Improving Online Reviews & Reputation for a Local Business

Having quality products and services is important, but it isn't everything. You need to have a solid business reputation if you want to truly succeed.

According to Luisa Zhou, 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product. How your audience views your brand will have a huge impact on your ability to keep up with the competition.

There are various online review strategies you can implement to help with this. Through effective online reputation management, you can ensure people have a better opinion of your business making it easier for you to achieve your business goals.

In this guide, we'll take a look at how managing and improving online reviews can help your local business. Keep reading for more.

What Is Reputation Management?

Your business's reputation is incredibly important, and you have more control over it than you might realize. In today's digital world, it's easier for people to look into businesses than ever before.

Users can easily explore things like reviews or social media posts to gather insights into your brand. With that said, your business reputation depends on a lot more than just reviews.

People often use the terms "review management" and "reputation management" interchangeably. While there is some overlap between the two, they also cover some different areas. It's important to work on both if you want to get the best results.

Reputation management can be particularly important for local businesses. It can help them improve search visibility which will directly impact sales. Effective reputation management involves several elements including:

• Social media posts
• Brand coverage in media outlets
• Crisis response
• Seizing opportunities to boost reputation

All of this will help position your business more favorably in the eyes of your target audience.

Online Reputation Management

These days, shoppers are far more accustomed to finding what they need through the internet. PR Newswire states that as many as 76% of consumers will look at the online presence of a business before visiting a physical location. This makes online reputation management especially important for local businesses.

Online reputation management focuses specifically on the presence of your brand online. You can implement online review strategies that focus on areas such as:

• Using brand messaging to amplify reviews
• Dealing with PR issues that come from negative publicity
• Gaining more positive social media mentions

Every activity in your online reputation management strategy should be in line with how you want your brand to be perceived.

The Importance of Online Reputation Management

Many inexperienced business owners don't realize it, but their reputation is one of their most valuable assets. Some only worry about it when things get bad, but at this point, it may be too late.

Details about your business can easily be found online. When users are looking into your brand, they'll be able to examine things like your:

• Products
• Services
• Culture
• Ethics
• Personnel

If people come across information on any of these that they don't like, they'll probably move straight on to one of your competitors. You need to bear in mind that consumers can come across information from a range of sources, such as:

• Reviews
• Endorsements
• News articles
• Recommendations
• Comments
• Shares

With new apps, platforms, and publishers always springing up, it's important to stay on top of your online reputation at all times. What's being said and shared online will shape your brand and what people think of it very quickly.

Online reputation management will help you ensure that the information and opinions people find about your brand show it in a positive light. This will make it more likely that they'll want to invest in your products or services.

Why Reputation Matters to All Businesses

While business goals can vary significantly, all companies aim for growth. Many aspects of business can change depending on size and scale, but it remains true that you'll always want to maintain a good reputation.

One of the most important things to remember is that online reputation management is an ongoing process. You can work to improve your reputation, but if you stop, things could easily get worse.

This is especially true over an extended period. As your business evolves, your customers may decide they don't like certain changes. You need to stay on top of things to ensure your existing customers don't turn away from your brand.

Ratings and Reviews: Their Involvement in the Path to Purchase

Ratings and reviews are a huge factor in terms of the path to purchase. Customers may look at them during any stage of the buyer journey, including the following:

• Initial search
• Consideration phase
• Final purchasing decision

There are plenty of review platforms out there, but the power of reviews can go beyond this. You can repurpose and leverage reviews your users leave across various channels to boost your business reputation. For example, you could share positive reviews on your social media pages or showcase them in advertisements.

Trust Matters

One of the most important elements of this whole concept is trust. If you don't have trust, your business won't last very long.

Customers have plenty of options these days. With that, expectations are generally very high. You need to consistently prove to your customers that they can trust your business.

Advertisements can be a great way to promote your brand, but many users don't have much trust in them. It's common for people to use tools like ad blockers just to avoid them. Clear, organic content like reviews and ratings can be far more effective when it comes to building trust.

Proper online reputation management is vital here. You can use various channels such as:

• Social media
• PR
• Local search

Effective coordination between these channels will help you keep things consistent and cohesive making it easier for you to generate trust.

Gaining a Rounded View of Your Business

If you own or operate a business, you may think you have the clearest view of it, but this isn't always the case. If you want to gain a better understanding of it, you should try to look at your company from different angles.

