A big element associated with reputation management has to do with your online reputation. Nowadays, with everything being digital, it’s more important than ever to maintain your reputation online. According to BrightLocal, as many as 75 percent of all shoppers say they trust online reviews as much as they do asking friends and family. This, combined with 89 percent of them looking at reviews before buying, make managing your reputation online a must. These reviews have become an integral component of the customer buying journey.
While negative reviews across the board are bad, they don’t have to be a death sentence. By effectively spending more time and energy on your online reviews, you can make it much easier to maintain a healthy reputation online. You want to make it easy for customers to leave reviews online. This can get you more positive reviews and help you enhance your online image.
There are numerous questions you need to be asking yourself to see where your online reputation stands. Some of them include:
– Do your positive reviews outnumber your negative?
This is an important question to answer. You need to figure out whether or not you have more positive than negative reviews. This can give you a good feel for your current situation.
– Did you respond to the negative reviews?
Responding to any negative feedback is crucial. It’s important to not only show that you care for your customers but to prospective customers alike. Customers want to see that you made an effort to fix the problem whether it be caused by shipping delays, poor service, or something else.
– Do you have a common theme in your negative reviews?
This can tell you a lot about your business. Check to see if there is a common theme going on within your negative reviews. You can generally tell if something needs to be addressed at the root of the problem based on whether or not the reviews have commonalities associated with them. For instance, if everyone is complaining about the service, you likely need to address it with your staff.
– Where are you getting the majority of your negative reviews?
Look to see where the majority of the reviews are coming from. You can generally tell a lot about where the reviews are being posted. You also want to check to see when they were posted. Are they from a long time ago? Are they recent?
– Do they look like they came from customers?
This is a common problem when it comes to online reputation management. A lot of companies will pay to spam their competition with bad reviews. These reviews are typically easy to spot. They generally come from accounts with no picture attached and have a lot of spelling errors or grammatical errors in them.
It can be very daunting to deal with negativity online in a timely manner, this is why many companies employ the help of Summon or similar agencies who offer online reputation management.
Here are some good tips that you can use to improve your online reputation management quickly.
1. Respond To Every Negative Review
One of the worst things you can do with a negative review is to ignore it. You want to respond to reviews as quickly as you can. You want to not only acknowledge the customer’s experience but do your best to remedy the situation. A prospective customer wants to know there are people behind the scenes that care about their customers. They want to know if they have a bad experience, they aren’t going to be ignored. Who wants to be ignored? A lot of times, if you can remedy a bad customer’s experience, not only will they retract their bad review, but they will change it to a positive one. This gives prospective customers much more confidence in becoming a customer of yours.
2. Have Contact Information Readily Available
One of the biggest ways to guarantee that you are going to get a lot of negative feedback posted online is by not having your contact information available. A customer wants to be able to remedy their problem with your business. If you make it difficult to find contact information, they will use whatever means they have available to get their problem heard. Because of this, you need to claim all of your Google My Business pages as well as pages with third-party review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor. This will ensure that your customers can get their voices heard.
You’ll also want to put all of your contact information readily available on your website. Have it on every page so a customer will be more likely to contact you than leave a bad review.
3. Ask For Reviews
One of the best ways to get more reviews is by asking for them. Believe it or not, Search Engine Land found as many as 70 percent of customers will happily leave a review when they are asked to do so. Don’t make the mistake of being scared to ask. Ask your customers for a review. You can even offer an incentive if needed. This can be an easy way to get more reviews written for your business. This will allow you to generate more reviews which can help you drive more organic traffic to your listings and website.