Online reputation management (ORM) is a marketing technique that allows companies to create an online presence and improve search engine rankings. It also significantly expands brand visibility, attracts new customers, and raises engagement levels online. The efficiency of ORM solutions is enhanced and measured through ORM success metrics.
Read on to find multiple types of ORM metrics and how to measure them effectively.
The Importance of Online Reputation Management (ORM) In B2B and B2C
ORM significantly impacts business operations by boosting brand credibility and driving sales. Therefore, 97% of business owners report ORM services as an important part of their marketing strategy. However, the importance of ORM varies for B2B and B2C businesses.
ORM for B2B Companies
B2B (business-to-business) organizations need online reputation management to attract the target company’s entire management team to gain customers. A strong brand image outshines competitors for such businesses, turning prospects into long-term assets.
ORM for B2C Companies
The online reputation of B2C (business-to-consumer) organizations can obtain great damage due to negative comments and reviews on online forums. However, practicing ORM widens the customer base via superior customer service, which further improves positive feedback. As a result, customer loyalty and overall sales are increased.
The Need to Measure the Effectiveness of ORM Efforts
Online reputation management can help you nip the PR crises in the bud and maintain a healthy relationship with clients. It can also reduce churn rate and assists you in creating an online presence that attracts new customers. However, all these things are only possible if you measure ORM effectiveness through specific metrics.
The Role of ORM Success Metrics in Evaluating and Optimizing Your Strategy
Using ORM metrics is the key to measuring the success of your strategies. These metrics effectively measure how well your ORM campaign works based on key performance indicators (KPIs). Without using these metrics, you cannot learn which strategies are effective. As a result, you will keep appointing time, cost and effort to the ineffective approaches.
Defining Your ORM Goals and Objectives
Setting ORM goals and objectives provide a direction to build and move your reputation management campaigns. Having measurable goals shows you the brand activity’s impact on sales, performance, and engagement. You can define these goals by utilizing the following steps:
Identifying The ORM Goals and Objectives
You can figure out which goals you should set by answering the questions mentioned below:
- What are your expectations from ORM?
- How do you want ORM to contribute and align with your other business goals?
Evaluate each goal on these criteria and make sure you have a clear-cut answer before finalizing the ORM improvement plan.
Setting Clear ORM Goals and Objectives
Once you know which objectives are effective for brand building and protecting online reputation, use the SMART model for goal setting. This model identifies themes that result in positive outcomes. The SMART model is broken down into five steps, which are:
- Specific: Your online reputation management goals should be to the point (not ambiguous)
- Measurable: You should be able to measure the goals to learn about their success
- Achievable: Your goals should be achievable (not farfetched)
- Relevant: All your objectives should relate to and support your business goals
- Time-Bound: You must set a reasonable time limit to achieve each goal. If your deadline is too short, you may compromise on quality. In comparison, an extensive deadline can lead to procrastination, making it difficult to achieve timely outcomes.
Types of ORM Success Metrics
Let’s break down the ORM metrics into three major types so you can monitor their functioning individually.
1. Brand Awareness and Visibility Metrics
Brand awareness metrics track the performance of your marketing efforts across various social media platforms and search engines. This approach is further divided into multiple factors to ensure you correctly evaluate the results of an online reputation management campaign.
- Brand Impressions: It calculates the number of followers that viewed and interacted with your content
- Website Traffic: It checks the number of visitors to your website
- Social Media Engagement: It uses ORM data analysis tools to learn about brand engagement acquired through organic or paid options
- Search Volume Data: It shows how many users have searched for you through search engines
2. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Metrics
Customer satisfaction metrics, also known as CX metrics, are numeric scores that are interpreted to learn the quality of customer experiences with a brand. These are calculated by:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): It measures customer satisfaction based on how likely a customer is to recommend the brand to their friends and family.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): It examines how easy or difficult it is for a customer to complete a specific action, such as placing an order.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): It is the average cost for a business to acquire a new customer.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): It shows the total revenue a company has obtained from a client over a specific period.
3. Sales and Revenue Metrics
Sales and revenue metrics are measured to improve sales by identifying the inefficiencies in the sales process. The metrics that facilitate this task are:
- Total Revenue: It represents the total amount of profit generated from all products and services.
- Repeat Customer Rate: It measures customers’ satisfaction level and evaluates their return based on the first interaction with the brand.
- Net Revenue Retention (NRR): It calculates the quality of products and services to determine whether or not it is meeting customers’ expectations and needs.
Choosing the Right ORM Success Metrics
Use the following criteria for selecting the right ORM success metrics for your brand:
What ORM Success Metrics Align with Your Goals and Objectives?
Your ORM metrics should be strategic, market-driven, and actionable while aligning with your organization’s goals and objectives. Otherwise, a metric will have no value for improving your brand’s online reputation.
Which ORM Success Metrics Are Most Relevant to Your Business and Industry?
