How to Build Reputation Management Strategy Step-by-Step

Brand reputation matters. This can be frustrating for companies struggling to find a reputation management strategy to control the impact of what consumers are saying about the business online and off. 

Almost 81% of consumers feel that negative reviews online impact shopping decisions. However, only 35.4% of consumers trust reviews published on a company’s website. It begs the question: How does a company effectively control or manage its online reputation?

Managing online reputation goes beyond controlling what is said about a company. Trying to remove negative reviews, arguing with customers about their experiences, or simply ignoring complaints and issues is a recipe for brand disaster. 

Instead, a sound reputation management plan is proactive, not reactive. It’s intentional and comprehensive. Let’s look at how to build an effective brand reputation strategy. 

Reputation Management Strategy: Intro

Your company has a reputation. Hopefully, it’s a positive one. When they are deciding to spend money, customers first decide if your company is responsive, and reliable to do business with. Do you offer what the customer needs? Will the product or service work correctly? Will you make it right if something goes wrong?

Online reviews, social media interactions, and customer feedback all build the online perception of your company. While it can feel overwhelming to try and track and influence so many facets of the internet, online reputation management strategies make it possible to not only monitor, but to benefit from the online chatter about your business. 

• What is a Reputation Management Strategy?
• Key Steps to Building a Reputation Management Strategy
• Practical Tips for Effective Reputation Management
• Case Study: Reputation Management Strategy in Practice
• How PissedConsumer Can Help You Build Effective Strategy

What is a Reputation Management Strategy?

Brand reputation management is taking the reins on how consumers view your business. You become your business’ best influencer. A brand reputation strategy is more comprehensive than marketing or advertising. It’s bigger. Your company’s reputation includes three elements:

1. How your company performs.
2. How your company markets its products and services.
3. How others perceive your company.

You’re going to have to go bigger. That’s why a comprehensive reputation management strategy is essential. 

Not only must you ensure you’re producing the products and services that the customer expects, but you must also interact with these consumers in the public eye. You must monitor what customers are saying about your company. You must manage the mentions your customers, your competitors, and your collaborators are making in online spaces. And finally, you must appropriately respond to all this online feedback in ways that enhance rather than diminish your reputation. 

This can feel overwhelming, especially if you have previously treated feedback as final rather than simply a starting place for brand management. 

Key Steps to Building a Reputation Management Strategy

Step 1: Assess Your Current Online Reputation

Your first step is always to simply see where you are. What is your current reputation? Start by performing a comprehensive reputation analysis. This will include:

• Searching for your company’s name online and analyzing search engine results.
• Visiting multiple review platforms to find what customers are saying about your products and services. This will include big-name review sites as well as industry-specific sites.
• Pursuing social media and setting up monitoring services to see what is being said through Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Threads, YouTube, and other social media platforms.
• Sending out surveys to customers asking for feedback. Sometimes, the best information is the information we ask for directly.

Once you have the data from all the available sources, you must examine it objectively. What areas of your business are being repeatedly praised or criticized? What do customers wish for? What complaints are you seeing? 99.9% of customers read reviews when they shop online. See what they are seeing. All this information is simply data used to inform you of the next steps in your reputation management strategies.

Step 2: Assess Your Current Competition’s Online Reputation

Now you know what customers are saying about your company. But what are they saying about the competition? Do their star ratings on various websites look better than yours? Consumers say this is the most important factor when judging local businesses. 

Once you’ve gathered your information, do the same for your competitors. This information will not only let you know how you compare, but also potentially inspire new ideas for how to compete or differentiate. 

Pay attention to how your competition shows up online and how they engage with consumers in public spaces like social media or review platforms. If your chief competitors are engaging with negative customer reviews or answering customer questions through social media comments, shouldn’t you? 

It’s a clear sign of what customers expect in your industry. And if the competition isn’t engaging customers, it might be an opportunity to pull ahead by filling a need the customer didn’t even realize they had. 