Throughout online reputation management, you'll be able to observe customer perception of your brand. You can assess things like:

• What customers think of your business
• Problems or disappointments people have
• Your standing against your competitors

It's important to understand how your business looks in the eyes of your target audience. You can also gather valuable insights and data. This kind of information will help you make improvements moving forward.

Recruitment

Your employees are the backbone of your company. Not only are they integral to your business operations, but they can have a huge impact on your business reputation. This is particularly true for any customer-facing employees.

It's important to recruit carefully so you can drive the best business results. Job seekers can look into business reputations just as easily as customers.

Many younger job seekers put a lot of value on a business's reputation. About 92% of workers would consider changing their jobs to a different company with a better reputation according to McCann Synergy.

Local businesses need to find the best talent so they can offer the best customer service. Having a better online business reputation will make it much easier for you to build a team that can help you improve customer feedback and overall brand reputation.

What Reputation Management Involves

Reputation management, like many other processes, can look slightly different for every business. There are, however, some elements that are likely to be present in almost all online reputation management strategies. You're likely to want to include the following:

• Social media marketing
• Content marketing
• Public relations campaigns
• SEO
• Review management
• Crisis management
• Customer engagement

Consider these different practices and how each one can impact your own business reputation. This will help you prioritize resources effectively.

Building an Online Reputation Management Strategy

Online reputation management is no small task. You need to plan things out properly if you want to increase online ratings and reviews. There are several steps you can take to build an effective online reputation management strategy.

1. Research Your Current Online Reputation

Before you can start working on improving your online reputation, you need to know where your business currently stands. Figure out how people feel about your brand and how they rate your products/services.

It may seem like finding out this information will be difficult, but it's essential. Your entire online reputation management strategy will be built on this.

There are various tools you can use to help with this and other parts of your strategy. You can streamline things with Jooice as it allows you to bring all of your digital tools together into one place. It also allows you to automate routine tasks to help you save time and manpower.

2. Send an NPS Survey

Your Net Promotor Score (NPS) runs on a scale of -100 to 100. You can figure this out by asking your customers a series of questions and applying the scale to see how likely they are to recommend your company to others.

NPS gives you a better understanding of loyalty and sentiment. Having clearer insights here will help you know what you're working with when developing your online reputation management strategy. It will help you highlight problems that need addressing and allow you to see when you need to put more focus.

Various tools can help you get feedback from your customers. You can gather this through things like reviews and questionnaires. You can then apply the NPS scale to understand how they feel.

Another good approach is to add a pop-up to your website. There are plenty of simple plugins that will allow you to do this. Customers can then offer feedback whenever it's convenient for them.

3. Determine What Matters to Your Audience

You should remember that while you may be targeting specific groups or demographics, these will be made up of individuals. Everyone is unique, and something that can help improve your reputation with one person may not have the same effect with another.

Trust has many facets, and there are several ways that you may be able to gain trust from your audience, such as:

• Being authentic
• Being transparent
• Responding to feedback
• Providing good customer service
• Being consistent
• Being dependable
• Maintaining high product/service quality
• Promoting sustainability
• Having ethical values
• More

Looking into this will give you a better idea of what customers expect from you. You may also be able to determine what areas you have more flexibility in.

For example, your customers may be happy to accept longer delivery times if they know they're getting top-quality products. This will ultimately come down to your business and your audience.

One of the most important parts of this stage is figuring out which channels your audience uses. This could be:

• Social media platforms
• Apps
• Websites
• Forums
• More

You can then use these to build and manage your brand reputation effectively. The research you do in step one should be useful here.

4. Set Online Reputation Management Goals

If you want to achieve anything in business, you should have targets that you're aiming for. In terms of reviews and reputations, it's important to specify what your goals are.

These goals will dictate the decisions and actions you take throughout the process. They'll also help you figure out if your approach is effective and how you can optimize it.

Think about what you want your business to achieve. For example, if the results from your NPS survey weren't at the standard you were expecting, you might want to improve that. You can then start thinking about the precise steps you need to take to achieve this.

You might have a poor online reputation as a result of less-than-impressive customer experiences. If this is the case, you'll want to start with that.

Your goals might even include maintaining something you already have. If you get a lot of good reviews, for example, you might want to establish a system that will help keep things that way.

