18 Reputation Management Tips:
- Deliver Good Work and Get Reviews
- Focus On Customer Service
- Respond to Negative Reviews
- Share Positive Reviews
- Setup a Google Alert for Your Business Name
- Learn From Negative Reviews
- Have Fun With Your Brand Voice
- Involve Your Customer In Your Business Decisions
- Practice Transparency
- Improve Public Perception Through Charity
- Take Care of Your Employees
- Use Social Media as an Asset
- Clean up Your Website
- Stay Tech-Savvy
- Get Regular Feedback
- Go Above and Beyond
- Show Your Appreciation for Customers
- One Final Tip
1. Deliver Good Work and You'll Improve Online Reviews
Deliver good work and your clients will be happy enough to write a review about it, ranking you higher when potential customers are searching for information about your company.
Reviews have become an everyday thing in our lives. It’s important to provide quality work and encourage customers to leave reviews.
Reviews are more important than ever for any company now. Positive customer reviews give you a higher chance of ranking on search engines online in your local city.
The best way to improve online reviews is to provide quality work and to take the right steps in getting reviews from clients at the end of each job. Reputation management software can help you keep track of when clients mention feedback, which will help you attract new customers, gett more referrals, improve online reviews, increase customer lifetime value, and so much more.
2. Focus On Customer Experience
Customer experience is arguably THE most important value proposition in your company, but it’s also often overlooked. Most people don’t realize that customer experience is what sets an organization apart from its competitors.
It can be difficult for many businesses to know where to start when it comes to customer experience, which is often overlooked as a value proposition for a business.
As a good rule of thumb, here a 5 key areas to focus on if you want to improve online reviews and your customer experience:
- understand who your customers are
- create emotional connections with your customers
- fast communications & response times
- capture customer feedback consistently and as soon as possible
- act quickly on internal employee feedback
3. Respond to Bad Reviews Quickly
It’s important for business owners to know that bad reviews are unavoidable. One of the worst things you can do is ignore them, because it doesn’t make any sense and they won’t go away. Instead, try to reach out immediately and rectify the issue with your customer.
Answering a bad review as quickly as possible with an apology and a solution is generally the best strategy. Ideally, reach out to the unhappy customer personally first to see if you can resolve the issue privately, and you’ll find that oftentimes customers will delete their bad reviews without you having to ask them.
Once you’ve owned your mistake, you can try to show that you have been in contact with them about fixing the issue by publicly responding to the bad review online.
4. Share Positive Reviews
There are many reasons why it’s important to share and promote positive reviews. The best reason is that it can help improve your company’s online reputation. It can also increase traffic to your website, which is important for any business.
Sharing and promoting positive reviews from different review sites can also help you generate more leads and add social proof, which will help your business get more customers in the future.
It’s important to encourage clients & customers to post feedback on review sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook so that they get an accurate representation of how happy their customers are with your work.
A lot of times, a company just views their work as a job instead of approaching it like customer service, which is what it actually is!
You want people that are happy with your work to be able to say so, and you want other people looking for companies like yours to be able to see what others have to say.
5. Setup a Google Alert for Your Business Name
A Google Alert is a notification that Google will send to you on a periodic basis about keywords and phrases related to your business.
Many companies use them for following coverage in the media or searching mentions of their company. However, there are many other reasons why it’s important to set up a Google Alert for your company name.
It’s important to monitor if your company is referred to in any way because with the internet, it’s becoming more difficult to keep track of what people are saying about you.
Monitoring social media and content online can help you identify potential opportunities and pitfalls before they happen. You want other people looking for companies like yours to be able to find it easily so it’s important to register your business with search engines like Google when you start your business.
For instance, if you’re company is a web design agency, it’s important for you to know when people are talking about how expensive or affordable you are online so that if the price isn’t right, you can take action and make sure they’re happy with doing business with you.
The same goes for if your company is mentioned in the media. You want to make sure that you know what people are saying about you, so if there’s a negative article written about your business or if there’s an idea for a new product or service that would add value to your customers, you can do something about it right away.
6. Learn From Bad Reviews
If your attempts to contact the unhappy customer privately are unsuccessful, the best thing that can be done is to respond to them.
