How to Find Online Reputation Management Clients
Regular online interactions with customers are vital to a brand’s success.
Customers are talking about companies more than ever, whether on review platforms or social media.
As a result, nearly 90% of small businesses monitor their online reputation at least quarterly. 27% of small businesses hire an online reputation management service.
The benefits of feedback from customers are plentiful, but also suffer the public wrath of their customers.
Both scenarios merit online reputation management (ORM), but where do you find these clients?
When selling a reputation product, it’s best to experiment with several channels to see where you can cost-effectively find new clients. Depending on your position, you might improve your SEO rank, use affiliate channels, or pull leads from ratings and review websites.
Digital marketing and online reputation management companies can use this article to learn a handful of lead generation strategies for finding ORM clients.
1. Improve Your SEO
Search engines are often the go-to for businesses that need ORM.
Search engines are essential to the B2B purchasing journey, so improving your SEO is a great way to generate leads.
Use SEO best practices to boost your brand’s visibility on search engines, including:
- Optimize your site and content for target keywords
- Produce high-quality content that addresses customer concerns
- Create an internal linking structure that makes navigation on your site intuitive
- Build links to your site from guest posting and outreach
B2B buyers are intentional about how they consume content, so design your content strategy to target your audiences according to their specific needs.
For example, a company interested in social media monitoring will engage with different content than a company in the midst of a PR crisis. The latter will need more specific and product- or services-related content to find an immediate solution, rather than gather general information for some time in the future.
SEO is an effective way to generate inbound leads for online reputation, though time and resources are required to elevate your position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Use Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing helps agencies generate web traffic and leads in a cost-effective way.
Affiliate marketing is the process of partnering with another business to publish your content. You pay the affiliate a commission for each conversion, whether in the form of impressions or clicks to your site.
Publishing your content on a reputable site helps to promote your thought leadership and generate social proof for your agency. This develops awareness and trustworthiness for your brand, which helps to drive clicks with interested prospects.
Affiliate programs also allow you to track key engagement metrics and prove your ROI and monitor your budget.
When seeking an affiliate partner, look for a reputable publisher that reaches your target audience. For best results, craft a value proposition for this niche audience and devise a content strategy to match.
Affiliates are concerned with earnings per click (EPC), so you’ll need to offer an attractive rate on commission and assure them that promoting your content is worthwhile. Given the commission requirements, affiliate marketing programs can be best suited for established agencies.
3. Look for Low-Ranking Companies
A high volume of positive customer feedback is essential to a company’s success.
As ratings and review platforms have proliferated in recent years, so too have the number of low-ranking businesses.
Brands with lackluster reputations, or who lack reviews entirely, are ideal ORM clients. These companies may lack time to manage their reputation, be unaware of such services, or have suffered a PR crisis.
To identify prospects, look to industry-relevant B2B directories, such as:
- Aileensoul
- AngelList
- CrunchBase
- Visual Objects
Consumer-facing sites like Yelp, Google My Business, and social networks are also home to many companies with unflattering customer feedback.
For example, lawn care companies on Google My Business with zero and 3-of-5 stars are at a visible disadvantage to the five-star competitor.
Use directories to identify prospects in need, then reach out to educate them about your services. Be sure to mention how poor customer reviews can impede customer acquisition, retention, and erode brand equity over time.
Data scraping services can help you pull the contact details from the businesses on these websites. This way, you can efficiently aggregate your data and pursue the most promising outbound leads.
Finding Clients for Your ORM Agency
Reputation is a booming industry. Visibility and credibility are key to finding clients, so SEO and affiliate channels are both effective inbound tactics for lead generation.
For an outbound approach, online reputation and PR companies should identify companies with poor or nonexistent review profiles and pitch them your most relevant ORM product.
