Your online reputation will come to affect a lot of your business as you move down the road. Up to 50% of people have assumptions of the quality of a company based off of the reviews. Not only do they suspect the product may not be all that it seems but the company as well. You, as a company, should care a lot about what people are saying about you and your products because it will have a direct affect on your sales now and far into the future.
When creating your online presence, make sure you have a clear goal in mind for what you hope to accomplish through your efforts. Rather than wasting time making goals with no clear point of success, make sure your goals are ones that you fully understand. While its all good to want to increase your online reputation, that cannot be your entire goal with your online presence. Set a goal such as “get 50 positive review” or “engage with 200 reviews.” These are clear and defined goals that you will know when you have hit. If you don’t know where you want your company to go, you will have no plan for how to get there. Now that you know your exact goal, you can look at the real steps on how to get to that number.
Set short-term and long-term goals for your company, with the short-term steps as a roadmap for how to accomplish your long-term goals. Let’s say you have a long-term goal to get to 4 stars on your Google listing. There are going to be a lot of short-terms goals that need to be met before hitting that long-term goal. Focus your attention on tasks such as engaging with at least 75% of comments, interacting with all negative reviews, and smaller tasks such as those. Then all of a sudden, after a lot of short-term goals, you will reach your goal of hitting 4 stars.
The way that you engage with your audience is going to be different for every company and every audience. Evaluate previous sales and similar companies to try to best determine your audience and how to market yourself in a way that they will be interested in. Everything that you put out as a company should be evaluated for how it will be received by your intended audience. Your audience is going to be your best spenders so invest in methods of communication, such as social media platforms, email chains, etc., that would engage their specific attention.
The way you market your company will affect how customers view you as they write their reviews. Start out by marketing to your audience properly and they are more likely to think favorably of you in the future.
When looking at how a company handles their reputation, it is important to note how they interact with their customers day to day. While the big marketing campaigns are very needed, it is important to engage with customers on the personal level so they can see you are more than a money-obsessed machine. Respond to comments, messages, emails, and other methods of communication to show your audience that you care enough to take the time to make sure they are taken care of.
Negative reviews are one of the easiest ways to make or break your online reputation. While customers will react favorably to a positive review, up to 86% of people will be wary to make a sale from a company with bad reviews. While one negative review won’t destroy your business, if the majority of your reviews are negative, it will likely scare off the majority of people who would have otherwise made a purchase.
Work hard to produce quality products that will leave little reason for your customers to write a negative review.
There is a silver lining to having a negative review! If the company responds in a positive way and works to fix the problem, readers can see that the company is willing to work with the customer to fix the issue. They could then see that the negative review as a fluke and not a representation of the company as a whole. While this won’t fix a product with 100% negative reviews, owning up to your mistakes and working to change them can set you apart from other companies and land the sale.
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