause and organized meetings at the doors of more than 10 Primark stores with a double goal: on the one hand to claim the right to breastfeed in public and on the other hand to discredit the Primark image. Surely, an apology in due time would have avoided such transcendence.
Therefore, the ORM can greatly help to your brand development, both from the point of view of its reputation and its own growth. Whatever your business model, it is important you control everything that is within your reach and never leave the comment of any user without answering.
