Just how important is your company’s reputation online? In fact, your company’s online reputation can be the very reason your business continues to see ongoing success throughout the year or puts you out of business for good.
According to an article from BrightLocal, “90% of consumers used the internet to find a local business in the last year, with 33% looking every day.” The article goes on to say, “82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, with 52% of 18-54 years olds saying they ‘always’ read reviews.” And get this: “The average consumer spends 13 minutes and 45 seconds reading reviews before making a decision,” and “only 53% of people would consider using a business with less than 4 stars.”
Reputation Management
Reviews and ratings are two of the most important factors that influence a potential customer’s decision process. In fact, it could be the very factors that determine whether they choose your company to do business with, or with your competitors down the street.
Managing your company’s reputation online effectively means you become intentional about allowing your potential customers to see you in the best light possible, on the websites they trust and depend on for accurate information. And remember, perception is reality.
Therefore, it is important to know what potential customers are looking for when they go to sites like Yelp, or the Yellow Pages, or Angie’s List, or even Google itself, and what you can do to improve their third-party online perception of what the overall interaction is like with your company.
How to Respond to Reviews, Both Good and Bad
Responding to reviews, both good and bad, in a polite and professional manner presents your company, not only in a good light, but it also cultivates a feeling of respect for your company in the eyes of your potential customers. In fact, it validates the good reviews as well as provides insight into your potential customers that your company cares about the bad reviews and will do its best to reconcile any unpleasant situations or experiences.
With that said, when it comes to responding to bad reviews, it is important to respond quickly and without excuses. In addition to that, it is important to be brief and to the point. You want to acknowledge and show your signs of appreciation for certain complaints, but you don’t want to agree to any fault or pass blame — and you most definitely don’t want to get emotionally aggressive or combative.
Moreover, you want to be sure to contact negative reviewers offline and attempt to reconcile any issues or concerns they might have about the experience they have had with your company as soon as possible. Hopefully, when a resolution is made they will make the decision to remove or revise the review they made of your company online — or they could even decide to add another review about the experience they had when coming to a resolution with your company.
Lastly, in order to prevent future negative reviews, take reviews that have valid concerns, and use them as a way to learn from past mistakes. Just like we should be intentional about self-improvement, we as business owners should also be intentional about professional improvement.
Local Directory Listings
Finally, a quick word on local directory listings. These types of listings are important because if your potential customers can’t find your location and company information, then how would they know your business even exist? They have to know that you are out there before they could even attempt to do business with you.
With that said, potential customers online are looking for accurate, up-to-date business information — such as contact and location details — as quickly as possible. In fact, just the small thing of adding up-to-date contact information to one of these listing sites could be the very thing that increases the overall traffic to your business by 200%.
These types of listings also provide another way of separating you from your competition by allowing you the opportunity to provide details about the services you offer — as well as the ability to add photos of your location and any other items that might interest your potential customer.
To that end, we encourage you to consider evaluating, or re-evaluating your company’s online reputation on a weekly to monthly basis. Need help with setting up a reputation management system, or to learn more about our reputation management services contact us today!