According to research, online reviews play an essential role in the success of local businesses in the U.S. The majority of customers leave reviews to share their customer experience, while the majority of potential buyers read reviews to assess product performance and buyer satisfaction. On average, potential buyers read 112 reviews before making a purchase. 

While this research was conducted in 2019, its findings are still relevant. When a vast majority of businesses moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of online reviews skyrocketed. 

As a marketing agency owner, you understand the importance of maintaining a positive online reputation for your clients. However, with dozens of clients and countless review sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and industry-specific review sites, managing reputation manually can quickly become overwhelming.

This is where agency management software such as reputation management comes in handy. This blog covers its key features, top picks, and expert tips to help you choose, set up, and get the most from your solution.

Table of Contents

• What is Reputation Management Software for Agencies?
• Why Is Reputation Management Software Important for Agencies?
• Key Features of an Online Reputation Management Tool
• Top 10 Reputation Management Software for Agencies
• How to Choose the Best Reputation Management Software
• Why Vendasta Is the Best Reputation Management Tool on the Market

What is Reputation Management Software for Agencies?

Reputation management software for agencies is a tool that lets you automate the process of managing your clients’ reputations online. To better understand how this automation works, first things first, it’s helpful to outline what steps this process consists of.

Getting a Bigger Picture

Reputation management for clients begins by forming an understanding of an SMB’s online presence by answering the following questions:

• How do the customers perceive an SMB? 
• What image does the SMB have in the local press?
• What is the SMB’s target audience, and what are their core values and priorities?
• How does the SMB’s online presence contrast with that of its competitors?

To answer these questions, it’s necessary to collect the following information:

• What comes up in search results when potential customers look for the SMB online?
• What ratings does the SMB have on the most popular review sites and on those that are relevant to the SMB’s industry?
• Does SMB have any mentions in local newspapers or magazines? Are these articles positive or negative?
• How do all of the aforementioned aspects of the SMB’s online reputation compare to those of its key competitors?

Reputation management software can automate the process of collecting all the necessary information about an SMB’s online image with the help of social media and brand mention monitoring tools. These tools track relevant keywords and hashtags on social media platforms and also track online mentions of SMBs. 

At this point, it’s worth drawing a distinction between social media monitoring and social listening:

Another useful tool that exists under the umbrella of reputation management tools is the brand sentiment analysis tool. This tool is powered by AI algorithms that analyze all the mentions of an SMB’s brand and assign the appropriate score (such as Very Negative, Negative, Neutral, Positive, Very Positive, or Mixed Sentiment).

A competitive analysis tool helps understand how the SMB’s online presence stacks up against competitors. This tool pulls data about the competitors’ marketing strategies and organizes all relevant metrics into a single, easy-to-understand dashboard. 

Implementing the Strategy

Once your agency has assessed the SMB’s online reputation, you can design and implement a strategy with these key steps:

• Ensure NAP Data Consistency: Verify that the SMB’s name, address, and phone number are accurate across all listings.
• Leverage SEO: Publish high-quality content on various digital channels to maintain a positive online presence and secure top Google search rankings.
• Encourage Online Reviews: Actively ask satisfied customers to share positive feedback, such as by providing Google review links.
• Engage with Reviews: Respond to both positive and negative reviews respectfully, aligning with the SMB’s brand voice and audience expectations.

Now, here's how reputation management software for agencies​ can automate these tasks.

• Automated Listing Management: AI algorithms ensure business information like NAP details and working hours are accurately distributed and maintained across platforms.
• Smart Review Responses: AI-driven tools analyze customer review sentiments and generate intelligent, empathetic response suggestions. Your team can simply proofread and publish these replies.
• Automated Review Requests: Set triggers, such as purchases or consultations, to send automated SMS or email review requests to clients, encouraging valuable feedback.
• Streamlined Social Media Management: AI-powered platforms help draft and schedule social media posts tailored to the SMB's industry, upcoming events, or holidays, making it easier to maintain a strong online presence.

