Is Your Brand’s Online Reputation Helping or Hurting Business?
Your brand’s online reputation is key to gaining the trust of consumers who are searching for your products or services on the web. Consumers often base their purchase decisions on customer reviews, which is in large part what shapes your brand’s reputation. What consumers say about your brand and how you handle online reviews can either inspire consumers to learn more about your business, or it can prompt them to look for that particular product or service elsewhere. In fact, almost 90% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, making reviews a critical factor to the success of your business. Below are some factors that affect your business and its online reputation.
Receiving Positive Reviews
Every business loves getting positive reviews, but aside from the satisfaction they bring, positive reviews have a larger impact on the success of your business. Positive reviews are beneficial to your business in many ways, from improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to increasing traffic to your website and physical store location. What many businesses fail to do, however, is respond to positive reviews. You should always follow up with positive reviews that your business receives online. This shows consumers that your brand has a genuine interest in customer service and gives prospective customers peace of mind that they are purchasing from a reputable and authoritative company.
The Occasional Negative Review
Whether one of your employees delivered poor service, a defective product was sent out or a customer is just having bad day, getting a negative review every so often is almost inevitable. Fortunately, actively managing your online reputation can give your brand a voice in the conversation that goes on online. This is crucial to making sure your brand’s reputation stays intact. Although no one wants negative reviews, they can help you become aware of particular issues and allow you to promptly resolve them. By promptly addressing these concerns and responding to the negative reviews in a timely manner, you can win back unhappy customers and retain their business in the future. However, if negative reviews go unanswered, you are more likely to lose that customer forever, as well as prospective customers who have read the review.
The More, The Merrier
Search engines favor businesses that have a large number of current, high-quality reviews by ranking them higher in organic and local search results. This makes review generation an important factor to your online reputation and digital marketing efforts. Even if you have good reviews, if you don’t have many of them or if they are outdated, they may not be as beneficial to your SEO and your reputation. By actively requesting and generating reviews, you can easily improve your online visibility and increase your ranking with popular search engines. Review generation is also one of the most cost-effective ways to improve your brand’s online presence and boost awareness.
Manage Your Brand’s Reputation the Easy Way
Managing your online reputation can be time consuming, so Strategic Marketing offers an efficient solution for businesses. Our reputation management platform, SmartRep, offers easy set-up, automated management and a user-friendly dashboard so you can spend more time running your business while the platform does most of the work for you. SmartRep will inform you immediately of negative reviews so you can address issues right away, preventing you from losing customers. Positive reviews are automatically published to review sites and social media pages to increase your visibility and boost your SEO. To learn more about SmartRep, give us a call today at (561) 688-8155 or visit the contact page on our website.
