The online reputation of a small business may be the determinant of its success. The types of follows and mentions, customer reviews, or search engine outcomes are examples of what people read or see online and get a preliminary perception. To small businesses, this reputation is not only important but necessary to manage to grow and be credible. This is where Online Reputation Management (ORM) tools come into play. Such tools can be used to keep track of the mentions of the brands, customer feedback, track reviews on various platforms, and even enhance search engine presence.
A proper ORM tool enables small businesses to control their online image, respond quickly to negative comments and enhance positive reviews. Most of these apps are affordable and can be utilised with ease and hence can be used by startups and other growing companies who do not have a dedicated PR department. ORM tools can help to automate the request of reviews to track the buzz on social media, which is a competitive seller advantage.
This article identifies the best online reputation management tools suited to small businesses, including their features, affordability, and simplicity. You may be a local cafe, or a retail store with a niche, or a start-up company offering services, but the selection of the appropriate ORM tool will contribute towards enabling you to defend your brand, further gaining customers and creating long-term permanency in the online market.
What is the Need to Utilise the Online Reputation Management Tool in Small Business?
- Track Brand Mentions – Get on-the-spot notifications when your company is discussed on the internet, such as on Facebook and Twitter, or on blogs and forums.
- Autonomous Online Review Management: Scrape Google, Yelp, and Facebook customer reviews, analyse them and respond to them.
- Enhance Customer Confidence – By taking your feedback actively, you make customers feel that you care about their opinion and this will boost their confidence in you.
- Increase Local SEO ranking: An Increase in across-the-board postings and comments as well as positive reviews can help to advance search engine rankings.
- Crisis Management: Quickly react to negative comments or reviews to ensure that the comments or reviews do not negatively affect your image.
- Automate Review Requests – The tools can carry out follow-up emails or SMS that persuade the satisfied customers to leave reviews.
- Obtain Competitive Insights – Monitor the reputation of the competitor so that you will know how your business is faring and how to fix it.
- Data-Driven Decisions: The capacity to review trends and attitudes to make changes to customer affairs, products or processes.
List of 15 Best Online Reputation Management Tools for Small Businesses
1. Reputation.com
Reputation.com is a powerful online reputation management software that fits businesses of all types even those that are small and medium-sized. It is aimed at optimising customer experience and exposure through control of online reviews, business listings, and customer reviews. The platform retrieves the reviews of various sites that aid businesses to be able to respond promptly to praise as well as criticism. It has a friendly dashboard that the business owner can see the most important reputation metrics, including average ratings, sentiment trends, and performance by location, which is perfect when it comes to multi-location small companies.
Reputation.com is in addition to allowing businesses to enhance their local search engine optimization by providing coherent and precise information on a scoreboard of local online directories. Although Reputation.com is an enterprise-level platform, it has a scalable pricing model, which makes it affordable to smaller companies willing to reach more customers and control the customer opinion effectively.
Key Features:
- Monitoring and responding to review the centralised God
- Valid business list management
- Sentiment analysis tracking and reputation score tracking
- Features of local SEO optimisation include
- Multi-location management
- Custom alerting and automations
Pricing:
- Not available
2. Podium
Podium is a customer communications and reputation platform that was established to assist small enterprises in increasing their online presence and correlate more favourably with prospects. It allows companies to gather reviews online (via text messages) and in this way, the likelihood of getting positive feedback is much higher. Podium organises different messages communicated by different platforms, Google, Facebook, and even the chat on the website, in a single inbox which makes communication much easier.
Other features on the platform are web chats, payment technology, and customer surveys, and this adds value to the platform that can be used in many ways other than reputation management. Podium can give businesses a chance to strengthen their customer relationship, get more real reviews and rise in local search rankings. It is sensitive to popular CRMs and point-of-sale systems which makes it appropriate in retail, dental, auto, and home service businesses.
Key Features:
- SMS reviews
- Web-based chat and lead capture
- The use of surveys and feedbacks of customer feedback
- Internet-based payment processing
- CRM-POS integration
- Local search optimisation
Pricing:
- Custom pricing
3. Birdeye
Birdeye is one of the most effective online reputational management platforms that are specifically targets small and local businesses. It assists companies to gather reviews, keep track of customer reviews, and interact with its audience on more than 150 review sites, such as Google, Facebook, and Yelp. The tool offers real-time notifications of the new review so that the business can respond in time and ensure that it has a good customer relationship. Automated review request is one of its prominent characteristics, which the system can send to its users through SMS or email following a purchase or a service delivery and as such, it is not a problem to build up positive reviews in an organic manner.