It doesn’t make sense for someone to have a negative review about your company and you not doing anything about it.
If the review is unreasonable, then as long as you apologized and fixed their problem, they should be happy with how you handled the situation.
Try to read reviews all the time and take a note of any mistakes that were made on your part.
Lastly, never take it personally. People write reviews for a variety of reasons; many people want attention, so do not think any less of yourself or your business because of a few negative reviews.
7. Have Fun With Your Brand Voice
One way you can have fun with your brand voice is by being creative. Creativity could include something like creating a funny video, for example. You can also involve your audience by asking them to comment on the idea of making a funny video and see what they think.
Another way you can have fun with your brand voice is by using it as an opportunity to show off your personality. For example, if you’re brand voice is more serious and conservative, you could try using humor in a different way instead–like having a lighthearted contest around your product or service, for instance.
8. Involve Your Customer In Your Business Decisions
Involving customers in business decisions can be a highly effective method to improve online reviews. There are a few things that you can do to involve customers in your business decisions.
1) Feedback
Depending on the type of company, feedback could be a good way to understand what your customers want from your company.
For example, if you’re running an ecommerce site, then you’re probably all about customer feedback. You’ll want to make any changes necessary for your customers and you’ll also want them to give more feedback so that they have more of an impact on what the company does.
Of course, it might not be easy for you and it might take time but with a little work, it’s definitely possible to get enough feedback from customers to see what they would like for the company.
An easy way to do this by using a reputation management software that has NPS Surveys.
NPS surveys are a way to conduct quick surveys that gather feedback from customers and then translate those responses into numbers.
It allows you to track how you’re perceived in the market through an online survey of your customers.
NPS is an acronym meaning “Net Promoter Score”.
Detecting negativity within customer reviews is just one example of NPS Surveys usage: as well as identifying potential areas for improvement, it will also tell you what customers think of your business in general- whether or not you’re meeting their needs, help convert more unhappy customers into promoters, get feedback about new product ideas, and help you identify your best customers (and reward them with benefits).
2) Blogs and Forums
Many companies create blogs and forums where customers can communicate with each other around products or services.
Being able to see what people are saying about your company, whether it’s good or bad, is a valuable way to know what customers want from you. This would also be an opportunity for the company itself to respond to concerns they might have about their products or services.
3) Questionnaires
Companies can also create surveys for their customers to take when they’re shopping with them online or in store. It’s a great way for the company to ask questions and find out what customers really think about them without being too invasive about it.
Software for surveys and forms can help you do this in minutes – while automating the whole process! They’re so easy to use that all you have to do is send it out, and watch the results as they roll in.
4) Polls
Another option that could be really easy for a company to do would be creating polls that show some kind of problem with their products or services.
Companies could create the poll asking customers what they would like the company to do about it. If there is an issue, companies can show how they’re trying to fix it and then take a look at how many votes were placed on each option.
5) Send Out Requests
If you have a large following on one of the many social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, you can use your followers to get information about what customers want and need from your company.
It also makes sense because it should be easy for people to respond–and if they have an issue with something, they are more likely to say something about it.”
Be prepared to make changes and improvements based on the feedback you receive.
You should try for a two-way conversation where you can incorporate customer feedback into your business, but also use your brand voice to show customers what kind of company you are.
9. Practice Transparency
1) Have Active Social Media
2) View Negative Reviews as Opportunity to Improve
3) Respond Quickly to Concerns
4) Return and Exchange Policy
5) Be Honest About Pricing
10. Improve Public Perception Through Charity
A company can improve online reviews and strengthen their public perception by giving back to the community. This is a great way to engage people who will word of mouth about your business and in return, bring in more business.
You don’t have to be a large company or organization, you could give to smaller charities or organizations in your area that are looking for help.
For example, a small company with a limited budget might want to get involved with some local animal shelters and volunteer their time or donate some needed supplies.
It’s important to do activities that not only help the company but also affect the lives of those around them. Majority of people will view your business as more trustworthy if you’re doing work in the community.
