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Online reputation is now increasingly becoming a great factor for a company’s success or loss. You can not ignore the fact that having positive or negative reviews directly impacts how your business performs both online and in the real world. Your consumers need to read a positive review for your brand to trust you for making a purchase.
According to research, about 86% of consumers give a read to around 10 reviews online before buying from a certain company or brand. Brands with 4 or more stars will get 57% of consumers to buy from them. You need to know everything about online reviews to build online reputation that will directly affect how many sales you make or the loss that you bear.
What should I consider an online reputation?
All the reviews that are posted online about your business on any platform contribute to your online reputation. Certain websites specifically allow consumers to make a review of your business. Such websites include Yelp and GMB if you run a brick and mortar business and marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy if your products for sale are in an eCommerce store.
You can also allow people to post their reviews on your website for the potential consumers visiting your site to check for reviews. Other things also included in your online reputation building or ruining factors include:
- Any news about your business published in online newspapers and articles.
- The gossip about your business on forums, social media, and also in online comments posted on any online platform.
- Blogposts made about your business that can be from people who tested your serving or products
How should I check my reviews online?
You must have an eye over what is being said about your business in the online space. To do so you can do the following:
Setup profiles online:
You must be able to reach all the comments that are made about you online and to do so you must be present on every social media platform. You should have profiles on the review sites where people might be talking about your business.
You should claim a vanity URL that has your business name in it on sites like Facebook Business. Your contact information must be up to date and complete on these sites. Your review site will pop up in searches only if you write accurate and compelling content on your site.
Set up Google Alerts for your business:
Through google alerts, you can get alerts for certain keywords that define your business. Whenever these keywords will be used in the online space you will get notified. You can check the reviews or the feedback about your business and respond to positivity and negativity accordingly.
Have a community manager:
Being a business owner, you can not manage everything. And as far as the matter of building an online reputation is, you need to have a cool brain to respond to negativity and positivity in the best manner. So out of the online reputation management best practices are having a community manager.
He will actively manage and build your online reputation and will respond to reviews. Responding to reviews proves you as a responsible and active business. People expect to have a response in at most an hour. So, a community manager can always be there to respond to the worthy reviews and feedback of your clients. Even negative feedback can be for your benefit if responded politely and with a cool mind.
A community manager must also be active on your social platforms and should always be the voice of your brand. He must be polite and warm in his tone. All these factors contribute to build online reputation for your business.
How to build an online reputation of your business online?
A great reputation online will help you in many ways. It will attract more leads and hence more sales. If your services or products are great than your customers will leave positive reviews for your business. These reviews play an important role in building your reputation online. As many people that will be visiting your site due to the positive reviews, as much will be your site’s credibility.
If you build online reputation your site will also be ranked in search results. According to a report from Moz, GMB, and review signals play the most important role in affecting the search results of three top search engines. The quality and quantity of these reviews are very important. You can get more reviews from the following tactics:
Request for reviews:
Many people will not leave a review for your business or brand on their own. And about 70% of them will leave one when prompted or asked. You can either ask your customers to leave a review right after a sale. Keep note that as older the sale will get the less probable is your clients to leave a review.
Hence you should ask for one as soon as possible. You can also send emails to your loyal customers requesting for a review. You can send a link to your review site that also is attached to your main website so that it is easy to find.
Look for positive reviews:
Many people might be leaving reviews about your business in random places. Whenever you spot such positive reviews you should request the person posted them to be able to use it on your site. You should ask them if you can use it in your marketing materials.
Once gotten the permission, you can turn this positive review into an eye-catching testimonial that will attract more customers while improving your online reputation. When you share such reviews, it will make other consumers also make reviews about you because they would want to get attached to your business.
Make high-quality products or services:
Your customer satisfaction will be your biggest weapon. You need to make quality products or provide quality services so that your customers get happy. In such a case you will not have to ask for any reviews. They will leave reviews by themselves if made very happy and will happily leave reviews if they get moderately happy. Your great products or reviews will be a great source for positive reviews only.
How to deal with online feedback:
People online are more heartless and most brutally honest. If you serve them well they will respond and leave good feedback. And if poorly served, you will also get harsh comments. But it is up to you to keep cool and act professionally in every situation. Following are some ways you can make any customer review done well:
Make sure to say ‘thank you’:
You must thank them for the time your consumer took out to write for a review. Even though it is a positive or negative review. A positive review when gets a ‘thank you’ will give a sense of doing something great. And for a negative review, it will lessen down their hate and will build a relationship of warmth between you two.
Respond to the comment:
Responding to a positive comment does take so much of our efforts. But a negative comment or feedback can throttle us and make us get defensive. But you must always remember that the customer is always right! whatever he says must be on the highest levels of respect.
Even if a customer is saying something bad about your products or services and even if he is wrong, you still have to be patient and take his reviews equally worthy like you would take his positive feedback. Always make sure you respond to feedback as a team including every one of the staff you have on board. This will represent how much value you put in every member of your staff.
Have conversations offline as well:
You are not required to only respond to negative comments cautiously but also to solve them. Have offline conversations with your customers who had a bad experience with your services or products and talk to them to solve the issue. If possible, try delivering them some free services to show that you put value in their feedback and how they feel about you. Try your best to improve their overall experience with you and make them one of your loyal customers for the next time.
What people have to say about your business and its products or services has a lot to do with how you perform online. You can not succeed without having the support of your customers. These people are the ones you need to grow because you are essentially working for them only. The only way to build online reputation is through deploying all these tactics stated above by yourself or by QRGTech – a marketing company that can help you build your online reputation.
QRGTech can be your ultimate solution in managing your socials, website, and your review sites to have a positive feedback system. With QRGTech you can grow to be a thriving business online that knows how to manage the customer reviews both positive and negative alike!