Birdeye also provides analytical information that can help proprietors of small firms keep track of sentiment, customer satisfaction trends and general brand performance. Its social listening tool enables you to monitor what individuals are discussing on social media and other online platforms concerning your business. Whether connected to CRMs or point-of-sale systems, Birdeye makes it the easiest to manage reviews without necessarily deploying additional manpower. It is accessible because it was created to be user-friendly so that non-technical business owners can navigate and applying its functionality is not an issue.
Birdeye is an extensive and affordable platform that can be utilised by small companies that desire to assume management of their digitalized reputation.
Key Features:
- Requests for the evaluation via email and SMS Automated requests for reviews
- Monitoring of the reviews in real time 150+ sites
- Review the response and the control board
- Sentiment and performance signals
- Social media tracking and tracking Social media tracking and listening
- CRM integration POS system integration
- Customer-messaging inbox Unified
Pricing:
- Starter: $299 /month
- Growth: $399 /month
- Dominate: $449/month
- Premium: Custom pricing
4. Yext
Yext is a powerful Digital Presence and online reputation management tool that allows small businesses to have full control over their brand on the web. Yext is renowned for its strong listings management features, which maintain your company’s information, including hours, address, and phone number, accurate and consistent with more than 200 directories, including Google, Apple Maps, Yelp, and Facebook. In addition to listings, Yext offers powerful review monitoring where businesses can monitor, respond to, and analyse customer feedback in a real-time fashion.
It uses AI, providing an analytics engine that learns and measures trends and sentiments of customer feedback to provide more insight that can be used to enhance customer experience. The Knowledge Graph system developed by Yext makes it easy to update the business data as everything is centralised and the updates are fast and convenient. It also helps in automatically prompting first-party reviews through emails and SMS to increase the strength and quantity of reviews.
Since smaller companies are oriented to establishing trust and attracting more local traffic, Yext provides such companies with great value because it is automated, accurate, and thoughtfully utilises data. Despite the products having previously targeted enterprise clients, Yext also has small business packages that can grow in line with business expansion.
Key Features:
- Online monitoring and alert overview
- Directory listing in 200+ listings
- AI and the detection of sentiment and trend
- Centralised business data Knowledge Graph
- Generation of reviews through email/SMS that is customizable
- The customer experience improvement insights
- Local SEO ohne Energieverbrauch
Pricing:
- Track: $29/mo or $348/year
- Manage: $36/mo or $432/year
- Grow: $44/mo or $528/year
5. Grade.us
Grade.us is a niche player among online reputation management tools that places a lot of emphasis on review generation and marketing for small businesses, small digital marketers, and agencies. In the evolving landscape of marketing in the digital age, platforms like Grade.us help businesses stay competitive by automating review solicitation via email and SMS campaigns, directing satisfied customers to review sites such as Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and other industry-specific platforms. The most striking aspect of it is probably its review funnel, which does some pre-selection of what customers say about the company and even prompts positive feedback, whether it is publicly visible or diverted to a back-channel.
Grade.us can be white-labeled as well which also makes it very popular with marketing agencies. It provides detailed tracking, overview broadcast to websites, and detailed analytics that can assist the business to know its reputation trends. The interface is very easy to use and easy to implement complete with templates and customizable offers that are suited to many sectors. To the small businesses that want to grow credibility with the help of genuine reviews and to have more tools to address negative comments without suspicions, Grade.us offers an effective but not expensive solution that is rather compatible with existing tools.
Key Features:
- Completely automatic requests campaign through emails/SMS
- Pre-screening Review funnel
- Multi-platform publishing of reviews
- Review landing pages that can be customised with the help of templates
- Agency White-labeling
- Dashboards Analytics and monitoring
- Reviews in widgets on the site
Pricing:
- Solo: $110/ month
- Professional: $60/ month
- Agency: $40/ month
- Partner: $25/month
6. ReviewTrackers
ReviewTrackers is an all-inclusive reputation management platform that enables a small business to monitor, track, and enhance customer reviews spread across over 100 platforms on the internet. The dashboard that it presents is easy to use and collects reviews on sources such as Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and other industry-specific websites giving companies the capability to check sentiment trends and reply to the reviews almost instantly.
The unique part of ReviewTrackers is that it could prove to be the turning point in saving your company with what it would be able to find out by interpreting customer opinions with your business about customer sentiment analysis to find out where your business is lacking by finding the gaps in these ideas as a business to make your business efficient and effective as well as to evaluate which employees are the most effective within your business. User-friendly review collection tools are automated email and SMS wavy, and reporting facilities allow the user to visualise customer satisfaction rates and KPIs of the company.
