I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.
If you just want FairTech’s team to do your reputation management for you, visit our Online Reputation Marketing service page.
Online Reputation Management
The amount of Google local guides have grown from 5 million to 129 million in the past 4 years. Nowadays businesses have no other choice to monitor and manage their reputation.
A bad reputation can wreck your business
Survey done by Brightlocal
show that
- 87% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses
- Only 48% of consumers would consider using a business with fewer than 4 stars
- 73% of consumers only pay attention to reviews written in the last month
- Going from a 3-star rating to a 5-star rating gets a business 25% more clicks from Google local
Meaning, if you don’t have recent positive reviews
Or
The reviews are not spread on different platforms
Or
A rating above 4 stars or more
Your business is not trusted, this will directly affect your income.
Last week at the end of a webinar about Confident Cash-flow I was presenting, a business owner approached me and told me that suddenly since 2 months his sales had gone down and were not picking up. After a quick analysis, my team found out that 2 months prior to that, he got 2 negative reviews on Google. With very little effort using the technique I am explaining below, in less than 2 weeks he was getting even more business that he was getting before.
Also important.
According to experts, review signals make up 15% of Google local ranking factors.
Source: Moz, “local ranking factors survey”
1st learning here is that no fresh reviews on different platforms or negative reviews will drastically affect your business.
Now that you know what you need to do to gain the trust of new potential clients and retain your existing clients, you can make sure to provide them with what they are looking for.
With this strategy you will see it is easy and fast to deploy.
The 3 pillars of this strategy are:
- Collect reviews
- Manage the reviews
- Spread the reviews
Adding point 1 and 3 to reputation management (point 2) is a total game changer. This strategy makes you switch from:
A reactive status where you are constrained to manage your reputation constantly to keep the business coming in, to a proactive state where you use this as a marketing tool and start getting clients attracted to your business instead of you searching for them.
The online reputation marketing strategy
1. Collect reviews
We just learned that potential clients will not trust your business if you have less than 10 positive reviews on different platforms.
People tend to write reviews when they are unhappy and when everything went well they find it normal and don’t write a review.
Result; with 9 happy clients and 1 unhappy one you will most probably end up with one negative review and no positive at all.
Happy clients when asked to do a review will be pleased to do it, they just did not think about doing it.
So the key here is to ask every client to give their honest feedback and review, this will give you regular reviews and most importantly better reviews.
2. Manage your online reviews
Every review needs to be replied to. You can have the best customer service on the phone or on your website, people expect you to reply to online reviews. Good and bad ones.
2.1 Negative reviews management
If you get a negative review,it is very important to reply fast.
It’s not only about you and this complaining client, 1000’s of potential clients will see this review.
When replying, make sure to move the discussion to private email, phone call, messaging outside the review platform, so you can continue the discussion without the whole world seeing it. Find what the problem is. Sometimes it’s just a small communication problem. Solve the problem, compensate the client, make her/him happy again. Once they see you went into lots of trouble to rectify and you made sure you adjusted your system so it does not happen again and he/she is convinced, ask if they would be ready to take the review down or write a reply to show the problem has been solved to her/his satisfaction.
A negative review where the client comes back and mentions that you took care of his complaint and he/she is satisfied now, can turn to your advantage.
People will see that if something goes wrong you will fix it. A good point to build trust.
A bad review will need about 10-15 good reviews to compensate for its negative effect. Make sure you rapidly collect good reviews to drown it.
2.2 Positive reviews management
Reply also the positive reviews, when you clients take the time to leave testimonials, the least you can do is to say thank you. Take advantage of this opportunity to nurture your rapport with your clientele.
2.3 Protect your reputation
There is a way to protect your company from bad reputation. Propose to all your clients to give you their feedback on how you are doing. Do that on the backend of your website, not visible to the public. Make sure the process is easy and fast, maximum, a minute to give the feedback.
For the positive review, propose to share it on the favorite platform of your client, like Google Map, Facebook, Yelp etc
If a negative review comes in, make sure you get an alert or your client satisfaction team and that they handle it immediately. Make sure the situation does not degenerate, act fast. If you own a restaurant, go speak to the client immediately, find out what the problem is and solve it. This way, the client goes home happy, you know what you need to improve, and the negative review never goes out.
3. Spread the reviews
Now that you regularly have positive reviews, and clients start to come on their own, due to your good reputation, it’s time to scale up.
We saw that you propose to your clients to share it on the platform of their choice, this was the 1st step to spread it. As they gave the testimonial on your own platform, you have their contact, you can automate an email to say thank you or send it manually. In the email propose other platforms where they could share it too.
Show those positive reviews on your website.
Additionally, to take screenshots of good reviews, share them on your social media. Show them on your website, even print them to show during presentations. Create a short video with some top reviews, upload them to Youtube. Now, the attraction of clients toward your business gets stronger and stronger with results of a growing cash-flow for you.
Remember to:
Collect
Manage
And spread your reviews
What you say is your story
What you clients says about you is your reputation
Make your clients sell your services and products
How can FairTech help you improve your reputation and attract your ideal client?
- Providing a free audit of your reputation.
This will give an overview of where you stand right now and identify the gap to where you need to be. - Provide you with a free consultation.
During this session, together with you, we will elaborate the best strategy to place you as a leader in your industry so that your ideal clients are attracted to you. - If you are looking for a "do it for me" solution,
FairTech's online reputation marketing team can handle the entire process for you. For this, start with a FREE strategy session. Use the button below now.
Click the button below to get a free audit including a free consultation
The 1:1 strategy session is based on the result of the free audit of your actual reputation and the Confident Cash-flow Formula. It can be adapted to all industries and sizes of companies. It leaves room for creativity and hits the mark every time with SEO.
You’re only 3 steps away from having new clients requesting your services while you sleep. You will learn how to combine simple techniques that will turn your reputation into actual customers.
This unique strategy of reputation marketing instead of reputation management has worked wonders for over 1’000 clients already
Click the button below to get a free audit including a free consultation
The 1:1 strategy session is based on the result of the free audit of your actual reputation and the Confident Cash-flow Formula. It can be adapted to all industries and sizes of companies. It leaves room for creativity and hits the mark every time with SEO.
You’re only 3 steps away from having new clients requesting your services while you sleep. You will learn how to combine simple techniques that will turn your reputation into actual customers.