Following your initial comprehensive analysis, set up alerts to notify you of additional and future mentions of your own company and your competition. This will continue to provide insight and inform your strategies about:

• What is working in the industry, and what isn’t?
• What mistakes have your competition made that you want to avoid?
• What are customers looking for, and what are the current expectations to satisfy those desires?
• Opportunities to differentiate and stand apart from the competition.
• Continue to adjust and improve your own strategies for customer engagement, responses, branding, and more.

Step 3: Set an Action Plan

You’ve collected the data. You’ve analyzed it. Now it’s time to act. It’s natural to be excited once you see opportunities to improve. Still, it’s also critical that your reputation management tactics be organized and intentional to avoid wasted effort or burnout. 

Brand management is not something accomplished in a day or a year. It’s systemic. Your goal is to design a system to bring your company up to speed with online reputation management and then to sustain your efforts moving forward. 

As you build your action plan, concentrate on setting S.M.A.R.T. goals. These goals are:

• Specific. Narrow your focus into bite-sized chunks. You can’t do everything at once.
• Measurable. How will you know if your goals are working? As you continue to collect data, what will you be looking for? For example, your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) may be to reply to 90% of customer reviews within 48 hours. 
• Achievable. A lofty goal is commendable, but may be unrealistic, especially if you’re just starting brand management efforts. Make your goals attainable. You can always start small and then grow your goals in the second stage of the action plan. 
• Time-bound. Your goals need a timeline, or they won’t feel urgent. Set a deadline for each action step.
• Relevant. Your goals should be reflective and relevant. This is an opportunity to prioritize. What steps will make the biggest impact with the least amount of change or effort? Start there and save the less impactful, refining steps for later in your strategy plan.

Step 4: Develop a Monitoring System

As you move from implementation to systemic brand maintenance, one of the most effective online reputation management tips is to automate as much as possible. Many reputation management tools exist to better track and improve responsiveness to online mentions, comments, and reviews. 

These online review management platforms allow businesses to set up automated review monitoring across their own platforms and many others. When your business is mentioned, the reviewing platform alerts you of the mention so that you can engage with the customer by addressing a concern, answering a question, or simply thanking a customer for a positive review. 

Review monitoring also allows you to track reviews that may be false or created by bots in a campaign to damage your business. Finally, management software will store the data tracked and collected for short—and long-term analysis. This allows you to see the impact of your brand management efforts, head off negative trends, or capitalize on positive ones. 

Step 5: Engage and Respond to Reviews

You’ve found and analyzed the reviews of your company. Now, it’s time to engage. Only 54% of businesses respond to all or most reviews, creating a distinctive opportunity for companies who are willing to engage with customers through reviews, complaints, and online comments.

Responding to reviews can not only set your company apart from the customers leaving feedback, but also with those who are watching. Most consumers only read reviews but don’t write them. With 41% of consumers who read reviews but never leave their own, or who leave only one review per year, you can assume that every review online reflects the sentiments of the silent readers. They are paying attention to your responses, too.

Whether you’re dealing with positive, negative, or even fake reviews – every response you make is an impactful part of your brand management system.

Negative reviews are frustrating and often feel unfair. Despite this, replying to negative reviews can greatly impact the development or improvement of your brand online. When you reply to a negative review:

• Acknowledge the customer’s concern or frustration. Often, customers want to feel heard.
• Apologize publicly for the issue or the inconvenience, even if your company isn’t at fault. 
• Offer the next steps to resolve the issue, perhaps a full solution or answer to a concern.
• Move the conversation out of the public eye by offering a private means of communication.
• Follow up once the issue is resolved to confirm the customer's satisfaction (and consider updating the initial review). 

How to Respond to Negative Reviews

Negative reviews are frustrating and often feel unfair. Despite this, replying to negative reviews can greatly impact the development or improvement of your brand online. When you reply to a negative review:

• Acknowledge the customer’s concern or frustration. Often, customers want to feel heard.
• Apologize publicly for the issue or the inconvenience, even if your company isn’t at fault. 
• Offer the next steps to resolve the issue, perhaps a full solution or answer to a concern.
• Move the conversation out of the public eye by offering a private means of communication.
• Follow up once the issue is resolved to confirm the customer's satisfaction (and consider updating the initial review). 