ReviewTrackers is designed to integrate with existing workflows (along with the most popular CRMs and marketing tools). It is particularly useful in the hospitality, medicine, and retail sectors where customer reviews play a large part in the purchasing cycles. ReviewTrackers is a great decision whether you strive to increase your ratings or provide better service based on data-driven analysis as a small business aiming to enhance customer experience.
Key Features:
- Response since more than 100 studied sites
- Request emails and SMS that are automated
- Sentiment tracking and performance monitoring
- Reporting & Dashboard Custom
- Multi-location support
- Management resources in reviews
- With CRM and marketing platforms integration
Pricing:
- Custom pricing
7. NiceJob
NiceJob is an effective, but lightweight online reputation management software that allows small businesses to expand their online presence by automating the collection of reviews. The platform makes it easy to convert your happy customers into public evangelists, by engaging them using smart and automated follow-ups through SMS and email. The fact that using NiceJob is as easy as breathing on difficult installations with overwhelming dashboards and just automated processes and concrete outcomes is one of its main strong sides.
The tool is also connected with CRMs, invoicing systems, and booking platforms, which allows issuing review requests at the right time of the customer experience. In addition to the review generation, NiceJob will also make Stories of the reviews and will post them on your social media accounts, thus, contributing to the increased credibility and engagement. Even its website supplements start to generate more leads by showing customer reviews in real time.
NiceJob is an affordable, easy-to-understand and outcome-driven service especially created to manage and support small service businesses, such as home repair, dental services, and cleaning services. When seeking a set-and-forget type of tool that builds your reputation on autopilot, there is NiceJob.
Key Features:
- Automatic campaign for reviewing SMS and email
- A combination of an invoicing system and CRM
- Review sharing via social media
- Widgets to show customer feedback on the websites
- Content marketing has the feature of stories
- Real-time review monitoring
- user-centric dashboard
Pricing:
- Reviews: $75/month
- Pro: $125/month
8. Brand24
Brand24 is a web-based monitor that assists small companies in the monitoring and handling of the online visibility of their brands across social networks, blogs, forums, news, and so on. Although it is strictly not a review aggregator, Brand24 is an excellent option when it comes to real-time monitoring of brand mentions and sentiment analysis, which makes it a necessity in terms of reputation management. It enables their users to keep track of what people are saying about their brand, products, competitors or key terms, and act proactively in positive sentiments and grievances.
Visualised sentiment analysis and influencer score tracking and source or platform filtering of data are provided on the platform. This can be especially helpful in terms of recognising PR opportunities or considerations as well as pre-empting some of the emerging issues before they become worse. The dashboard of Brand24 is user-friendly and has strong filtering features being able to give the user to get something usable without being flooded. Its low cost and scalability work in favour of the small businesses deployed in social media or those whose growth depends on the opinion of people.
Brand24 is a multifaceted and informative tool, especially when you need to know what people are saying about your business on the internet and do something about it.
Key Features:
- Brand mention tracking in real time
- Sentiment analysis of visual reporting
- News and social media tracking
- Tracking of keywords and influencers
- Create reports and alerts to create Alerts
- Filtering by source, sentiment, and platform Since its inception, social media has become a powerful tool with high user engagement. This is because it acts as a form of brand engagement and interaction.
- On-the-go online monitoring mobile app
Pricing:
- Individual: $149/month
- Team: $249/month
- Pro: $299/month
- Business: $499/month
- Enterprise: from $999/month
9. Trustpilot
Trustpilot is highly known as one of the most renowned websites where customer reviews are solicited and displayed, thus it is one of the most used tools that small businesses wish to establish credibility on the internet. It allows businesses to collect verified customer feedback by automatically inviting, designing review forms, and having a review profile that can be public.
Trustpilot reviews are used to give your business a better search ranking in search engines, which helps to improve SEO and click-through rates. The platform is also able to offer customer sentiment and review performance analytics to enable you to be able to overcome your problems and emphasise your strengths. You can discover positive reviews with built-in widgets and TrustBoxes without much effort and implement them on the site to fortify the trust among new site visitors.
Transparency of the review system and reliability of Trustpilot give enterprises a competitive advantage in the markets where trust is central to making a buying decision. It targets businesses of any size, but it has a friendly user interface and affordable offers, which is why small brands willing to scale can use it. Should you want to promote transparency and make customer satisfaction turn into growth, Trustpilot provides solid ground.
