Range of services offered: Aspects of reputation management for businesses and professionals are identifying and responding to negative content, encouraging and promoting positive reviews, creating a good and lasting first impression, and ensuring that potential customers can find you.
Reputation management companies also help firms and individuals monitor reviews and comments on sites and across social media, discover all references to their brand, and manage opinions expressed about them on public forums. The tools that the services use to protect reputations include company profiles, fast surfacing of reviews of your business, and timely and effective responses to positive and negative comments.
Customers have growing expectations around establishing a two-way relationship with the firms they deal with. Often simply acknowledging the customer’s criticism will alleviate some of the damage, but it’s most important to indicate that you take their concerns seriously. Like many other industries, many reputation management services are adding AI-based capabilities to reputation protection, such as Podium’s AI-driven response suggestions.
Another facet of reputation management to be aware of is localization, which is now as important for large, multinational firms as it is for small businesses. The ability to tailor positive reviews to a specific area has become a key factor for companies large and small.
Customization of services to meet specific needs: There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all reputation management solution. Vendors such as WebiMax work closely with their clients to determine where your company currently stands with its customers, your goals for improving your business’s reputation, and the approach that will achieve those goals within your budget.
Many reputation management services tailor their offerings to the needs of specific industries. For example, Reputation sells solutions for healthcare and senior care, restaurants and hospitality businesses, retailers, financial services, property management, and the automotive industry.
Every reputation-management campaign that NetReputation crafts is designed for each customer’s unique situation. The company breaks down the services it offers initially, after the first month, and for subsequent months. For example, the emphasis at first is on reputation analysis, including removal assessment, competitive research (gap analysis), and strategies for earned media, asset promotion, and business listings. In the first month of service, resources shift to profile development and content creation, as well as publishing and promotion. The following months will have a small strategy component but an increased focus on content production and optimization.
Transparent pricing and packages: The downside of the need for customized solutions for reputation management is the difficulty in pricing the services. Many vendors don’t post their prices on their sites and instead rely on customers signing up for a custom quote. These companies include Go Fish Digital, WebiMax, Reputation, and NetReputation. Gadook, Podium, and Birdeye list the cost of their reputation management packages, and Gadook also provides the price it charges per hour for one-off projects. Google Business Profile remains a free service.
Ultimately, reputation management services could run you between a few hundred dollars a month to upward of $15,000 a month. For many businesses, reputation management is a form of insurance against damaging online content, as well as a tool for protecting and enhancing its positive reputation. The investment in reputation management services becomes the foundation of the firm’s trust-building activities.
However, most vendors require annual contracts for their reputation management plans, and their cancellation terms typically don’t cover refunds. For example, Birdeye allows refunds for early cancellations only if your contract includes an early opt-out clause, and it can be paused only if a pause clause is listed in the contract terms.
Proven strategies for reputation repair and maintenance: One of the most important reputation considerations for companies is identifying and responding effectively to negative content regarding the business. Most instances of a bad review or poor customer experience pose little threat to the firm’s long-term reputation, although the cumulative effect of ignoring or mishandling these complaints can be costly. The larger concern is getting ahead of serious damage to the company’s brand, whether a data breach that leaks customers’ sensitive information or a marketing campaign that goes terribly wrong.
Some of the strategies that reputation management services may provide to you have both passive and active components and include:
- Ensuring that you’ve claimed all of your profiles on consumer review sites, starting with your Google Business Profile but including profiles on Yelp, TrustPilot, Capterra, and other similar review sites.
- Identifying negative comments and responding within 24 hours from your verified business profile to apologize and offer a solution or concession.
- Deleting negative reviews if they meet the site’s requirement for removal, or “burying” them by surfacing positive reviews that will appear higher in results.
- Automating the process of inviting customers to write positive reviews of your company via services such as Birdeye’s automatic text messages.
- Being prepared to act fast when a bad review or other negative comment gains traction.
Responsive and reliable customer support: Repairing a company’s reputation doesn’t happen overnight, and maintaining a solid reputation with customers and the public is a never-ending process. You’re likely to enter into a long-term relationship with whichever reputation management service you choose, so you have to be confident that the company will help you start the process, implement your plan, and monitor and maintain it to ensure it remains effective.
Most of the vendors on this list offer extensive self-help support that includes knowledge bases, guides, tutorials, FAQs, and community forums. Most provide direct support via email, chat, and telephone during extended business hours. In particular, Birdeye, Reputation, and WebiMax have extensive resources for users in addition to offering direct support through various channels.
By contrast, the self-help support resources available from Go Fish Digital, Gadook, and NetReputation are more meager, consisting primarily of FAQs. One of our key selection criteria for this list was the responsiveness of the vendors to customer complaints. All eight of the services we review here had minimal complaints registered against them on user-rating sites.