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Best Online Reputation Management Software & Services

Discover the digital tools and services that businesses can use to monitor and manage their online reputation. The best reputation management software helps small to medium-sized businesses track and analyze their online presence, including mentions of their brand and customer reviews. They can also help businesses respond to and address negative comments, amplify positive reviews, as well as promote content about their brand to improve their online reputation.

What is online reputation management software?

Reputation management software (sometimes referred to as review management software) is a digital solution for efficiently tracking, managing, and taking control of your clients’ online reputations. The all-in-one review management platform allows you to easily monitor, collect, respond to, and report on online reviews across 100+ sites in one integrated dashboard.

Read more about monitoring reputation →

What is the best online reputation management software?

Of course we think that Vendasta’s all-in-one solution is the best online reputation management software and review management service on the market! To give a more in-depth answer, let’s focus on why ours is the best online reputation management software. Rather than describing every bell and whistle here, we’ll instead go over the value we add.

Online reputation management software quickly allows you to find new clients who need help with their review performance.

Outsource Reputation Management

Feel confident in our marketing experts as they support your growing business. Our team will handle all your clients’ needs and act as an extension of your team, under your brand. Review management software creates a seamless client experience.

How does reputation management work?

Reputation management is the strategic approach businesses take to monitoring their perception of their brand, managing their company narrative, and amplifying positive customer experiences and reviews.

The first step in the process is being aware of the conversation (or lack thereof) happening around a business online, via its website, social media accounts, online directory and review sites, Google, and other platforms. Only then can a business engage in strategic decision-making to make informed choices about how to protect and improve their reputation and potentially find the best reputation management software solutions to help them do so.

Reputation management activities can work in a few different ways, aided by reputation management software and services.

Monitor, respond, and report on online reviews.

Review management software makes it possible to easily monitor 100+ sites while never missing a single review. The all-in-one review management platform dashboard saves time while ensuring each review receives a reply with built-in suggestions and custom response templates. Understand customer trends through review sentiment analysis, powered by AI.

Gather more authentic online reviews.

Get more reviews for clients by helping them collect responses right where their customers are looking with the embeddable website widget. Solicit reviews on their behalf and increase open rates with branded email and SMS templates to boost star ratings on 100s of sites that matter.

Manage your clients’ reputations across the web.

What are the four elements of reputation management?

The four elements of reputation management are: authority, reputation, transparency and visibility. Leveraging a reputation and review management software solution will help manage all four elements of your online reputation. These elements are interconnected and the best reputation management software will be able to address them all.

1. Authority

Your business clients need to establish brand authority and credibility online. With 49 percent of consumers trusting reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family, listing management is an essential—not a nice-to-have. It is a key part of building authority.Clear, consistent listings across a variety of sites demonstrates professionalism and shows customers that a business is credible. But it goes deeper than that. Whether or not a business is listed consistently on web directories, review sites, and social networks will have a major impact on its local map rankings.

2. Reputation

Once you’ve established brand authority and have increased your findability, customers are more likely to engage with a business. But even if they have an excellent experience when doing so, they might not leave a review—which is a huge missed opportunity. Your clients need to be proactive about collecting and soliciting customer reviews to actively build trust in their reputations.Additionally, missing a review can be just as bad. After you’ve listed your business clients on a variety of online business directories, using review monitoring tools ensures that nothing slips through the cracks.

3. Transparency

Build public trust through transparency to nurture relationships with current and future customers. How? By responding to each and every customer review, both positive and negative. Reputation management software makes it easy to create reusable review response templates to save your clients time and create brand-consistency. Responding to positive reviews graciously develops ambassadors. It reaffirms a customer’s great experience and also adds a nice personal touch that will likely build loyalty. Responding to negative online reviews shows that a business is willing to listen, learn, and improve. Customers will then be more likely to give the business a second shot.

4. Visibility

If you help your clients with elements one through three, the end result is increased brand awareness through a strong and active online presence.Additionally, reputation management and SEO go hand in hand when it comes to boosting visibility. In fact, these solutions and services are often bundled together to maximize results. Claiming business profiles, establishing a presence on review sites, and creating a strategy around keywords are some ways in which SEO can boost visibility.

What is an example of reputation management?

A review management platform will help your clients be both proactive and reactive when it comes to their reputations.

Who is responsible for reputation management?

However, managing your company’s reputation should not rely solely on the efforts of specific individuals⁠—it is a group effort across multiple employees. A customer service team may be responsible for responding to positive and negative reviews online via review management software, or marketing teams might run brand campaigns to improve a brand’s goodwill.

Leveraging software to manage your reputation is another tool for teams which are responsible for reputation management. Some of the best reputation management software also offer additional services such as white-label reputation management services. The responsibility of managing your company’s reputation is then shared amongst you, your client, and your expert fulfillment team operating as an extension of your brand.

It’s important to note that since all outsourced work is white-labeled, from your clients’ perspective, there is no third party involved. That’s the beauty of white-label reputation management solutions: The only company getting credit is yours.

Read more about brand protection

How do I monitor my reputation?

Your clients most likely do not have the time and resources to monitor their reputations consistently. But with tools like a review management platform, you can equip them for success. Beyond having the right review management software, though, there is some strategy involved.

Centralize:

Get all of a client’s mentions, listings, and reviews under one roof to simplify the process. By streamlining activities through an all-in-one dashboard, you can be more effective in monitoring the conversation around your clients’ brands.

Watch socials:

Keeping tabs on the conversation across platforms helps your team see how many mentions the client has. It might also provide a look at the tone of the conversation.

Leverage technology:

By using online reputation management software, you’re already doing this! Ensure you’re making the most of the automation capabilities and AI to crunch numbers and learn from insights the easy way.

