In China, your brand reputation is critical because Chinese buyers research brands and products in much greater detail than westerners do, before making a purchase. What are your potential customers hearing about your business?
Online reputation management should now be a key part of your online business strategy.
What is Online Reputation Management?
Chinese people may know and search for a brand even before it taps into China market. It’s essential to build up your positive brand asset online so your target customers will find you.
At a basic level, Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of creating and spreading positive information about your brand/products and suppressing the negative voices in various digital channels. Our expert team will also help to create a 360-degree proactive brand-fence and maintain your positive brand image, encouraging your potential buyers to buy from you and increasing overall sales.
Advanced ORM builds up content around the generic search keywords and competitor keywords; for example, “which brand is better for wealth management?”(投资理财哪家好) if for peer-to-peer crowdfunding brands. When this content is optimised for search engines and takes the visible positions in the first 2 search result pages around these search keywords, it typically attracts attentation to the brand and helps drive new traffic and customers into the top of acquisition funnel.
Why is it important?
The moment a negative comment or review appears, your brand reputation is at risk. To make it worse, your business is at risk of losing potential customers among those who see the negative comment.
One single negative comment posted online has the power to change the way people regard your brand. It spreads through the power of digital spaces such as social media, forums, blogs and vertical sites, shared far more quickly than any positive comment will ever be.
They search online and they look to search engines to find out what others are saying. They trust these independent reviews more than the information they read on your official website or social accounts.
As a new brand, there may be no negative comments, but to tap into the Chinese market and build up the brand image, you will still need to proactively manage your online reputation. If potential customers search your brand/products on Chinese search engines, well-organised positive search results on 1st and 2nd SERP will encourage them to consider the brand and finally make the purchase. These positive search results can be managed proactively by the brands, telling the brand story, introducing the star products from both official and user positions, and identifying the key differentiators of your brand from your competitors.
How do we manage it?
We approach online reputation management through three key methods.
Promote the postive
By creating and publishing positive content across digital channels such as Baidu Baike (a Wikipedia equivalent), Baidu Wenku (an online library), and Baidu Q&A,we boost your brand reputation. Because the Chinese search engine Baidu is one of the most powerful, content published on its own channels is likely to rank highly in the search results, putting you straight in front of your prospective customers.
In addition to Baidu, online reputation management will also promote the positive on other digital channels, such as Zhihu, high-authority news portals, vertical websites, forums, and social media, etc. These popular channels are very helpful in building awareness among your potential customers and influencing their buying decisions. For example, if you are a mother and searching for information about infant products, then you won’t have missed the vertical site,”Babytree”.
When Sinorbis manages an ORM project for our client, we not only publish content with positive information about the brand, but our expert team will also analyse and further optimise that content with targeted keywords to maximum its visibility in Chinese search engines.
Clean up the negative
We help to clean up negative voices by using SEO techniques and content creation to sink the negative comments, shifting them further down the search results. We also communicate directly with the original sources to reduce negative content or have it removed when the information published is not true.
Social listening
By listening to what is being said about your brand (positive, negative and neutral) on various digital channels, such as social media, forums, vertical website, etc, we alert you to potential issues so you can manage them and avoid a crisis. We also provide analysis on your brand sensitivity for you to track your brand voices.
Entering the China Market
The difficulty for businesses wishing to enter the market in China is their lack of reputation. While the business might rank well in Google, Chinese websites and search engines may never have heard of you. That means your potential customers won’t find you. It also leaves your brand exposed to possible malicious attacks from competing brands.
If you plan on entering the China market, or releasing a new product line, you can use online reputation management to build a reputation. By creating and sharing positive content across the search engines and key digital platforms, customers will find the positive information they need to help them make a purchase decision.
For example, Sinorbis helped a famous international milk powder brand in China launch a new product on the Chinese market. Although the brand was well known, their new product had no online reputation.
From 2015-2016, we achieve:
After one year of producing optimised and positive content, the product was ranked on the top of organic search results. Sinorbis helped our client sccessfully establish the new brand image and reputation on various digital channels, generating a high volume of traffic to the new product.
Protect Your Online Reputation
Your brand’s reputation can make or break the business. The Chinese people buy based on trust, so prove yourself to them as trustworthy. This is crucial to succeeding in the Chinese market.
The expert team at Sinorbis will help you maximise your business opportunities through their online reputation management services. Contact Sinorbis today and start building your positive brand reputation so your customers can find you.
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