How to Respond to Fake Reviews

Nothing is more frustrating than fake or spam reviews. How do you fight a fake enemy? When you suspect fake reviews:

• Verify authenticity. Check your customer records, if possible, to see if the customer has made a purchase. 
• Response in a neutral, polite voice to ask for specifics about the situation in the review.
• Reply to the review in a way that showcases how concerned your company is with genuine feedback and a desire for transparency and improvement. 
• If the review violates the protocols of the specific platform, report it to have it removed.

Step 6: Implement a Reputation Repair Strategy if Needed

If you discover your brand has been damaged online, you will need to take action to repair your online reputation. A brand reputation repair strategy requires that you determine the issues and “stop the bleed” before taking additional steps. If a recurring issue is causing numerous complaints, immediately address it.

While addressing the issue, start apologizing authentically and often to customers impacted by the concern. Be transparent about what you’ve discovered and how you plan to resolve the issue moving forward. Then, you need to make it happen. Make visible improvements and update consumers about your progress.

As you work toward long-term solutions and improved brand reputation, continue your efforts toward rapid and transparent feedback. Avoid fake reviews, and don’t ignore the negative feedback. 96% of consumers are specifically looking at negative reviews. These reviews are a chance to showcase your company’s dedication toward improving and getting things back on track.

Step 7: Measure and Adjust Your Strategy

An effective brand reputation strategy is systemic but requires constant evaluation and improvement. The expectations of the online marketplace and consumers are always evolving, and if you want to avoid being left behind, you must evolve with them. Use review and brand management platforms to monitor your online reputation and evaluate the data curated by these systems to measure your effectiveness and make necessary adjustments routinely.

Practical Tips for Effective Reputation Management

Emphasize Transparency and Authenticity

Consumers respond to authenticity. They want to know if they can trust your company, and being transparent about concerns, responses, and next steps is a highly effective way to build trust with consumers. 

Use Sentiment Analysis for Customer Insights

You can certainly read what your customers are saying online, and you can also easily track sales figures. But what are customers feeling about your business? This is where sentiment analysis can help. Sentiment analysis is the process of scanning data collection for “sentiment” or the connotation of word choice.

Are the words and phrases positive, negative, or neutral? AI-powered sentiment analysis allows businesses to go beyond what the words say into large-scale analysis of what happens between the lines in reviews, identifying subtext, connotations, and implied meaning that guides customer perception and decisions.

Combine Proactive and Reactive Approaches

The first step in reputation management is reactive. Customers leave feedback, and you respond, using that feedback as a springboard to thank customers publicly, offer solutions, and showcase your customer service skills. This is reactive and turns your customers into brand advocates through your interactions. 

Reactive brand management will help you:

• Mitigate damage from negative reviews
• Showcase your responsiveness and customer care
• Creative opportunities to improve based on customer feedback
• Turn frustrated customers into brand advocates. 

Imagine the power of blending that reactive response with a proactive one. Not only are you engaging with customers reactively, but you can also be proactive by asking customers to share their positive experiences. You can work proactively to build trust, start and engage in conversations deliberately with followers, and share updates and news as a way of informing customers in an authentic and transparent way.

Proactive brand management will help you:

• Bolster positive reviews
• Increase customer engagement
• Foster a stronger online presence
• Show your commitment to customer satisfaction.

Blending these together makes for a highly effective brand management strategy.

Case Study: Reputation Management Strategy in Practice

Reputation management works in theory, but what about in practice? Let’s look at a case study.

Support Pets, a company that helps customers register their pets as emotional support animals, developed a poor reputation, earning only 1.9 stars out of a possible 5 on the PissedConsumer review platform. Through an effective reputation management strategy, the company raised its star rating by 3.1 points, creating a 5-star rating and eventually earning the company a Consumer’s Choice Award 2024.