Keep tabs on the competition.

The best reputation management software (like Vendasta’s!) will include reporting that features competitive insights to help get ahead. You can compare your client’s reputation with industry leaders to help strive for continuous improvement.

How do I manage my online reputation?

By using reputation management software, of course! Offer a complete solution to your clients by managing review responses and Google Q&A on their behalf via fulfillment services, all while knowing that project management software makes it easy to collaborate. Delegating tasks and responding to reviews from hundreds of sources can be simple when it’s all accomplished from one dynamic dashboard.

Manage the workflow of any size of task or project across teams to stay efficient, deliver results on time, and retain more customers. With easy-to-read reporting, prove value and ROI to your clients and ensure they get sent results automatically.

How do I protect my online reputation?

Online reputation management software is the best way to protect online reputations. The best defense is a good offense, so it’s important to position reputation management software solutions and services as something required from the very beginning. It can be easier to build a reputation from the ground up than reverse damage. Review management and review monitoring are some of the biggest ways to protect your online reputation, and both can be administered through an all-in-one review management platform. To protect your online reputation, focus on the factors that impact it.

Review management.

Daily responses to all reviews, both positive and negative, using a consistent and professional tone will protect your reputation. Taking accountability and then prompting customers to “take things offline” to discuss negative reviews further is also a good idea. Using automation to manage, flag, and respond to conversations being had by a business online is also a must.

Website monitoring.

Review management software lets you and your clients easily monitor and manage from one platform, streamlining both essential reputation management activities. Monitoring social, reviews, and other web platforms online lets you stay on top of conversations about a business, and quickly address concerns or mitigate potential damage. Daily, weekly, and monthly reporting lets you track and measure how reputations improve.

Use SEO to amplify the positive.

A strong reputation is a two-way street with SEO. When potential customers search for “best coffee shop near me” for example, only the businesses with the highest Google ratings will show up in the Google snack pack. Get more positive reviews and earn one of these coveted spots. Also consider developing a keywords strategy to try to rank higher and climb to the first page of Google.

Create relevant content.

Blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts are all tools you can use to drive an online presence. Use these mediums to distribute the content that your potential customers are searching for, and create authoritative narratives about your business and industry.

How do I create a reputation management plan?

How to create a reputation management strategy

1. 1. Start off by helping local businesses claim their listings, setting up alerts, and encourage them to set aside time to respond to reviews. Online reputation management software keeps clients in the know with a stream of all their online reviews in one place with real time alerts.

1. 1. Get them to think about using reviews as a source of free feedback to improve customer and business outcomes. Review management software includes advanced customer insights using AI technology to find trends, measure performance, and drive actionable change.

1. 1. Include additional marketing and state the business’s name in a positive review response for findability, but don’t be overly promotional. Create reusable review response templates to save your clients time and create brand-consistency.

1. Take negative review interactions offline as quickly as possible, solve the customer’s problem and broadcast how you fixed it back onto the review platform. Respond to the most critical reviews directly from the review management platform’s dashboard.

Why do we need reputation management?

A business’s online reputation can have a significant impact on their overall success in the market. In today’s digital world, people have access to more information and more choice than ever before. They use the internet as the primary way to instantly discover info about a business before they even consider making a critical buying decision. Businesses without a strategic plan to manage their online reputations and put forth a positive image to potential customers will inevitably fall behind their competitors.

And without reputation management and a review management platform, it’s easy to lose control of the way a business is perceived online. 92 percent of consumers read online reviews. With more options than ever before, reviews help guide their purchasing decisions and translate into revenue potential. Failure to manage the narrative can result in big losses to the bottom line.

And businesses should not be fooled: crickets can be just as bad as killer bees. In other words, no reviews (or extremely outdated ones) can be just as damaging as negative conversations. Plus, your clients are missing out on opportunities to turn insights into sentiment analysis. Bolstering your clients’ online reputations with a proven process of gathering customer reviews is essential. Not only does a lack of reviews damage credibility and increase suspicion, it will bury a business deep within the recesses of Google when it comes to organic search.

Reputation management software also allows businesses to receive feedback first hand to make improvements. Customize every aspect of review requests to optimize open rates and get results and reach customers in the most effective way, including via email, SMS, kiosk, email signature, or website widget. This allows customers to feel as if their time and preferences are being respected.

And just as consumers have more choices than ever before, small to medium-sized businesses also have more to keep track of. The best reputation management software and services streamlines activities and reduces complexity for the best experience. Manage large projects and organize a group of tasks for your clients’ with transparency (just as important for you as it is for your clients’ online reputations!).

How to create an online revenue stream

Find more clients

Another huge benefit of online reputation management software is that it is also a tool for you to find more prospects in need of your solutions and services through automating your research. And that’s the first step. From there, go from prospect to presentation in just minutes with a personalized report using real business data.

Then, with the power of white label, brand the report as your own to deliver stellar prospect presentations that pinpoint other areas for improvement (listings, reviews, social, website, advertising, etc.) to prescribe the perfect solution. Finally, deep integration with a sales CRM delivers hot lead notifications to notify your team when a prospect becomes interested. Your salespeople are primed to close the deal. All dialed into the review management platform.

How much does reputation management software cost?

There’s good news for every budget when it comes to pricing reputation management software solutions and services.

You are able to deliver immediate value to your prospects and clients with a set of freemium reputation management solutions. Offer limited editions of the most important products for your clients, such as listings, reputation management, and social media management. Demonstrate your company’s value immediately. When clients are ready for more features, the products help up-sell them to even more value. Set a customized upgrade path to any product or service you wish, including your own managed reputation services or those offered through Vendasta.