Why Is Reputation Management Software Important for Agencies?

If your marketing agency doesn’t currently offer reputation management on its list of services, you might want to consider adding it. 

Here are our top three reasons why it’s worth your efforts to resell local reputation management services.

Strengthens Client Trust and Retention

According to research, 40% of consumers say that negative reviews affect their decision to buy a product or service while 68% of consumers have an inclination to trust 5-star ratings only if they are supported by online reviews. 

Let’s say your agency offers web development services, paid marketing campaigns, and SEO strategies. A local dental clinic, a client in your digital marketing niche, doesn’t see a significant marketing ROI because the clinic doesn’t have working hours on its Google My Business Profile, and some potential customers leave negative feedback because they show up at the clinic’s doorstep when it’s closed. 

If you leave this reputation management problem unaddressed, this may increase the likelihood of customer churn. However, there’s another way. You can leverage white-label reputation management software to add reputation management to your roast of marketing services without increasing overhead costs. 

By expanding the portfolio of your marketing services, you will succeed in creating an image of a marketing agency that is well-versed in the nuts and bolts of digital marketing integration.

Streamlines Review Management Across Multiple Clients

As discussed, if the only challenge holding you back from adding reputation management to your services was the need to hire additional experts, the software can help you scale effectively. 

Manual reputation management that requires employees to manually go through all the existing directories to update SMBs’ NAP data and log into dozens of digital marketing platforms to calculate reputation management metrics and contrast them against those of competitors is no longer needed. 

Neither do your employees need to create convoluted spreadsheets to track reviews and whether they were responded to or not.

AI algorithms can perform all these tasks quickly and with a small number of errors. They are inherently friendly to surges in demand. Whether you need to cater to ten or a hundred SMBs, reputation management software for agencies can tackle any number of clients.

Drives Business Growth and Revenue Opportunities

Poor reputation management can have disastrous consequences. Just take a look at the United Airlines Flight 3411 incident. The company’s failure to effectively address the forceful removal of a passenger from a flight resulted in the company losing around $1 billion.

If a poorly handled scandal has such a profound impact on a well-established company, then by no stretch of imagination is it possible to believe that a similar scandal would leave an SMB unscathed.

While big corporations, such as United Airlines and Nestle, have enough financial resources to stay afloat even after such devastating blows to their reputation, SMBs rarely have the same luxury. That’s why empowering them with effective online reputation management services is paramount to helping them survive. 

Key Features of an Online Reputation Management Tool

The features of an effective reputation management software for agencies need to assist you with the tasks of ensuring your clients have a consistent online profile in all relevant directories, keeping tabs on your clients’ online reputation through client reports with sentiment and competitor analyses, effectively engaging with customer feedback and proactively encouraging clients to leave positive reviews and testimonials.

Building Accurate Local Citations

In a nutshell, a local citation is any online mention of your client's SMB that includes its NAP data. Managing local citations is a process that goes both ways. As a marketing agency, you are responsible for verifying that any online mention of an SMB has accurate information. Simultaneously, you are responsible for increasing local citations for your SMB because the more citations your clients have, the higher they rank in SERPs. 

Given all this, it’s important to make sure that the reputation management software for agencies that you choose has the functionality that automates the processes of verifying the consistency of NAP data across the web and also helps boost SMBs’ online visibility by distributing their business details across a wide range of relevant platforms from a single data aggregator, such as Data Axle or Foursquare.

Comprehensive Review Monitoring

Given the importance of swift replies to customer reviews, the reputation management software for agencies must have robust review monitoring and review generation functionality. 

It’s important to ensure that the customers believe that their feedback receives genuine rather than templated responses. Reputation management software that uses AI with natural language processing capabilities can generate reviews that can pass as if human employees wrote them.

Since personalization in customer interactions is key to success, you should choose software powered by AI that uses proprietary client data and generates responses to customer reviews that align with SMBs’ brand guidelines. 