Each industry measures online reputation management effectiveness by using different metrics. For example, corporate companies use the volume of online interactions, sentiment analysis, and PR shares. eCommerce stores focus on referrals, follower count, and subscriber amount. Meanwhile, online reputation management services for the healthcare industry monitor reviews to improve service levels and digital presence.
Tracking and Measuring ORM Success Metrics
Keeping a close eye on ORM metrics allows you to learn how customers perceive your brand. You can also find the weak areas and enhance them to increase customer engagement and retention.
Tools and Technologies for Tracking ORM Success Metrics
The below-mentioned tools and technologies are highly effective in measuring your ORM success.
9 Best ORM Software and Platforms
The top best ORM software and platforms to monitor your online reputation are:
- Reputation.com: It is a comprehensive ORM platform that provides a software for managing consumer feedback across multiple sites, social media platforms, and directories to evaluate customer acquisition and loyalty.
- Brand24: It is a monitoring solution for social media forums. Companies use it to analyze online mentions of its brand, services, and products.
- Reputology: It is a customer feedback and reviews monitoring and management platform that tracks and responds to customers on review sites, such as GMB, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, and Yelp.
- ReviewTrackers: This award-winning ORM software helps organizations identify new ways to enhance customer experience.
- Hootsuite Insights: It is a social listening solution created by Brandwatch. You can connect it with your Hootsuite dashboard to create content, analyze, and report on social media posts.
- Trackur: It is a social media monitoring and analytics tool that uses keywords to track brand mentions across the internet.
- ORM.buzz: This platform offers ORM tools to help you engage with customers on social media. It also allows you to control your brand image by tracking and managing complaints.
- Mention: It is a web and social media monitoring tool, enabling companies to monitor their reputation across the internet by listening to their audience and managing social media.
- Synup: This site uses next-generation technologies to deliver trustworthy content that builds brand reputation and facilitates customer acquisition.
9 Best Web Analytics Tools
The best web analytics tools for measuring your content marketing and ORM efforts are:
- Google Analytics: This web analytics service collects statistical data about website traffic, conversion rate, and customer engagement to boost SERP ranking and marketing campaign results.
- SEMrush: It is an all-in-one tool suite that uses keyword research, competitor analysis, and Google Ad optimization to discover groundbreaking marketing insights and improve online visibility.
- Ahrefs: It is an SEO and web analytics tool that presents unlimited marketing opportunities, which include keyword research and link building, and content ideas.
- Moz: It is an SEO software suite that works on search engine optimization, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing.
- BuzzSumo: This cloud-based platform discovers innovative content ideas to increase customer engagement and brand outreach across social media sites and search engines.
- Cyfe: This all-in-one dashboard application software collects and combines user data in one place to visualize trends and ORM solutions.
- Webmaster Tools: Also known as Google Search Console, Webmaster tools are a collection of multiple tools that evaluate how a company’s site interacts with Google.
- Klear: It is an influencer marketing platform that encourages meaningful interactions between brands and their customers. It allows companies to build, scale, and measure the results of influencer marketing programs.
- Piwik: This analytic suite creates detailed reports about website visitors. A report includes the keywords and language used by the visitors and their content preferences.
Top 8 Social Media Analytics Tools
Create performance reports on the success of your ORM practices with these social media analytics tools:
- Followerwonk: It is a Twitter analytics tool that analyzes and optimizes user information to determine trends. This leads to an increase in the follower base and achievement of business goals.
- KeyHole: This social media data reporting platform measures and translates real-time and previously recorded data into an easy-to-use format, such as graphs and tables.
- Agorapulse: It is a full-featured social media management software. Its main features include publishing content, scheduling posts, formulating social account usage reports, locating brand mentions, and storing popular hashtags.
- Brandwatch: It is a social media suite company powered by Cision. It houses the world’s largest archive of consumer opinions, which is accessible through AI. Companies can use it for new trend identification to make smarter and better business decisions.
- Sprout Social: This social media management platform contains various scheduling, analytical, and engagement tools. It is leveraged by companies to manage online conversations and gain actionable insights to drive business impact.
- Simply Measured: It is a full-funnel social media analytics tool that creates a detailed analysis of customer activities on social media platforms. Using this automated tool, companies can track multiple social media accounts and gain competitive insights into other companies.
- Radian6: This social media monitoring tool contains various widgets that are used by digital marketers to study consumer opinions regarding brand products and services in real-time.
- NetBase Quid: It is an AI-based consumer and market intelligence platform that collects important information about a brand, such as buyer sentiments and company attributes. The consumer and market data collected in real-time is utilized to create an action plan that improves business agility.
Tips for Tracking and Measuring ORM Success Metrics Effectively
To make sure you obtain correct and actionable results from ORM metrics, follow these tips:
Track and Monitor ORM Metrics
Regularly tracking and monitoring your ORM metrics will help you make the required changes in your online reputation management practices. As a result, you increase the quality of your service, maintain healthy relationships with customers, and reduce the churn rate.
