In this article, we’ll be talking about Reputation Management, why you need it, and how it works.
So what is reputation management and why do you need it?
Well, reputation management is essentially helping you capture more reviews online in a positive way across multiple verified review sites for your particular industry or sector. By doing this, it will build your reputation online so that when people are researching who to do business with, you or your business will stand out.
However, to best understand this, let’s really break down 5 reasons why you need reputation marketing.
5 REASONS WHY YOU NEED REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
Reason One:
Studies show that before making any buying decision or filling out a lead form or make an online purchase from you, 86% of people would’ve gone to check your website or see you on social media to check your reputation online.
They would do that by going to Google and searching your brand name and the word reviews. If you don’t have very many reviews or you’re not on several review sites or particularly if you have bad reviews that are really going to hurt you, they’re not going to take that final step and reach out to buy or subscribe to whatever you’re offering; so if you don’t have that you’re potentially missing out on 86% of the leads that you could be receiving, and so an online reputation is hugely important because that’s part of the buying process and the research phase that people are going through so you need to tackle it.
Reason Two:
Another reason why reputation management is important is even if you do have a lot of reviews out there and the reviews are pretty good, and you have reviews on multiple review sites, if those reviews aren’t fresh people tend to lose trust. In other words, if they see the date on the current reviews and they are months old, they’re probably going to start losing trust, so it’s important to always have a steady influx and flow of fresh review content to help build that credibility you need to get the sale and win the business.
Reason Three:
Is that reputation management will differentiate you from your competitors, therefore you really want to have the best reputation online when somebody is comparing you with all the other competitors that you might be up against. That’s very important, so you have to invest in it; however, the key is that it takes time and because of that a lot of people skip out on it. Reputation management is not something that may be skipped, it has to be something that you focus on today and always.
Reason Four:
Is that it’s better to have more reviews out there because they’re almost like miniature salespeople working for you. Every review you get posted online is like a salesperson referring your business in the future. It’s their testimonial to how they experience your business that’s going to help influence somebody else to do business with you as well.
So do you want 2 salespeople out there working for you or 200? Of course, you want 200 that’s going to come in the way of more and more reviews, and the more reviews you get the more referrals and sales you’re going to get on the back end.
Reason Five:
Is that it shows that you’re experienced. If you don’t have a lot of reviews it almost seems like you’re not very experienced. How many projects have you done? how many people have you worked with? It’s probably substantially more than the number of reviews that you have online, what you want is to represent the amount of experience that you have, and that comes in the way of reviews.
The more reviews you can get when people are looking from a third-party perspective, it’s going to appear as if you have the most experience as well, and when they’re looking at you compared to other competitors if you appear to have the most experience, people are going to have the most confidence to choose you and not your competitor.
So now that you know what reputation management is and why you need it let’s talk about 6 (six) steps on how it works.
6 STEPS ON HOW REPUTATION MANAGEMENT WORKS
Step 1: is to start with a kickoff call about your reputation management. They’re going to take a look at your current online reputation and strategize with you on ways we can put a plan in place to help improve on that and build into the future
Step 2: is your reputation manager is going to get access to any review sites you already have set up and they’re also going to talk to you about other review sites that should be set up because they’re trusted review sites in your industry.
The aim is to be on more than one verified review sites; you want to be listed on many and have reviews on many, so they’re going to help get access to the accounts as you do have and then help you set up the accounts that you don’t have so that you have that foundation in place.
Step 3: They can start to build upon step number three once all the review sites are set up and ready to go. Your reputation manager will capture all of the emails of all the past customers and contacts that you’ve worked with and they’ll capture an initial batch of reviews.
They’ll typically do this in an intelligent way by asking for the feedback and a “thumbs up thumb down” format so that the thumbs up are routed to one of the verified review sites to capture review and the thumbs down are routed to a feedback form that you can use to help grow your business but without necessarily hurting your reputation online.
Step 4: Once that batch of reviews are collected and those review sites are all populated nicely with a lot of nice good positive reviews as well, look at how you can automate reviews and capture reviews into the future. Check out ways like adding it into your invoices maybe into your email communications, onto your website, and other ways where on an automated basis throughout time as you work with your customers.
We can ask for more reviews and acquire more reviews in addition to that on a monthly basis. Your reputation manager will consult with you and see who they can help reach out to capture more reviews so that you have fresh reviews and new review content all the time.
Step 5: Your reputation manager will monitor all the reviews, make comments, and replies to those reviews to build additional content so that those reviews rank higher and tell the full story. They’ll of course work with you as a business owner to make sure that the responses are approved by you, but it’s really key to respond to reviews because it shows people that you care.
It also builds content on the page so that you rank higher than your competitors with regard to online reputation.
Step 6: Your reputation manager will take a look at your online reputation and if there are any fake reviews that have been posted online or potentially anonymous reviews that have been posted online that don’t appear to be from a real customer they’ll work with those verified review sites to do what they can to potentially remove the review or suppress it. In some cases, there won’t be anything they can do because that’s the way the review site is built but in a lot of cases they can do things to provide information and prove that it was not a real customer and get those removed.
Like I said earlier every review is like a miniature salesperson, the more you get out there the more sales you’ll make. you’ll start to see it’s like a snowball effect so be patient give it the time it’s gonna pay off tenfold.
Hopefully, this article helps you better understand reputation management and how you can use it to grow your business. If you have any questions give us a call or send a message using our contact form on the website. We love an opportunity to earn your business, so talk to one of our marketing consultants today, and happy marketing.
Recent Comments