If you don’t watch out for a brand’s reputation, you could lose customers. People read reviews, looking for comments from other customers before they make a purchasing decision. If you ignore this question, you’re missing out on profits, even if you have a really good product, even if it’s a PlayAmo casino that offers lots of extra benefits for their members. What services will give you the ability to track new mentions and feedback from your customers?
What SERM Is and What Work It Involves
SERM is a marketing technology, the most important part of online reputation management (ORM), aimed at creating a positive image of the company by influencing search results.
By promoting sites with positive and neutral content to the first pages of search results, you can oust resources with undesirable information that discredits the reputation of the brand. In fact, SERM is a synthesis of PR technologies and SEO-promotion, which includes a whole complex of works:
- Monitoring of reputation in search engines and the dynamics of changes in the reputational environment of the brand, not only resources in the top, but also other important for business development sites.
- Prompt response to negative information about the brand, the product, the motivation of real customers to self-placement of the positive in the network.
- Creation of a testimonials section on the brand’s official site (or its optimization, if such a page exists but is not ranked).
- Creating a topic for reviews in the official group in social networks with a title close in content to the main brand request (“brand+reviews”). For example, on Facebook, you can connect to the “Reviews” section in the community. But many don’t have it active because the owner of the group can’t delete the review and rating; if there’s a surge of negativity, the only thing left would be to respond to it.
Google Alerts
Google’s free alert system, where you choose any query and set how often you want the report sent. The service does not sort by tone of mentions, you will have to check this manually. However, you can set up notifications to be sent instantly – this is useful for beauty salons and restaurants where it’s important to react quickly to customer feedback.
Fanpage Karma
You can use it to analyze your own profiles as well as those of your competitors, with KPIs, analyses and reports. This tool is free.
You can monitor your company’s reputation online every day, compare your performance with that of your competitors and get better. Another advantage of the program is the ability to quickly upload to Excel. You can also set up alerts and keep track of your competitors’ actions even when you’re out of the office.
Brand Analytics
The tool lets you track mentions and publications about your company, your competitors, certain events, products and services. For convenience, all results are collected in charts and visual reports where you can see main trends, hot discussions and fresh publications. The tone of mentions is also determined.
IQBuzz
This user-friendly tool monitors the news feeds, social networks and blogs. The tone of the reviews is determined automatically, but the user can specify their own settings. The authors are tagged in the reports, which helps to quickly handle negativity. For an additional fee, “Online Media Monitoring” and “Manual Document Review” are offered. The listed options are first of all necessary for large-scale projects, small businesses will be fine with the cheapest tariff.
YouScan
This tool helps to find brand, person, specific product mentions in social media. It’s an interesting feature: image analysis, which allows you to recognize photos and pictures that use the company logo, name or symbology.
YouScan allows you to determine the tone of the mentions and distribute them by categories, topics and trends.