For example, if your client SMB values humor, you should be able to instruct the AI to come up with witty responses to clients’ feedback.

Sentiment Analysis and Reporting

As mentioned above, reputation management doesn’t consist of only updating business information and engaging with customer reviews. Your agency also needs to make sure that your client’s online presence is on par with its competitors, whether they are direct, indirect, or offer replacement products or services.

Furthermore, giving your clients visibility into their online posture on the market through regular client reports is essential for justifying your reputation management tactics. 

Hence, the reputation management software for agencies should have AI algorithms that can perform social monitoring, social listening, and brand monitoring, as well as use the collected data to perform competitor analysis.

Integration with Other Agency Tools

If your marketing agency already uses AI marketing software, you should make sure that the reputation management software for agencies that you choose to employ seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack. 

That’s why if you already have a contract with a white-label marketing software provider, your first step may be to check out whether they offer any reputation management tools that satisfy your requirements. 

If you don’t have white-label AI software in place yet, you may find the forthcoming list of reputation management software for agencies useful.

Top 10 Reputation Management Software for Agencies

1. Vendasta

The first option on our list is Vendasta’s AI-powered reputation management software for agencies.   It was designed specifically for agencies and has the following functionalities.

• Integrates Google Insights to give visibility into customer actions such as calls and website visits.
• Ensures consistency in NAP data across platforms like Google, Facebook, and Apple for single-location SMBs and those with multiple locations.
• Gives intelligent recommendations for what keywords to use in the SMB’s marketing strategy based on local search volume and rank difficulty.
• Helps increase the SMBs’ online presence by distributing business details to a plethora of digital platforms with the help of data aggregators.
• Performs sentiment analysis, helping your clients better understand their brand reputation and how they are positioned against competitors.
• Allows you to use white-label client reports to give your clients proof that your reputation management strategy brings tangible results.
• Automates review requests, allowing you to set up triggers where the platform sends out texts or emails automatically to request that your client’s customers leave feedback.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the last functionality. No need to worry about the reputation management software becoming a magnet that pulls negative reviews. The software’s AI assigns an NPS score to each customer and sends review requests only to those individuals who fall into the Promoters category.

2. Birdeye

Birdeye has a number of AI-powered tools that help marketing agencies streamline reputation management for their customers:

• Listings AI helps build and disseminate consistent business profiles on platforms like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Bing.
• Reviews AI automates the processes of sending out requests for customers’ feedback and writing replies to reviews.
• Social AI simplifies the process of sustaining SMBs’ positive online presence with the help of AI-generated social media posts.

3. Podium

Podium Reviews is part of Podium’s AI-powered platform that comes with the following functionalities:

• Automatic process of requesting reviews from your customers’ clients.
• AI-generated responses to clients’ reviews.
• Client reporting on every business’s online reputation.

4. Yext

Through the Yext Reseller Partner Program, agencies can resell Yext's solutions directly to their small-business clients, typically those with fewer than 25 locations. This program provides access to Yext's technology, enabling agencies to deliver services under their own branding.

Yext’s professional package has the following list of features to ease reputation management:

• Knowledge Network ensures that your clients' business data is consistent across top online platforms, including Google My Business, Amazon Alexa, Apple Maps, Bing, and Facebook.
• Listings Analytics shows how consumers engage with your clients’ brands online.
• Review Monitorings rely on Yext’s direct integrations with Knowledge Network publishers to gather clients' reviews into a single dashboard.

5. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers offers a white-label tool for agencies that need to offer comprehensive review management services under their own brand. 

The tool centralizes reviews for 100+ review sites and helps generate reviews to improve local SEO. It also integrates with a range of marketing automation platforms and CRMs.

The tool’s key promises include:

• Business intelligence to equip your team with useful insights about customers
• Increased review responsiveness thanks to a comprehensive overview of all online reviews

6. Grade.us

Grade.us offers a white-label marketing tool to help SMBs generate, monitor, and market customer reviews. To begin with, their product helps you automate the process of sending out requests for feedback via texts or emails. 