Key Features:
- Review collection and management Verification
- Public review profiles that are SEO optimised
- Development of automated email invitations for reviews
- Performance metrics/reporting View
- TrustBox widgets to show on a site
- eCommerce and CRM extraction
- Personalised alert and templates of reviews
Pricing:
- Plus: $299
- Premium: $629
- Advanced: $1,099
10. Broadly
Broadly is one of the top online reputation management tools, offering a super simple user interface tailored for smaller, service-based companies such as dentists, auto repair shops, and contractors. It specializes in helping businesses grow by improving communication with customers and increasing online reviews. Broadly automates the process of requesting reviews via text and email after customer interactions, increasing the chances of receiving positive and fresh feedback.
Live website chat can also be enabled on the platform to secure leads and results in better customer interaction. Its combined dashboard allows companies to pay attention to and acknowledge all reviews on the platforms, including Google, Facebook, and Yelp, at their location. Broadly also facilitates customer feedback surveys, providing small business owners with ideas of how pleased clients were and in what aspects they can work on.
The tool can interface with numerous industry-specific CRMs, which facilitate optimising the organisational processes without necessarily being a technical person. As a small business that wants to earn more local customers and get a better online presence, Broadly can help you fix that in a rather efficient and helpful way.
Key Features:
- Automated mail and SMS review requests Automated mail and SMS review requests
- Monitoring and response to reviews Centralised Reviews
- Online chat to conduct instant customer interaction
- General customer reactions surveys
- Integration of CRM and vendor-wise software
- On-the-go management in a mobile application
- Performance dashboards Insights
Pricing:
- Standard: $249/month + $350 build-out fee
- Pro: $349/month + $350 build-out fee
- Elite: $449/month + $350 build-out fee
11. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a fully integrated social media management package that features strong facilities in reputation management on the small business scale. It enables you to track brand mentions, reply to any comments, track sentiment, and deal with customer relationship management across social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn through one dashboard.
Sprout Social earns a mention because of its intuitive interface, extensive analytics, and smart inbox, which brings together all the incoming messages and reviews so they can be easily managed. As one of the top social media analytics tools, the platform also gives the functionality of social listening which analyses trends, hashtags, and overall talk on your brand or industry. In businesses that are keen on ensuring that they have a healthy presence and reputation on social sites, Sprout Social offers all that is required to ensure that one operates in a proactive and responsive environment.
For those exploring Sendible alternatives, Sprout Social stands out as a robust contender, especially with its powerful reporting tools that provide insights on audience sentiment, engagement rates, and campaign performance. Even though it is not purely a product of review management, its one-stop-shop character makes it a perfect tool to make a small company that considers social media as an important component of its strategy of reputation building.
Key Features:
- Centralized inbox for all social media communication
- Being aware of the moments when people refer to your brand and tracking keywords
- Sentiment analysis and social listening
- Social media planning and posting
- Performance reports tailored to suit you Customizable reports with your logo on them
- Die Plattformfunktion (Facebook, Instagram etc.)
- Collaboration tools of the response management team
Pricing:
- Standard: $199 per seat/month
- Professional: $299 per seat/month
- Advanced: $399 per seat/month
12. Mention
Mention is an interactive publicity tracking and social listening application that enables small organisations to monitor their brand online on social media activity, interchangeable sites and forums, and the news press among others. Although it does not focus on the classic review sites, it is a leader in the aspect of reputation management as it allows companies to keep track of conversations, keywords, and the due actions of competitors.
Mention gives you daily summaries and alerts in real time of when your brand is being talked about on the internet, which makes it easier to respond to customer concerns or praise in real time. It provides sentiment response, measures performance, and tracks influencers and provides businesses with a valuable perspective into the outlook in which they are judged, and by whom.
Mention is useful to small businesses, as the interface is simple, it has flexible settings on alert monitors, and it tracks various languages. Mention is an influential app even to the individuals who care more about brand health, PR, and community engagement as it guarantees nothing about your business is neglected online. It is particularly useful to companies that use social sites or seek to enhance their engagement and actively respond to them, making it one of the more versatile social media marketing tools available today.
Key Features:
- Brand and mention tracking in real time
- Sentiment analysis and keyword tracking
- Identification and watching of influences
- Benchmarking and tracking of competitors
- Daily-digest Reports and bespoke alerts
- Face-to-face connection with the social media Integration
- It was global monitoring with multilingual support.