11. Take Care of Your Employees
The saying, “All or nothing” might be a good strategy when you’re playing blackjack in Vegas, but it’s terrible for public perception.
Do not allow your employees to make extreme statements that could damage your brand.
It’s important to choose carefully what they say about business and customer service and stick with it.
There are quite a few ways that you can take care of your employees as well. You need to pay them fairly and offer good benefits if possible–it’s also important to make sure that they’re treated with respect by the rest of the staff.
If someone is having issues, it needs to be taken seriously.
You should also try to create a work environment that helps them do their best. Share your goals and vision with all of your employees so they know what you’re trying to accomplish overall.
12. Use Social Media as an Asset
If you already have social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest then use it as an asset for your company.
You should always be posting interesting and eye-catching stuff that will gain the attention of others.
If you have an engaging social media strategy, people are more likely to talk about your brand and business.
13. Clean up Your Website
If you don’t pay attention to your website , it can become a big problem for both customer and employee perception.
If your site is slow or isn’t working, it makes people think that you aren’t that reliable and are unprepared to deal with customers.
You should make sure that the pages on your website lead to places where they actually want to go. This helps with making customer service easier for them.
It’s also important to keep a blog on your website so that you can easily engage with other people.
14. Stay Tech-Savvy
If you’re running an older business, it’s important to stay up to date with technology or what is known as being tech-savvy.
People in the younger generations expect businesses to be able to use new technology and want their products or services in new and different ways.
You can also reach out to some of the most tech-savvy and highly rated marketing companies like our friends at Devante Group so that they can help you achieve your goals faster.
15. Get Regular Feedback
If you’re running a small to medium-sized company, it’s important to get your employees input on how the business is doing and what could be improved. This way, they can share their concerns and give suggestions on how to improve things.
It’s also helpful for hearing about any customer complaints that you might have missed or problems you didn’t know were going on.
16. Go Above and Beyond
There’s a difference between being good at what you do and going above and beyond the expectations of your customers.
Offer something extra to your customers–if they are happy with the service then there’s more likelihood that they will talk it up.
It’s always a good idea to provide better than average customer service as well as consider what customers want and need.
17. Show Your Appreciation for Customers
If you want to win over new customers, then one of the best ways that you can do this is by showing your appreciation towards current customers.
If you’re running a small business, it’s important to keep your customers because without them, there won’t be a business.
You can offer loyalty discounts to customers who are repeat customers. This gives them something for coming back and makes them feel more appreciated.
You can also send thank you cards with candy, postcards or pictures that document their moments with your company to let them know how important they are to the business.
You can also consider giving out coupons to encourage people to come back after they have been in before or spread the word about your business in other ways.
18. One Final Tip
If you want your company to rise above competition and become one of the most trusted businesses in your area, then consider implementing a reputation management software.
Maven HQ helps local businesses generate more reviews with a powerful suite of solutions. Maven HQ’s review monitoring and review generation software helps you collect more reviews and manage your existing ones. It’s the best way to deliver a great customer experience on autopilot.
If you want to discover what’s possible with Maven HQ, check out this case study on how Dockside Physiotherapy boosted Google reviews by 651% within a month.
With a fully automated review generation software, you can easily collect more reviews from your customers and improve online reviews so you can rise to the top of your market within weeks.
Conclusion
If you follow these tips, your business will not only be able to improve online reviews, but you will also attract new customers, improve customer loyalty, and become the obvious choice in the long run.
If you have any other tips for a company that wants to become the obvious choice in their market, then feel free to share them in the comments section below.
What you should do now
Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways we can help you grow your business:
- Book a Free Demo Session. If you want to generate demand, increase customer loyalty, and become the obvious choice – look no further. Maven HQ is a powerful marketing & sales automation CRM that can help you increase online visibility, collect reviews, generate leads, book more appointments, and tons more. Book your FREE Demo Session to see how Maven HQ can grow your business fast. First, one of our growth experts will understand your current marketing challenges, then we’ll show you how Maven HQ can solve those problems and help you grow fast.
- If you’d like to learn the exact demand, loyalty, and reputation strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download playbooks, templates, and tutorials we use for our most successful clients.
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