The reviews are pulled into a unified dashboard, and you can set up notifications for your team members to be notified by email whenever a new review shows up. 

Boosting the visibility of positive reviews is as important as receiving them in the first place. Grade.us automates the process of sharing reviews on your customers’ websites and their Facebook pages.

The key perks are:

• Helps organize various customers under one roof.
• Automates requesting, managing, and sharing reviews.

7. Reputation.com

Reputation.com offers a suite of tools for managing online reviews and customer feedback. While it has a formidable stack that caters to every step of the reputation management process, the company doesn’t offer white-label capabilities. Rather, their platform is designed for direct use by businesses. 

So, if you are seeking a solution to help you manage your marketing agency’s reputation, Reputation.com can help you in the following ways:

• Ensuring complete and accurate business listings.
• Providing client reports on how your agency’s listings are performing.
• Empowering you with real-time notifications about brand mentions, trending keywords, and hashtags.
• Delivering competitor analysis that helps you with SWOT analysis.
• Automating the process of publishing social media content.

8. SOCi

SOCi’s reputation management software for agencies helps their clients in the following ways:

• Drafts responses to reviews based on sentiment analysis.
• Improves social media marketing strategies by offering AI-generated content for paid campaigns.
• Provides AI-generated suggestions on improving business listings by adding relevant keywords or optimizing business descriptions.

9. Trustpilot

Similarly to Reputation.com, Trustpilot doesn’t offer white-label capabilities. This is a review platform that helps you collect and showcase your customer reviews. 

With this platform, you can:

• Automate the process of inviting your satisfied customers to share their feedback
• Sync your reviews to be displayed on important pages on your website. 

One of Trustpilot’s standout features is that transparency is one of its core values. They make sure clients can freely post reviews about marketing agencies. This level of transparency is important for a marketing agency that wants to create a trustworthy brand image and attract clients who believe in the agency’s ability to provide substantial marketing ROI.

10. Sprout Social

While predominantly a social media management platform, Sprout Social includes reputation management features:

• Social listening gives you visibility into your clients’ brand mentions.
• Hashtag performance analysis helps gauge the efficiency of social media marketing campaigns.
• A unified dashboard simplifies your client reporting, ensuring your customers are fully aware of their marketing ROI.
• Automated replies to posts, stories, questions, reviews, and messages.

How to Choose the Best Reputation Management Software

Step 1: Define Client Goals

It’s helpful to gauge the existing online presence of your clients: do they have an online reputation to begin with, or would you need to develop one from scratch for most of them? The level of your clients’ online presence will dictate what features your reputation management software will need to offer. 

For example, if most of your clients have robust presence in online directories but struggle with consistently responding to customer reviews, the reputation management software that you may choose should automate responses to customer reviews and requests for feedback, but it may lack in the capability to automatically ensure consistent NAP data across a wide range of listings.

Step 2: Evaluate Must-Have Features

That said, there are a number of must-have features that any reputation management software for agencies needs to offer simply because these form the essence of reputation management:

• Review Monitoring: Any reputation management software needs to give your team a bird’s eye view of all the reviews that your clients receive.
• Sentiment Analysis: Without AI analyzing the mood of client reviews and categorizing them into negative, neutral, and positive, it would be very difficult for you to get real-time visibility into your clients’ brands’ online performance and take prompt actions in cases of reputation crises. 
• Automated Reporting: If you are planning to offer reputation management to hundreds of clients, you want to make sure the software that you choose streamlines client reporting with the help of AI algorithms.
• Multi-Client Dashboards: This is the most effective way to deliver client reports to your clients. No need to send out emails. Your clients can simply log into your white-label client portal to view their reputation in real-time. 

