Company e-reputation: what impact on your business and your ROI?

Searching Google for information about a person, a product, or a company is now a reflex shared by nearly 90% of the population. Think you can slip through the net? Think again. Partners, customers, suppliers, investors, competitors, and many others use Google to investigate your company. And the image the search engine returns will largely shape the idea these people form of your brand. More broadly, e-reputation is defined as the sum of all the information available online about a brand or a person.

The ROI of company e-reputation

While you control certain building blocks of your e-reputation, you are far from mastering everything that is said about you! A good company e-reputation has a positive impact on your business. In the opposite case, things get complicated… What is the real impact of your brand’s e-reputation on your ROI, and how do you measure it? The answer is in this article!

Google: number one for information and e-reputation

The main uses of the internet

Before heading to a store or deciding to make a purchase on a website, internet users spend a lot of time doing research. And while a good e-reputation reassures, a bad one will immediately put users off! According to an IFOP study conducted in partnership with our agency, the 3 main uses of the internet are:

• information,
• purchases on e-commerce sites,
• researching information ahead of a purchase.

The most off-putting factors for an online purchase are mainly negative press articles and consumer reviews on blogs, sites, and forums, as well as low awareness of the site in question. Today, we can see that the press and user reviews carry roughly the same weight in the eyes of consumers during the purchase decision process. In addition, a recent study by Médiamétrie reveals that social media has become the number one way for 15-to-34-year-olds to keep up with the news. Likewise, consuming information via TV, print, and radio is declining among these same individuals, obviously in favor of the internet!Social media and search engines – and by extension the internet at large, and Google more specifically – are the main means young people use to access information.

Source: Médiamétrie

For 71% of the 15-to-34-year-old French respondents, search engines and social media are their means of accessing information. For its part, Google remains the primary way to search for information: brand, product, person, company, topic…

Google: the number one source of information by 2025?

Today, nearly half of French people still use television as their primary way to keep up with national and international news. However, the internet – and therefore Google – is taking on the role of challenger and is ahead of radio and print.

Source: Statista

While Generation Y, raised on Web 1.0, mainly uses the internet as a source of information, Generation Z is hyper-connected and swears by nothing else. For millennials, technology is everywhere and an integral part of their lives. Given how new generations behave with technology, we can easily imagine that the share of the population using the internet as their primary way to stay informed will keep growing in the years to come. The television screen, for its part, will not be abandoned. Nevertheless, it will serve mainly to entertain rather than to inform. For its part, Google is becoming a full-fledged source of information and meets every criterion to become THE go-to source of information used by the vast majority of the population. Today, everyone trusts the search engine to access the most accurate and most comprehensive information as quickly as possible. Almost half of the queries made by French users aim to find information about a product or service. You will have understood: the role of the internet, and therefore of Google, as a means of information will continue to grow. In the eyes of internet users, your brand is what Google says it is. Protecting your company e-reputation to better face the future and sustain growth seems to be the new challenge for brands.

Google: the number one e-reputation channel

As internet usage evolves, Google is redrawing the contours of reputation. Now inseparable from a company’s reputation, e-reputation has a direct and significant impact on the company’s business. Internet users have gotten into the habit of researching via Google – and of relying on reviews – before making a purchase. Gathering information via Google has become a reflex. In 20 years, Google has built its empire and now rules over more than 90% of its market.

