Your brand’s success relies on your business having a good reputation.
With everyone so connected online, your customers are probably posting and sharing things they purchased from your brand already or talking about service they received from you. These are not conversations you can afford to ignore.
In fact, approximately 91% of consumers trust reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from friends (1). This means that your brand’s reputation online is crucial, and it is something you should work to monitor and control with reputation management.
Why Reputation Management Matters
Some brands might not think that reviews are too important to their business. They know they are doing a good job and have a quality product, so what does it matter if some people are complaining online? Ignoring your critics is something that many people do, because they are confident in what they do, so the critics do not matter. You cannot ignore your critics in your business; you need to work on reputation management to face this problem. Why? Let’s take a look.
Consumers Depend on Reviews
Even before the digital age, you needed happy customers to keep your business running smoothly. Before the internet, bad reviews may not have been as widespread as they are now, but if the right person complained, you could end up losing a lot of customers. Now, it does not matter who is leaving bad reviews, and if there are enough of them, your business will suffer.
There are a lot of third-party review sites out there these days because of how many people rely on them. Yelp, Google, Foursquare, and TripAdvisor are some of the more common ones, but there are many others as well. You want good reviews on all of these sites, because you never know which ones your customers are going to look at before purchasing from you.
Digital word-of-mouth goes even further than that. Customers will talk on social media too. How often do you see people asking what someone’s favorite niche product is? When your customers are happy, they will say your name in these queries. You want positive conversations about your brand on social media to help customers learn more about you and find you.
People love reviews because they are unfiltered, but this can make reputation management harder on you. Responding to reviews is essential, but you need to take the time to construct a response. This is an integral part of reputation management that you need to keep in mind.
Tips for Reputation Management
Now that we’ve gone over why your reputation management is so important, let’s take a look at how to approach reputation management.
Determine Your Current Reputation
Before you can begin crafting a strategy for your reputation management, you first need to take stock of where your reputation currently sits. You will need to sift through a lot of data to determine how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are. You can start by looking at your reviews on your site, social media, and third-party sites. If you have feedback you have collected from your customers through emails, customer satisfaction surveys, and contact forms, factor that data in as well.
Next, you will want to dive into social media. Look at the comments customers leave on your posts, posts they may have made tagging you, and other mentions from both your customers and competitors. You will also want to look for mentions from blogs and journals in your industry.
Sifting through all of this information can take some time, and sometimes it can be disheartening to look at the negative reviews. Still, it is necessary to determine what your brand needs for reputation management.
Track Mentions
Now that you know where your reputation currently stands, you will need to keep an eye on it from now on. Set up notifications for tags and mentions of your brand on social media, as well as branded hashtags and branded keywords. This will help you keep a finger on the pulse of your reputation and allow you to respond quickly to any questions, comments, and concerns that come up.
Respond to Positive and Negative Comments
Responding to both good and bad comments and reviews shows your customers that you care about what they have to say. Even something as simple as “thank you for the feedback” or “thanks for shopping with us” is better than silence. Make sure you personalize your replies; if you just copy and paste generic responses, it implies laziness and that you do not care enough to put effort into responding. Also, try to say thank you to all of your comments, good and bad. For more on how to respond to comments, take a look at our blog post “Tips for Responding to Reviews Online.”
Take Control of the Narrative
While there is no way for you to control what customers say about you online, you can still take control of your narrative overall. The best way for you to combat negative reviews and comments is by encouraging the positive. You can publish success stories from your happy customers and share reviews. This will highlight the positive experiences customers have had and show that even though there are negative reviews, you also have many happy customers. If customers share unboxing photos or videos of your products, share them to show off the quality of your product and the unboxing experience they get from you. Before you share user-generated content like this, make sure you ask permission to do so; not all customers want to have their posts publicly shared.
Take Action
You have seen what your customers like and dislike, and now it is time to act on this. If several customers are unhappy about something you are doing, take action to change it. Responding to reviews will only get you so far; actions show you are genuinely listening to them.
