More and more people are buying online and choosing businesses using online services–they are faced with a huge number of offers from which they must choose. Relatively recently, the main criterion for making a decision was the personal experience of acquaintances, i.e. ‘word of mouth’. However, opinions on the Internet are now becoming crucial, as statistics prove: 85% of users trust reviews in the online space and 94% regularly look for information about local businesses online.
This is no coincidence. Consider this: when dealing with a new and unfamiliar product or service, individuals often want to know what others think about it. According to Reputation House, customer reviews can become a detriment even to a profitable business. As many as 60% of buyers will refuse to work with a company if they encounter negativity about it online!
Reputation House: Reviews Need Constant Monitoring
Since 2010, the agency has been actively working in the field of reputation management, so it knows firsthand how important it is to monitor customer opinions on the internet. During this time, they have helped more than 1,000 clients build and restore their reputations by solving their problems with market positioning and attracting and retaining customers.
The high competence of employees, the use of modern PR technologies, artificial intelligence, and SERM in Reputation House allow the agency to successfully solve even the most complex tasks. It works with various business sectors and media personalities, and its clients include such well-known companies as Mercedes-Benz, KIA, and GoStudy.
Comprehensive work with reputation helps improve market positioning, restore a positive image and attract new customers. Without the control of customer reviews, Reputation House
emphasizes that it is simply impossible to achieve the desired results, and here’s why:
- For 49% of consumers, a minimum 4-star rating is needed before they will use a company’s services.
- For 85%, online reviews are as important as personal recommendations from friends.
- For 60%, negative opinions on the internet became the reason for refusing to purchase goods or services.
Consumers tend to trust or distrust a business after reading at least 7 useful and relevant reviews. Reputation House’s research highlights a significant loss in potential client conversion due to 1 or 2-star reviews, reaching up to 86%!
Reputation House: Rules for Dealing with Negativity
It should be noted right away that not all negative opinions cause irreparable damage to a company’s image. Negativity can always be found, no matter what. The larger the brand, the longer it has been on the market, the easier it is to find false information or criticism about it. According to the experience of Reputation House, customer reviews and the attention given to them is precisely what helps companies remain successful, because real criticism can be constructive and even beneficial.
For example, let’s say customers are complaining about the same problem in a car. The brand would do the right thing if it recalled the batch or offered to fix the problem for free through their branded service. Their reputation will be preserved because the company solved the problem and did not ignore it.
If a brand responds to negativity about itself, offers solutions to conflict situations, and finds ways to communicate with dissatisfied consumers, then, according to Reputation House, reviews turn out to be an excellent opportunity for growth and development. Do drive this point home, increasing your Yelp rating by just one star increases profits by as much as 9%.
It is very important to analyze the reasons for the negativity that your business gets online. For example, it could be unfair competition or simply a customer in a bad mood who thus expresses their dissatisfaction with everything.
In any case, respond to a negative opinion as quickly as possible, because people may perceive the company’s silence as confirmation of the reliability of the published information. However, according to the experience of Reputation House, customer reviews being manually tracked is quite difficult. The agency has developed two mobile apps (for both individuals and businesses) that allow them to independently track all mentions of a brand or person.
But tracking alone is not enough to neutralize the opinions of online shoppers about a company. This requires an integrated approach: SERM from Reputation House. This stands for “Search Engine Reputation Management” in search engines, and it is aimed at displacing unwanted information from the top 10 resources, or results on the front page.
What can SERM Do for Your Brand?
New content is constantly appearing on social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and social networks. SERM from Reputation House allows you not only to track it, but also to control it. Agency specialists add new articles, reviews, testimonials, biographies, PR materials, thereby pushing away unwanted resources or results that have outdated, unreliable, or negative content.
However, posting content alone is not enough: you need to work to maintain top positions in the search, which is precisely what Reputation House and SERM do. After all, if the top position features negative content, then virtually no amount of positivity can neutralize it.
An integrated approach helps to ensure maximum results in working with the reputation of a brand or person. The agency begins by analyzing the information background in the online space and studying search queries in order to get a complete picture of what is happening. After developing an individual strategy for managing content and customer reviews, Reputation House begins to implement it. All possible mechanisms are used, including the removal of inaccurate content in pre-trial and sometimes judicial proceedings. At the end of the cycle, the effectiveness of the chosen strategy is studied, and if necessary, adjustments are made to it.
The agency knows absolutely everything about how to manage an image on the Internet, so it takes on the most complex cases. With Reputation House, customer reviews will be under complete control, which will help a brand or person win competition in the market.
