Most brands now realize why reputation management matters so much: The ratings and reviews customers give your business impact how search engines and other customers make decisions about your brand every day. This means that if you’re not building a great experience across touchpoints, and internalizing feedback customer reviews, you’re likely leaving revenue on the table.
But if you have already started monitoring and responding to your business reviews, what’s next? Here’s how you can take your business’ reputation management strategy to the next level:
No. 1: Competitive intelligence matters: Know how you measure up against your competition.
Understanding your review performance and online reputation relative to your competitors is critical to winning and maintaining business.
Most marketers know the value of competitive intelligence, but you’ll drive more ROI if you put that information to work with concrete metrics about your star-rating, which of your locations are performing best, and how your review volume has changed over time.
That said, developing a comprehensive strategy for a multi-location business can be time consuming, particularly if you’re starting from scratch. If you’re looking to streamline the process, there are solutions on the market that can help you learn how your rating, review count and more compare to other businesses in your industry. Then, you can compare insights by location, and pinpoint areas where you can win more business by improving your operations and customer experience.
No. 2: Improve your business insights through sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying feelings or opinions expressed in a piece of text or speech. The goal is to determine if the attitude toward a particular product or business is positive, negative, or neutral—and to react accordingly.
Why does sentiment analysis matter to your reputation management strategy? Because gathering information about how a customer feels towards your brand (i.e., what words they used in a tweet, how they asked Siri for your customer service number) can help you respond more effectively and provide a better customer experience. It enables you to stay a step ahead when providing customers with the right experiences—as well as potentially anticipating negative reviews, helping you salvage the brand relationship with disgruntled visitors. Sentiment analysis helps you take your understanding of what your customers are saying online to the next level.
If you have the proper tools, sentiment analysis allows you to analyze customer feedback at scale to understand how it’s actually impacting your reviews and ratings.
No. 3: Generate more reviews that help your business stand out in new search experiences.
Google now requires that you generate your own reviews directly from your customers that live on your website in order to show ratings in organic search results. Additionally, in today’s world of intelligent search, reviews help power recommendations across many AI-powered services. If a customer asks Siri or Alexa for the “best burger near me,” it’s reviews that inform the “best” term.
The good news is that generating new reviews is easier than it sounds: according to research by Search Engine Land, 70% of consumers will leave a review if you just ask. You can start by simply asking your customers at checkout if they’re willing to write a review for your business. Following up with repeat customers in-app or via email to ask for a review is helpful, too—provided you don’t ask too often, as this could annoy the very customers you’re trying to attract.
Learn how to create more effective review responses here.
Even if you have a lot of reviews across platforms, new, detailed reviews are an important part of your reputation management strategy because they help keep your business relevant—and give your customers the up-to-date view they seek.
Looking for a tool that can save you time when it comes to generating new, high-quality reviews? Yext Review Generation, part of Yext Reputation Management, can help you collect first-party reviews from customers, add those reviews to your website and more.
Explore how to effectively monitor and respond to your reviews to understand and improve your online reputation. Watch our webinar.