Pricing:
- Not available
13. Chatmeter
Chatmeter is a solution that presents itself as a local SEO and reputation management platform, but it can also be used by small businesses because of its effective solutions. It streamlines online reviews, search engine optimization and business listings in an all-inclusive mix with local SEO tools. Chatmeter enables you to track more than 100 platforms’ reviews, reply to them, and even review customer sentiment using AI-enabled tools.
Among its most interesting functions is the so-called competitor comparison; this comparative allows you to carry out a benchmarking of your brand against local competitors, concerning the review, ranking, and engagement levels. Chatmeter also puts listing management tools at your disposal so that your business data holds on to uniformity in search engines, directories, and maps.
It provides location-based performance analysis, and it fits perfectly in companies that have multiple branches. Small businesses seeking a higher-end reputation and visibility solution that can support the growth and features of an enterprise solution now have an enterprise level tool that fits their budget.
Key Features:
- Sentiment analysis and review analyses
- Local SEO and the organization of items
- Benchmarking tools Competitor benchmarking tools
- Multi location performance monitoring
- Customizable review notification and process이 JuniNine-pillar-spread
- Insights and artificially intelligent analytics
- Google and social integration
Pricing:
- Custom pricing
14. Vendasta
Vendasta is a white-label vendor system that assists online associations and small companies to oversee web-based recording, client criticism and vicinity references under their image. Its main Online Reputation Management software lets users track and respond to customer reviewing on other platforms, shows sentiment over the time and finds the areas where there is a need to enhance.
The companies can send automated review requests in the form of emails or SMS, and increase their chances of getting positive customer feedback. Such flexibility enables it to be a one stop shop when businesses want to manage not only reputation, but also all the elements of digital presence. Agencies have also used Vendasta to provide branded reputation services to their clients with its white-label functionality.
Key Features:
- Monitoring dashboard Centralized review
- Automatised requirement of review (email/ SMS)
- Sentiment analytics
- Listing management in business
- Reseller white-labeling
- The opportunity to have unrestricted access to everything digital marketing
- Irrespective of agency tools and CRM
Pricing:
- Starter: $79/month (billed $948/year)
- Professional: $399/month (billed $4,788/year)
- Premium: $799/month (billed $9,588/year)
15. LocalClarity
LocalClarity is a local SEO and online reputation management platform designed to give business owners the ability to manage reviews and listings en masse, yet it also makes economic and practical sense to small businesses. In the case of managing reviews across many locations, the platform specializes in assisting companies with Google Business Profile reviews, and additionally, supports Facebook, TripAdvisor, and other review sites.
The dashboard provided by LocalClarity allows one to track, evaluate, and comment on customer reviews on a real-time basis. It gives profound analytics with information using trends in ratings, customer satisfaction, and geographic performance. The platform also has the options of using templates to respond to review, the automation in the workflow, and reportings which prove useful to small teams. It is affordable, easy, and targeted at Google reviews, which renders it competent with businesses which otherwise depend on local traffic and exposure.
Key Features:
- Google Business Profile review management
- Cross site review tracking
- Sentiment and custom reporting
- Bulk listing to be updated on a regular basis
- Social and map integration
- Pricing of the small businesses
Pricing:
- Custom pricing
Conclusion
No more can running your online reputation be an option in the current competitive digital world, and not to mention to the small businesses especially. With the right online reputation management tools, you can track customer responses and reviews, respond to appraisals, build customer confidence levels, and increase the titles and search records of your business location through a centralized application.
Whatever industry you operate in, whether a local bakery, dental clinic or a service-based startup, these tools provide scalable and easy to use tools to protect and expand your brand on the internet. Small companies by investing in a tried and tested ORM tool are able to use customer feedback to create potent marketing tools and use it to create long-term relationships. Select the tool that is within your budget, is compatible with your workflow, and suitable to your growth strategy.
FAQs
1. What is Online Reputation Management (ORM) Tool?
An ORM tool provides assistance in observing, controlling, and enhancing corporate presence in review websites and social nets.
2. Why Should Small Businesses Use the Tools of Reputations?
They facilitate the improvement of credibility, increase local ranking, and turn loyal consumers into brand enthusiasts.
3. Are Small Firms Able to Afford ORM Tools?
There are a lot of tools with the affordable plans designed to suit the needs of small businesses or local businesses.
4. Are Such Tools Automated in their Review Gathering?
Automation of review requests is one way that most ORM tools facilitate the gathering of positive review. Some would come by SMS, some by email.
5. Do Social Media Monitoring Tools Work With ORM?
Social listening is a feature of some of the systems that helps monitor mentions and interaction on social media.