The company transformed its brand reputation with the help of PissedConsumer’s review management service. The service provided Support Pets with reviewer contact information, allowing the company to reach out directly and resolve concerns. Once issues were resolved, consumers were happy to change their initial low ratings and boost the overall online score of the company.

The program also provided a business verification badge to demonstrate authenticity and allowed online review management to stay updated about new postings and comments in real-time.

Another success story, a mid-sized mortgage lender in the United States who realized they had work to do. Their financial performance had declined over six months, primarily due to an increase in negative online reviews and lower ratings than its competitors on platforms like TrustPilot and PissedConsumer.

To address the issue and repair their online brand, the mortgage lender set out to regain customer confidence, increase the number of applications, and suppress additional negative content.

PissedConsumer helped the company build a positive online presence and generate new leads by performing a reputation analysis. Then, experts helped the company respond professionally and empathetically to negative reviewers to address concerns. The company also was able to remove false negative reviews.

This effort was combined with a new marketing campaign targeting 15 million PissedConsumer users. Ad campaigns used audiences specifically selected for the client. Its conversion rate was 3.7% higher than other advertising channels using general audiences. The final step was to remove negative search engine results by creating positive, SEO-optimized content about the company and its services.

Ultimately the reputation management strategy was hugely successful, boosting the company’s ranking from 1.6 to 5 stars, removing or improving more than 60% of the negative reviews, and increasing overall customer satisfaction by 84%.

How PissedConsumer Can Help You Build Effective Strategy

Online Reputation Audit

Our Online Reputation Audit will provide your business with a comprehensive review of its current online reputation status. The audit examines online reviews, social media mentions, and brand mentions across a range of social media platforms, search engines, and review sites to create an accurate representation of your online image.

Once complete, the audit identifies your business’s strengths and weaknesses in online spheres. It ensures that your brand aligns with your customer's expectations and the overall standards of your industry.

Online Review Management

Customer reviews are always being written, so they must always be monitored. Our Online Review Management offers businesses a comprehensive approach to managing these reviews. The platform will allow you to track reviews across multiple platforms, providing real-time or near-time opportunities for responses.

Customers increasingly expect businesses to respond to reviews on the same day, and 49% of customers say the relationship with a company is as significant as what it offers. Replying to reviews quickly improves overall satisfaction as customers feel heard and valued. You must track reviews and respond immediately to build the necessary relationships and create brand credibility. Online Review Management by PissedConsumer makes this possible.

Voice of Customer Analysis

Go deeper into what your customers say with our Voice of the Customer Analysis. This analysis serves your brand reputation strategy by analyzing customer sentiment and behavior patterns, drawing connections between reoccurring issues, and determining what matters most to customers.

When you appreciate what customers are looking for and discussing, businesses can make informed decisions and necessary adjustments to their products and service offerings. Customers want to be heard, and responding to their voices will boost loyalty and, ultimately, sales. The Voice of the Consumer Analysis will help you move beyond reactive brand management into proactive, data-driven reputation improvements.

Search Engine Reputation Management

PissedConsumer Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) is a service designed to help businesses improve their results or presence in the most popular search engines. This is done by reducing negative search engine results by promoting positive brand mentions and content results. This leads to a better overall image in the search engines.

New, SEO-optimized content is created that addresses the positive aspects of your company’s brand. This content replaces many negative results that may have previously appeared in search results by suppressing them from the first search page. It improves your reputation, brand awareness, and customer perceptions online and builds trust and business opportunities.

Protecting a Critical Reputation

In business, reputation is everything. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of traditional advertising and ads. Customers rely on the shared experiences of others to guide their own decisions, and you want those reviews and ratings to guide customers directly to your website or company.

Your online brand management strategy is a long-term solution to protect your business. Build a positive brand, maintain the respect and trust of your clients, and ultimately you will protect and grow your bottom line.