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The entire buying process has drastically changed over the last decade. A brand is no longer in direct control of the public perception of their product, service or business.
I don’t know about you, but I think small business owners are some of the most remarkable people in the world.
Just the other day I was speaking with a client in the Mobile Detailing business. He was doing 60% of the work, meeting with me regarding his marketing, starting another business during the later hours of the evening, still finding time for his family while juggling everything.
I just had to sit back for a second and marvel at this man, but when I thought about many of my clients I found a similar case with almost every single one. Regardless of how big or small the business was.
Every small business owner I have met has poured her/his heart and soul into their business and their clients.
This got me thinking about Reputation Management. I’ve had too many conversations with businesses who pay absolutely no attention to their online reputation.
They are wondering why they are not getting conversions with their marketing when they are spending thousands of dollars each month.
When I look I often find mediocre stars and review ratings on the internet or even worse I find none at all.
A company’s online reputation is directly proportional to their marketing conversion rate.
Let me break down some numbers.
93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions.
92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review.
It doesn’t matter if your B2C or B2B, the numbers are almost exactly the same. Reputation plays an enormous role in the buying decision.
The entire buying process has drastically changed over the last decade. A brand is no longer in direct control of the public perception of their product, service or business.
This entire process is now in the hands of the consumer/client. At any time they have a bad experience with a brand they can go online and leave a scathing review or if they have an exceptional experience they can likewise leave a raving review.
Unless a company is tracking their online reputation they would never know. As you can see from the statistics I laid out earlier, these reviews have a HUGE impact on a person buying decision.
Have you ever heard the statement “Word of mouth is the best marketing”? This statement is 100% true and in 2020 word of mouth marketing is your online reviews.
Example – You are the IT specialist for a small business. You are trying to find a service to help manage server speed. You search on the internet and find 3 companies that deliver very similar products. How is this guy going to determine which company to choose?
One company has a couple of 4 star reviews, one company has seven 4 star reviews and the last company has 45 reviews and their average rating of 4.5 stars.
Who do you think he is going to call first? It is going to be the last company.
As you can see, keeping track of your online reputation is a must. But there are so many review sources and not to mention if the business name or employee is mentioned online.
Is there a way to keep track of all this without using a million different software systems?
It’s 2020, of course there is. Some of them are:
Podium
Cision
Reputation.com
ReviewInc
Swell
BirdEye
And our favorite – Evolved HQ
A good reputation management software should pull all your review sources into one place, it should give you the ability to answer them from that one place, it should also help you with artificial intelligence to come up with responses based on the amount of stars and the tone of the review and if necessary to be able to customize those answers.
It should crawl the internet for any mention of keywords you want tracked (business name, key employees of the company, specific product, etc). It should do the same thing on social platforms.
It should track main competitors both online and how they are expanding with their reputation over social media channels.
It should track the most used words or long tail keywords in your reviews so that you can see what your audience is saying about you.
Check out the companies list above and find the one that is best for you, but in the end it will save you a lot of time and keep your companies reputation intact.
Another problem solved for small businesses. If you found the article helpful, be sure to follow us on our social media accounts to continue to get helpful content.