Source: Stat Counter

As the main, priority route to access information on the web, Google and its natural search ranking criteria call the tune. But beyond good rankings, the Silicon Valley giant also decides which elements are visible online that make up a brand’s image, and therefore its e-reputation. “Brand”-type keywords generate the largest share of the organic traffic driven to company websites. Here is an overview of the top keywords in the Top 100 most-searched keywords. And unsurprisingly, they are brand names:

Source: Ahrefs

To round this out, here is a concrete example of the keywords that generate the most traffic for the “Coca Cola” brand. We can see that the brand keyword is the one that brings the most organic traffic to the site:

Source: SEMrush

In the past, when a scandal broke about a company, it would temporarily make the headlines on TV and in the papers. Its reputation would be tarnished for a while. Little by little, the situation would gradually settle until things returned to normal. After the media frenzy, the event would be forgotten within a few months… But today, the internet leaves traces called digital footprints and erases the notion of time. And that is precisely what changes everything! During a scandal or a bad buzz, information flies around, then the scandal runs out of steam. The difference is that this negative content still exists and will continue to exist. For many years, brands hit by e-reputation problems are forced to absorb the repercussions of the poor results visible on Google. With Google My Business, automatically placed right at the top of the first page, Google gives even more weight to user reviews by highlighting this information. This tool alone is one of the major upheavals of recent years for company e-reputation. What’s more, brands that do not have a Google My Business listing will see their SEO negatively affected. Once again, the most-used search engine in the world dictates its own rules. Every day, our agency helps companies improve their brand image on Google My Business and better manage user reviews so they don’t end up like this:

Tools to measure and manage your e-reputation

To get an overall view of a brand’s image on the internet, several e-reputation analysis tools are available. You should use them daily to keep a close watch on what is being said about you and your brand.

Google Alerts

A monitoring classic, setting up Google Alerts lets you be notified in real time as soon as a mention of your brand appears on the web. Free and very easy to get to grips with, you can monitor brand names, products, executives… This tool does not scan social media and forums.

Digital fortress for company e-reputation

Our R&D team has developed a tool specially designed to monitor your company’s e-reputation. Tracking brand image on the internet over time and e-reputation scoring are the tool’s main features. Our dashboard lets you follow how e-reputation evolves and get an idea of how the results influence your business.

Synthesio

An excellent French tool, Synthesio lets you probe your e-reputation with an in-depth analysis of what is being said about you based on one or more keywords. Very comprehensive, the tool also gives you insights into information from forums, blogs, and even foreign social networks.

Mention

As a complement to the other tools, Mention is ideal for monitoring social media. Don’t hesitate to also keep an eye on competitors and the strategic keywords in your sector…

The various channels and players in a company’s online reputation

Building a brand’s e-reputation is not up to the brand itself: it is shaped by the individuals, companies, and institutions that talk about it. The internet is a communication channel with many facets, and it is precisely this feature that makes e-reputation management more complex. To better grasp ORM (Online Reputation Management), it is important to have a comprehensive view of all the channels and players that have an impact.

The brand itself

The first link in its own e-reputation, the brand produces content and speaks up online. From press releases to blog content, and from shares to comments on social media: brand messages are everywhere. Beyond intentional communication, many other pieces of content such as financial documents or job postings are also part of the brand’s digital footprint. Not to mention poorly secured cloud files and folders that could inadvertently be lingering on the web…

The company’s stakeholders

All the individuals and legal entities the company works and interacts with on a daily basis also contribute to building its e-reputation. What’s more, the rise of employee advocacy or social selling strategies clearly demonstrates the powerful impact employees have on brand image.

Source: Manager Go

Internet users

Whether they are a customer or not, every internet user influences the e-reputation of a company, and in several ways, for example:

• a like on an Instagram post, a retweet, a comment on one of your publications,
• a rating system on a product page,
• reviews on Google My Business and marketplaces,
• producing content about the brand published on a blog,
• positive or negative exchanges about your brand on social media,
• opening a thread on a forum…

Competitors

Even your competitors have a role to play in building your e-reputation, and not a small one. How? It is not uncommon today for some brands to publicly compare themselves to competitors, even to the point of building genuine communication tools. For example, Leclerc VS the other players in mass retail: On the other hand, if one of your fierce competitors finds itself at the heart of a scandal, that would indirectly have a positive effect on your brand.