Step 3: Ensure Scalability and Integration

When you start offering reputation management services to your clients, you should be prepared for the fact that your marketing agency will grow thanks to your extended portfolio of marketing services. Therefore, make sure that whichever software you choose can scale with you. 

If you’re an owner of a start-up marketing agency and you lack a unified platform to manage all your customers from one place, it’s a good idea to pick a reputation management software that is part of such a platform. This will ensure you have access to various tools that help you manage your marketing campaigns for your clients effectively and that you don’t need to deal with the headache of integrations later down the road. 

So, you may want to choose a platform that includes a CRM, a social media management platform, and email marketing software.

Step 4: Test the Software

Never purchase reputation management software without testing it first during a trial or demo. It’s a good idea to simulate client account management to assess how well the software meets their needs.

Step 5: Prioritize Agency-Specific Support

As a marketing agency owner, you should prioritize solutions built specifically for marketing agencies. While there are many providers of reputation management software for agencies, not all of these providers focus exclusively on agencies. Some may also pitch their product to clients from other industries. 

Choosing a provider that works exclusively with agencies can help ensure your team faces challenges with using the software at any time. They get customer support from a team that is well-versed in the marketing industry. 

Why Vendasta Is the Best Reputation Management Tool on the Market

Comprehensive Multi-Client Management

Vendasta is essentially a white-label marketing agency in a box. By opting for Vendasta’s platform, you get a comprehensive solution to manage all your marketing services for all of your clients in one place. 

Not only can you do that, but on a more granular level, Vendasta’s reputation management software gives you visibility into each clients’ online reputation. You can view all the constituent parts of reputation management (reviews, listings, mentions, competition, social metrics, Google Q&A) by navigating a user-friendly sidebar. 

Review Monitoring and Management

Vendasta’s reputation management software for agencies empowers you to get instant alerts about new reviews on select sites, such as Google, Yelp, and Zillow, to name just a few. 

You also don’t need to fret about manually increasing the number of reviews for your clients. Vendasta’s reputation management software for agencies automates the process of sending our review requests via SMS or emails by setting up trigger events, such as a completed purchase or service.

All you need to do is leverage the power of third-party integrations, such as QuickBooks Online, PetExec, and Jobber.

Sentiment Analysis and Insights

Vendasta’s intelligent sentiment analysis across all the top review sources highlights the key areas of your client’s reputation that require improvement. The software can scan the web, including blogs, news sources, and social media networks, to find mentions of your clients. These insights are invaluable. 

You can spread the word about positive mentions and deal with negative mentions offline to make sure small fires don’t spread.

White-Label Features

Of course, it goes without saying that Vendasta has a strict white-label policy in place. So, if you decide to adopt its platform as a foundation of your marketing agency, you can rest assured that your clients won’t find out unless you choose to disclose the information to them.

With Vendasta’s white-label features, you can deliver professional, branded reports and provide your clients with a user-friendly client portal they believe to be your own.

Integration with Other Tools

Vendasta is focused on ensuring that the tools are integration-friendly. Not only does the reputation management software seamlessly integrate with Vendasta’s CRM, but it also connects with third-party platforms like Google My Business and Yelp.

Industry-Leading Support

With over a decade of experience working with marketing agencies, Vendasta offers 24/7 high-quality support to troubleshoot any issues you may experience with its products. Vendasta also has a wealth of educational resources, ranging from a thorough onboarding process to a Content Library with various how-to guides. 

Take Your Agency’s Reputation Management to the Next Level

A poor reputation can be a downfall for SMB owners. Not only does it detract potential customers, but it also limits opportunities for attracting investments. If your marketing agency doesn’t have enough resources to offer a comprehensive reputation management service, opting for a white-label reputation management software can be a win-win situation for you and your clients. 

Vendasta is one of the best and most experienced marketing software providers for agencies. The platform allows you to manage all your marketing services and clients in one place. Try out Vendasta to ensure stellar reputation management for hundreds of SMBs across North America. Request a demo today!