The Darkside of Reviews: How Online Reputation Management Can Save Your Business
Online Reputation Management. A sector that many do not understand, but need. Why? Well, if you are a business owner or professional, what people find online about you, can do several things that can influence your image on and offline. It is hard to know where to start or how online reputation management services even work, but how do we even know if an ORM is for us? Let’s take a look at a typical reason companies need to start thinking about investing in online reputation management services and the benefits that come along with it:
Is Your Business Barely Floating Because of Bad Reviews?
It is a typical day. You wake up, enjoy your morning ritual of breakfast and coffee before heading to the office for the day, where you will run your business and continue to grow. Once at the office, you have your secretary make a fresh cup of Joe for you, and then you start to filter through your daily reports and then out of nowhere. BAM! Like a heavy-handed smack in the face, you begin to choke on your morning coffee at the sight of your company’s profit margins.
Immediately, you start sifting through old reports to try to find the correlation as to why these numbers are dropping. You hold a meeting with your departments and keep combing over analytics until you discover, your online reputation is taking a massive pounding due to a few negative reviews left online by displeased customers.
In the past, online reviews did not carry much weight, but as the population evolves and more and more people are staying connected; more product research is being conducted, which means more reviews across hundreds of platforms. The digital era allows us to express ourselves to the world at moments notice instantly.
What Makes Online Reviews So Important?
Well, if you happen to be like most of us who seem to find ourselves always plugged in, whether it be to our laptops or other mobile devices, before freely opening our wallets, we need to know more!
More What?
We need to know what others who have tried your product think before we start the checkout process. What did people love about it? What did they hate? Those who were upset with the service, did the company actively respond to handle their plea?
These are all questions consumers ask before hitting that big beautiful buy button. Therefore, how do bad reviews hurt your company?
Online reviews are extremely important for a number of reasons, but just to name a few, negative online customer reviews hurt your business by projected a weak brand image, deterring potential consumers, and can even cause your company to go red resulting in lost revenue.
You’re Not Perfect and Your Customers Know That
As technology advances and consumers become more demanding in the types of services they receive, online reputation management is something that a business, whether small or corporate should consider. Now tech-savvy millennials are not going to expect a company to have perfect 5-star raving reviews. In fact, a pristine review board can seem suspicious, but hey, can we help it if we deliver what we preach! The problem really relies on how you and your brand deal with these reviews.
Online Reputation Management Services are PR Superheroes
Here is the biz. You have spent all day, running through search result page after page making sure you have responded to every bit of feedback you can, only to wake up the next morning to find that one review you missed, went viral and now your company is being bashed on all channels. Do you have time to sit down and neglect your business to respond to all of these reviews and outlandish claims personally? Can you pull one of your employees to the back and have them take care of it? If you’re trying to build an empire, would you honestly trust your company’s reputation in the hands of anyone less than an expert? Yeah, neither would we!
Your online reputation management is more than just a few responses and thanking customers for their enjoyable experience. The darkside of online reviews come when trying to deal with a customer who is hell-bent on leaving as many bad reviews as they can. This can happen for several reasons, whether their experience was truly not up to par or if there are ulterior motives driving the reviews (unfortunately, some people do want stuff for free regardless of how well your service is). Things can quickly get out of hand and with the internet constantly expanding, and new platforms emerge daily, allowing consumers to post their opinions, the ‘domino effect,’ comes to mind.
Level your online reputation management game up and let experienced online reputation management superheroes show you how to take control of your online reputation once and for all!