The media

All the content offered by online media, and by extension the content relayed by social media, which enjoys enormous resonance. They have a direct and significant effect on your brand. Indeed, the main purpose of a media outlet is to inform its audience. This implies that, beforehand, studies, investigations, and comparisons have been carried out and everything must be sourced. A mark of reliability, the information relayed by the media counts for a lot in the eyes of internet users. As soon as a piece of information appears in a media outlet, it is considered official. Most of the great scandals in history broke following media revelations. In 2018, the ranking of the worst reputational crises made by RepRisk notably highlighted the cases of Weinstein Company, Kobe Steel, Equifax, J&F Investimos, Appleby, and others…

Influencers and bloggers

Whether they are in your sector or not, any influencer or public figure is likely to have an impact on your e-reputation. By definition, an influencer produces and distributes content and information to a large, highly engaged audience. In a tweet, Kylie Jenner of the famous and much-followed Kardashian family explains that she no longer uses Snapchat since the new update. On Twitter, the young woman is followed by more than 25 million people around the globe. The result of the devastating tweet: Snapchat’s stock drops 6%, causing more than a billion euros in lost revenue for the little-ghost brand… No less!

Google, of course

As soon as you type a brand name into the search bar, Google Suggest does its thing by revealing a preview of the most-typed queries related to the initial query. On the search results side, while the SERP is built around the major principles of SEO, we must not forget that it is the algorithms that decide which sites occupy the top positions. However, no algorithm is currently able to truly know whether the information being highlighted reflects the truth about your brand… Yet the traffic a piece of content generates and the time spent viewing it are important criteria in Google’s eyes. It is easy to understand why controversial photos, lawsuits, and other “gossip” topics that spark debate take on such importance and quickly manage to rank. News widely relayed on Google News is becoming increasingly important in brands’ e-reputation. A very recent example is the controversy around One Coin, a company specialized in cryptocurrencies. Here, the article from the Capital website explaining the company’s fraud even ranks ahead of the brand’s own site: Another example with Danske Bank, one of the largest Danish banks, currently at the heart of a money-laundering scandal. A rather awkward situation for a bank, all the same…:

What is the impact of company e-reputation on the brand prism?

Generally speaking, user reviews significantly affect a brand’s e-reputation. As genuine influencers, their opinion appreciably shapes readers’ thoughts and actions.

Brand image and awareness

A qualitative indicator that is not always easy to grasp, your brand’s awareness and image can be measured through sentiment indicators, particularly on social media, which is the communication space par excellence. But also the space for all kinds of excess. To better pin down internet users’ opinion of a brand, it is relevant to rely, for example, on the emojis that express reactions on Facebook and to draw broad trends from them. Are the publications made by third parties (influencers, bloggers, the press…) about your brand positive or negative?

Partners and stakeholders

While your partners and stakeholders affect your reputation, the reverse is also true. From the pride of working for a famous and ethical company to the shame of serving the interests of a company at the heart of a large-scale scandal, there is only one step. A company that draws the wrath of internet users online will have far more difficulty attracting new investors or winning everyone over during recruitment. The type of issue affecting the company (moral, environmental, political…) can lead some suppliers who do not approve of the brand’s behavior to withdraw from the ranks.

How other internet users perceive you

According to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising survey, 83% of respondents said they trust a recommendation from a friend, 70% said they trust brand websites, and 66% said they trust consumer opinions posted online. Overall, greater trust is placed in the statements of internet users, who aim to be objective, than in those of the brand itself, which are seen as self-promotion. It is also important to observe the mentions made of your brand and the topics linked to it. Is internet users’ sentiment toward you rather positive or negative? Are the ratings and comments positive?