Evaluate Collected Data
All the data collected through ORM metrics should be evaluated to check its accuracy. With accurate data, you can create error-free reports showing which parts of your ORM strategies present promising results. In comparison, using insufficient data to formulate your brand’s strategy will negatively affect your online reputation.
Use Multiple ORM Metrics
Use multiple ORM metrics to comprehensively view your brand’s digital presence and reputation. This will help you gather massive amounts of data that show which strategies provide the highest ROI. As a result, you make informed decisions.
Analyzing and Interpreting ORM Success Metrics
Conducting ORM data analysis to analyze and interpret the metrics results will ensure you remain updated with your brand’s current online reputation. Moreover, it will help you determine whether or not your efforts are coming to fruition.
Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses
Based on your organizational goals, some ORM practices will create better results than others. And that is one of the main reasons why you need measure these metrics. Plus, you also need to know which metrics are performing better and which ones need improvement. A good and strong metric is comparative, understandable, and shows measurable changes in your online reputation. However, it takes a little A/B testing to get there.
Techniques for Analyzing and Interpreting ORM Success Metrics
You can use these techniques to learn ORM metrics effectiveness:
Compare Metrics Results
Compare the results of various metrics with industry benchmarks and standards to judge the value and relevance of your techniques.
Analyze Latest Trends
Investigate the latest trends and patterns represented by the ORM metrics to track and improve your ORM strategies’ performance. This practice is effective in understanding customer behaviors and preferences, so you can make business decisions accordingly.
Use Data Visualization Tools and Techniques
Using data visualization tools and techniques will improve how you perceive, interact, and understand the data and its results. These tools translate complex data and present it in a simple form to ensure everyone can read the obtained results, regardless of their expertise level.
Optimizing Your ORM Strategy
Optimizing your ORM strategy allows you to take charge of the online activity regarding your brand. So you can represent your products and services in a positive light.
Strategies for Optimizing Your ORM Strategy Based on Your Success Metrics
Measuring the success of your online reputation management (ORM) efforts is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of your ORM strategy and identifying areas for improvement. To optimize your ORM strategy, you need to first establish clear and measurable success metrics, and then regularly track and analyze your performance against these metrics.
Here are a few strategies for optimizing your ORM strategy based on your success metrics:
- Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define a set of KPIs that are specific to your ORM goals, such as the number of positive reviews, the percentage of negative reviews, the number of social media mentions, and so on. Monitoring these KPIs will help you track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
- Track Competitor Metrics: Keeping an eye on your competitors’ ORM metrics can help you identify best practices and understand how your own performance stacks up against the competition.
- Regularly Review and Refine Your ORM Strategy: Regularly reviewing your ORM strategy and metrics will help you stay on track and make necessary adjustments to improve your results. Refining your strategy may involve making changes to your messaging, tone, or tactics based on the insights gleaned from your metrics.
- Utilize Analytics and Reporting Tools: Analytics and reporting tools can provide valuable insights into your ORM performance, including trends, areas for improvement, and the impact of your efforts. By using these tools, you can make informed decisions about your ORM strategy and identify areas for optimization.
Wrapping Up
Online reputation management is the key to enhancing your online credibility and gaining customer trust. Therefore, B2B and B2C companies must design and implement ORM strategies and check their performance using ORM success metrics. If you don’t have the time to do so – you can always get in touch with our experts at Digital Caterpillar.
The Benefits of Tracking and Measuring ORM Success Metrics
When you measure ORM effectiveness through metrics, you can obtain these benefits:
- Better Brand Awareness
- Increased Online Visibility
- High Customer Satisfaction
- Enhanced Brand Loyalty Levels
- Boost in Sales and Revenue
- Better Decision Making
- Increased Stakeholder Confidence
- Efficiency in Resource Allocation
- Improved Risk and Crisis Management Strategies
Final Thoughts and Recommendations on Measuring the Effectiveness of Your ORM Efforts
Without using ORM metrics to track and measure the results of your online reputation strategies, you cannot obtain the desired results. Therefore, define your goals and objectives and ensure you select performance-measuring metrics accordingly. After implementation of ORM practices, regularly measure and analyze the metrics by interpreting real-time data.
This will help you gain valuable insight into your ORM campaign’s effectiveness and assist in making the required improvements to enhance the results.
You can use these key recommendations by our Experts to boost the outcome of your ORM efforts:
- Regularly track and measure ORM metrics, brand awareness and visibility metrics, customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics, and sales and revenue metrics.
- To accurately estimate your ORM metrics success, utilize advanced tools and technologies, such as ORM platforms, web analytics tools, and social media analytics tools.
- Implement various techniques to analyze the obtained outcome. For example, compare your results with industry benchmarks and standards, examine newly emerging trends and patterns, and deploy data visualization tools.
- Keep reviewing and updating your ORM practices according to metric results and obtain the maximum benefits of your efforts.
In short, stay ahead of your competitors and maintain your online reputation by observing the results of your ORM efforts. After following these recommendations, you will notice a remarkable change in your brand awareness, online presence, visibility, customer satisfaction, loyalty levels, sales, and revenue.
