Building a great reputation begins with providing a great experience online.
To build brand trust and deliver a great experience online, brands today need to deliver answers everywhere consumers search.
Your brand’s online reputation directly influences whether customers choose to do business with you.
In short, your brand must be informative and reliable across the many maps, apps and search engines.
Approximately 80% of US internet users prefer using a search engine to find information about local businesses. Delivering a great customer experience that boosts your online reputation can’t happen if your business doesn’t surface in these local search results, or if it shows up with incorrect details. If a customer can’t find your phone number, sees out-dated product or provider information, or visits the wrong address, they’ll be frustrated and unlikely to return.
Delivering consistent, comprehensive, and correct information everywhere your customers might interact with your business.
Your brand’s online reputation directly influences whether customers choose to do business with you. Reviews are a huge part of this.88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and research suggests that reviews produce an average of 18% uplift in sales. Plus, a whopping 89% of consumers read a business owners response to online reviews! A delayed reaction to a problem, no matter how small, can also harm your business, which is why it is so important to respond.
This is made easier these days with the influx of Reputation Management companies. rannko.com But it is not just about taking care of your online reputation, you have to be proactive and that means delivering consistent, comprehensive, and correct information everywhere your customers might interact with your business.
Owning your reputation in the digital space.
Reviews, comments, social media profiles, photos, posts, the list of what we’ve put into the online world is a long one, and this is what shapes search results. But the impacts of these results don’t end on the first page of Google. They impact behavior, decisions and, above all, reputation. With this in mind, we have to learn how to own our reputation in the digital space.
- Create a stellar experience. Obviously, the most important activity that a local business can do is refining and improving their own craft. The better job a business does, the better reviews it is likely to get.
- Ask for reviews. 66% of consumers leave a review if you ask them to (source). And if you are bold enough to ask, you are likely serving them in a manner worthy of a positive review.
- Respond to reviews. 30% of customers consider a business’s responsiveness to reviews to be a key factor in their judgment of the business (source).
- Make your business easy to find online. Increasing your business’s overall visibility is one of the simplest ways to get more reviews. If customers can’t find you, they won’t review you. Improved local SEO and robust pages on Google, Yelp, and Facebook will give you a powerful edge in building a library of positive reviews.
Knowing how to improve your reputation management is a hard lesson in managing your business in 2019. And not only is it hard, but it also takes up a lot of time, which is why having a Reputation management software platform really takes the burden off your entrepreneurial shoulders!