Sales and business in general

Positive reviews of your brand will drive up internet users’ level of trust, multiply the positive reviews about you, and generate more interest. This translates in particular into more phone contacts, more traffic to your site, and more sales! In fact, search engines generate 10 times more visits than social media for an e-commerce site. On the other hand, if the reviews about you cast doubt on your ability to satisfy your customers, your prospects will more readily turn to one of your competitors who enjoys a good reputation. Your customers, for their part, probably won’t come back to you, for fear of being disappointed. Given the growing importance placed on consumer reviews, earning internet users’ trust is more than essential for a brand. All the more so if it is a pure player that has only the internet to build a reputation… The IFOP study gives an overview of the deterrent effect of negative content and reviews on internet users’ purchase decisions. The findings are unequivocal:

How do you calculate the ROI of your e-reputation?

Even though it is complicated to precisely calculate the ROI of an e-reputation effort, it is possible to identify a few broad quantified trends. E-reputation is an investment like any other, so it deserves a close look at its ROI. Here we give you several approaches to calculate the ROI of your e-reputation and better understand the financial impact of negative content about your brand appearing on Google’s first page. With more than 50% of internet users stopping at the results on Google’s first page, it is more than essential to protect your company e-reputation:

Source: Moz

Regarding the impact of bad reviews on a company’s products and services, this same study reveals that nearly 22% of internet users will not become a brand’s customers after reading a negative review. With two pieces of negative content, nearly 45% of internet users are lost… From 3 articles on, 60% of potential customers are discouraged from making a purchase… In a word: disaster.

Source: Moz

The financial losses caused by bad results on Google’s first page

Based on the data provided by Moz, here is an example to simply calculate the ROI of your e-reputation. If your company generates revenue of €10 million each year thanks to the internet, the impact of one negative result causes a loss of 21.9% of customers, i.e. 21.9% of revenue: €2.19 million gone. If you have two pieces of negative content on the first page, this bad e-reputation costs your company €4.42 million. According to the IFOP study presented earlier, 85% of internet users are deterred from making a purchase after reading negative reviews on blogs, forums, or consumer sites. Don’t overlook the customer acquisition cost, which creates a double loss for the brand: having paid to attract and convert an internet user who won’t buy and will go to competitors. This cost can prove all the higher when the brand runs a strategy combining SEO and SEA.

The financial losses caused by a bad review

A negative review costs you 30 customers (no less). Here is another method that lets you calculate the losses caused by that bad review. To do this, you absolutely need to know:

• what is the average value of a transaction made through your site?
• how many transactions on average are made per customer each year?
• what is the length of a customer’s lifecycle?

Let’s take an example to calculate the financial losses caused by that bad review:

• A customer brings you on average €10k per transaction.
• 12 transactions are made each year by each customer: 10k*12 = €120k brought in each year per customer.
• The customer lifecycle length is 5 years: 120k*5= €600k brought in per customer (Lifetime Value)
• Following the bad review, your company therefore records a loss of: €600k * 30 customers = €18 million

And not responding to these negative comments does nothing to help the situation. Discover our 10 tips for responding to negative reviews. If the price of your e-reputation is lower than the losses it causes, you have every interest in getting to work on it right now.

Estimating the financial losses linked to a bad e-reputation

A recent study by Moz tells us that a single negative article found by prospects on Google’s first page generates about 22% in lost revenue. Which is already catastrophic… But nothing compared to the losses caused by 2 articles, which reach 44% of revenue. This figure even climbs to 59% of revenue gone with 3 negative articles… From 4 negative results on, 70% of your bottom line is lost. Suffice it to say that bankruptcy is not far off. To find out exactly the % of additional customers you would have without these bad results, here is the technique. If, for example, you have 2 bad results on Google’s page 1 / (100 – 44) = 0.78 If you gain on average 200 customers per year, without any bad reviews you would have had*0.78 = 156 missed customers200+156 = 356 customers in total with a good e-reputationYou would have a total of 356 customers instead of 200. It is an obvious fact backed by the numbers: a piece of derogatory content or comment found on Google’s first page has catastrophic consequences. Discouraged, your prospects will immediately go to competitors who, for their part, enjoy a good reputation. Let’s take the figures from the previous example again with a Lifetime Value (the customer’s value based on the length of their lifecycle), i.e. €600k brought in by each customer over 5 years:€600k *156 missed customers = €93.6 million in lost revenue All that’s left now is to subtract your costs from your revenue to find out the net profit lost… And usually, the surprise is a big one!

