Best Ways To Improve Your Online Reputation

A great online reputation doesn’t just happen. Here’s an outline of how to amp up and keep up your business’s online reputation:

With the rise of digital marketing technologies comes great benefit. We have direct access to our audience. We can communicate information instantly. We can catch a customer with the simple click of a button. Digital marketing technology creates solutions for many problems businesses face for customer visibility. These solutions come at a great cost though, in the form of One. Bad. Review.

Reviews and comments on public internet forums (ie. Google Reviews, Yelp) make a HUGE impact on customer behavior and purchase decisions. Eighty percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Eighty Percent! That means that what we read in reviews and comments about a business, service, product, even from a complete stranger on the internet, matter!

Even the best digital marketing practices in use today struggle to undo the negative effect of bad reviews. This is where Online Reputation Management comes in. If you want to grow your business you’ll need a great online reputation and a strategy to keep that great reputation in place.

A great online reputation doesn’t just happen. Here’s an outline of how to amp up and keep up your business’s online reputation:

Review and Plan:

Take some time to check your business’s current online reputation. Identify websites and sources that your customer base interacts with, especially for review purposes. Look for trends in the comments and reviews. What do they like? What provokes bad reviews? Check out your competitors online reputations, too. What trends in comments and reviews do you see there?

Begin to identify some areas for improvement of your online reputation. Once you’ve got the baseline information collected and have identified areas for improvement, develop a and implement a plan of how to better your online reputation. Plus, consider how to keep it in good standing, long term.

Preventative Bad Reviews:

We’ve found that the biggest and most important strategy to improve online reputation is to follow the feedback before it is published. This can be done with feedback request software. Once a sale or service transaction is completed, certain softwares will send an automated survey via email to customers to follow up with how they would review the product or service. Depending on their response, the software directs the customer. If they respond positively, they are redirected to publish their comments publicly. If they respond negatively, they are redirected to a private message to your business to address the situation. In this way preventing negative feedback from being published for public view, and securing satisfied customers. This is a preventative method using feedback requests to improve your business’s online reputation. Plus, it can’t hurt to ask satisfied customers personally to review your business!

Strategic Approach:

Not only do you want satisfied customers, you want satisfied customers who go around telling their friends, and complete strangers online how happy they are. And ultimately, that leads to better business. It’s important to address this concern with a comprehensive strategic approach. Especially with the prevalence of savvy digital marketing, online reputation management has got to be done right. Following the best digital marketing practices is crucial because just one bad review is often the difference between the first page Google result and the 100th. Once you’ve completed your online reputation review and are managing bad reviews with feedback requests, you’ll want to adopt a strategic approach to play offense in conjunction with defense! This means expanding your efforts to get positive feedback. You can check out review boards on relevant websites regularly, including your competitors, to see what customers are talking about. You’ll also want to follow up with customers and reviews on various social media and public online platforms. In many cases, companies can respond to customer reviews publicly, which helps clarify and assuage uncomfortable situations and shows your business cares, a good strategy for better business. You can also keep things fresh by regularly updating the feedback survey questions, and even increase the survey response count by giving customers a head’s up that it’s coming. Amping up general digital marketing and advertising efforts helps too. Overall, a strategic approach means putting together details and tying loose ends in your digital marketing and reputation management plan so that not only do you avoid negative feedback, you promote positive feedback.

Analytics and Alerts:

The last thing to do in online reputation management is set up analytics and alerts. With the help of certain software you can continuously monitor your business’s online ratings to make sure your reputation is elevating with a constant stream of new positive reviews. Anything otherwise will trigger an alert. This gives you plenty of time to address customer issues before less-than-satisfied reviews get published online. Over time, with insights and analytics from various softwares and internet scouring tools, you will be able to identify exactly what may be damaging your business’s online reputation and get it back on track. You can add alerts to notify you of any bad reviews that are publicly published, while also collecting new, positive reviews to help your business stand out!

A good online reputation will help get satisfied customers and turn those into great reviews for your business. If you follow the above outline, your business will find improved SEO and visibility, more great reviews and new customers for your business.