You may find that you need to adjust your goals or add new ones after you begin your reputation management process. Be open to doing this, as it can help you yield better results in the long run. Continuously monitor your progress towards your goals so that you can stay on track and increase your chances of achieving them.

5. Decide on Your Tactics

The final piece of the puzzle is deciding on the tactics you're going to use. Look over your goals, and decide what approaches will be most suitable for reaching them. Again, if you add new goals or adjust your current ones, you may need to make some changes here.

Overview of Reputation Management Tactics

When building your strategy, there are several approaches you can take. Finding the right tactics will help you get the best results.

Managing and Improving Online Reviews

Requesting reviews from your customers is incredibly important. Many users are happy to leave reviews but may forget without a small reminder. Highlight the fact that their feedback will help you improve your products or services in the future.

Online reviews from your customers can offer a range of benefits such as:

• Gaining valuable insights from customers
• Improving your local SEO
• Showing new customers that people are happy with your business
• Generating trust throughout your audience

It's important to note that having a lot of negative reviews can be very bad for your business. This is why it's so important to listen to what your customers are saying and work to improve their opinion of your brand.

While simply asking for reviews can be helpful, you can also encourage reviews in a few ways. Many businesses give something back to customers who leave reviews such as special discount vouchers or entries into a competition. These tactics will help you get more reviews which you can then use to further improve your reputation.

Google My Business Monitoring

A lot of users will get information directly from your Google My Business profile. This could be something simple like your business address or contact number. Make sure this information is always up to date to avoid confusion or other issues.

You should also monitor the images on here. Quality photos will improve people's first impressions when they come across your business. You also want to make sure people aren't uploading images of other businesses.

You may allow customers to leave reviews directly on your site, but you'll likely end up with a lot of reviews on your Google My Business profile. Make sure you monitor these to gather insights into the general reputation of your business. A lot of users will simply look at your rating on Google, so working to keep this as high as possible is key.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media has become one of the most important business tools in the modern world. How you use it can have a huge impact on the success of your business.

You should pay attention to what people are saying about your business on social media. Research from Backlinko states that more than 4.95 billion people were using social media worldwide by October 2023. There's a good chance that most of your audience is present on various platforms.

It's a good idea to do some market research to find out what platforms your audience is most active on. You can then prioritize your resources to improve efficiency.

You can also benefit from creating official business accounts. You can use these to promote your business in various ways. Social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to do this, so taking advantage of it can be very beneficial.

You can also interact with your audience through social media channels. This will help you build relationships that will in turn generate more trust.

Brand Mention Monitoring

People will mention your brand in more than just reviews. There could be things like:

• Local newspapers
• Blogs
• Trade press
• Industry forums

By staying up to date with what people are saying about your brand, you can see the different positive and negative opinions that people have. You can then react to them accordingly to help maintain a good brand reputation.

You can set alerts for any mention of your business name. If your own name is closely related to your brand, you can do the same here. You might even want to do this if you have any brands or products that are specific to your company.

Even if you have a good brand reputation, there will likely be some negative comments and reviews out there. Actively monitoring these will help you find them so that you can deal with them quickly and efficiently.

Crisis Management

No matter how well you plan and prepare, things won't always go to plan. Situations may arise that can be very bad for your business. However, handling things correctly can help you maintain your brand reputation.

If you encounter a crisis, you need to take the right approach. Look at the issue so you can determine both the cause and the solution. Make sure you take the most appropriate course of action to reduce the impact on your brand reputation.

It's vital that you act quickly. If something bad happens and you don't respond immediately, people will think your business isn't bothered.

You want to show your audience that you care when something goes wrong. Additionally, you should let people know that you're committed to handling problems when they come up.

No business is perfect, but people will have a much better view of a company that owns up to its mistakes and works to correct them. Doing this can be hugely helpful when it comes to improving your brand reputation.

Improving Your Online Business Reputation With Jooice

Managing and improving online reviews is incredibly important if you want to achieve business success. You should develop a solid strategy that focuses on fostering a better opinion of your company in the eyes of your audience based on your specific business goals.

Through Jooice, you can use advanced AI to manage and respond to reviews across a range of platforms. This is one of the easiest ways to improve your overall online business reputation as you can manage everything through a single user-friendly dashboard. Start your free trial today.