The consequences of a bad e-reputation

The waves once created by a bad reputation can now be described as a genuine tsunami for a brand. Everything that happens on the internet is by definition instant, global, and uncontrollable, and your company e-reputation faces many risks. The proliferation of social media has only amplified the importance of a digital crisis.

A gradual decline in customer acquisition

1 in 3 internet users admits being willing to forgo a purchase after reading negative comments about the brand. As mentioned earlier, poor e-reputation management has a significant impact on your sales and your business in general…

Trust at an all-time low

More and more, internet users trust consumer reviews rather than what a brand says about itself. Psychologically, reading bad reviews about a brand that nonetheless gave us a satisfactory experience still tends to degrade its image.

Complicated recruitment

A victim of its e-reputation, a company that makes the headlines will have great difficulty attracting interesting candidates – or even any candidates at all – during a recruitment phase.

A flood of bad reviews and negative comments

Drawing the wrath of the internet is never a good sign… On the web, revenge has no face, so some people take advantage of it to let loose on social media, brand sites, forums… In the event of a bad buzz, any means and any excuse will do to tear a brand’s reputation to pieces. The snowball effect is to be expected…

Case study: the consequences of a bad buzz in terms of sales for a brand

To deploy an ORM (Online Reputation Management) strategy, a multitude of channels must be probed. For one of its clients, the Semji agency ran an ORM strategy to improve its e-reputation. This client was suffering from negative comments on Tripadvisor and Quechoisir. These sites, ranking in 2nd and 4th positions respectively on Google’s first page, were strongly hampering this pure-player client’s business. The financial loss linked to the bad e-reputation was estimated at between 1.2 million and 3.5 million per year. The e-reputation strategy applied to this client allowed it to reverse the trend in 5 months by giving more prominence to positive reviews than negative ones. Thanks to a company e-reputation strategy implemented by Semji, the bad results about this company were pushed into the background within a few months, replaced by positive results. Results: the financial losses caused by the bad e-reputation were significantly reduced, dropping from €3.4 million to only €400k per year.

What solutions are there to minimize the business impact of a bad e-reputation?

Today, any brand is exposed to the possibility of sooner or later suffering the consequences of a bad e-reputation. A malicious rumor, a defective product that causes a disaster, a political, economic, or environmental scandal: the reasons can be many. Whatever the situation, solutions exist to limit the damage:

• Opt for crisis communication to limit the snowball effect: ignoring a bad e-reputation is without a doubt the worst attitude to adopt. But crisis communication takes time, energy, and above all the upfront setup of a carefully thought-out strategy. Poorly handled crisis communication can produce the opposite of the intended effect and inflame tempers further. Without the right tools, it is also difficult to comprehensively map out all the channels on which to act. Don’t forget that mobilizing resources internally costs you money, probably far more than calling on an agency that knows exactly how to act.

• Entrust your company e-reputation to an agency: it has all the expertise and know-how, as well as the tools to help you best manage your e-reputation problem. The right to be forgotten, content removal, and contacts for running effective press relations are all tools mastered by a specialized agency. Beyond improving the current situation, the agency will also put in place a whole system, a kind of digital fortress, to preserve an e-reputation worthy of the name over time.

Your company’s brand image on the internet can generate profits just as much as losses. Either one can be extremely significant… Restoring your image after a bad buzz takes time on the internet, a lot of time. A study by Recover Reputation estimates that it takes a brand about 5 months to climb back up. That’s a lot of time during which the company in question does not generate its usual revenue. While a brand’s e-reputation cannot be fully controlled, it must never be simply endured: the collateral damage is far too widespread and significant!