Online reviews on Google and Facebook plays a crucial role in a purchase decision. So, it is essential to keep review management in your marketing strategy. Review management will enhance your online reputation, lift your search engine optimization, and encourage customers to trust your brand.
Review management is the process of monitoring, studying, responding and creating reviews among popular online platforms. The goal of online review management is to back up the company’s marketing strategy and refine the business performance.
Review management is absolutely critical for a business. Researchers have found 72% of customers won’t act before reading online reviews. Moreover, according to the Online Reviews Survey, 94% of customers avoid buying from a website after reading negative reviews.
So, it’s evident whether you have a small business or an enterprise, the online reviews directly impact the reputation and revenue of the company.
Effects of Negative Reviews
Negative reviews will automatically pull the consumers from your business. 90% of buyers use Google or Bing to search for products. So, it is necessary to have good reviews on these search engines.
Online reviews affect 67% of purchase decisions. Positive reviews are beneficial for businesses as they improve reputation, increase sales and enhance SEO. While negative reviews have many harmful effects on business and some of them are explained below.
Loss of Revenue
According to Womply, bad reviews on Google and Facebook drastically affect a business’s revenue. A company with a 1.1-star rating earns 33% less than a well-reviewed company.
Diminish the Reputation
Negative reviews diminish the brand reputation, your customers will not trust your brand hence making your reputation management strategies are useless. Most people don’t purchase goods from a business with a bad reputation, and 50% of potential customers question the product quality. If you are unable to fix the reviews, then it’s going to be quite challenging for you to regain trust.
So, make sure that reputation management and online review management must be done correctly.
Push Customers Away
Negative reviews are one of the strongest driving forces that will push the customers away. A couple of negative reviews are not a big issue if you have a large number of positive reviews. But if the negative reviews are numerous, then customer loss will be extreme.
Low Search Engine Ranking
Low search engine ranking is killing for business because search engines recommend the best website to users. So, Low ranking will shove you down the search engine ranking, and you will not be visible to potential customers.
How can you Tackle Negative Reviews?
- Respond to negative reviews. Most companies ignore the reviews, but it is critical to address both positive and negative reviews.
- Offer to fix the problem. Continue to talk to the customer directly through email or phone to resolve the issues.
- Invest in online reputation management. This ensures positive reviews. You can buy tools or hire a review management service provider like SEODigitalMarketers for the job. Another popular review management service provider is webpagefx review management.
- Encourage the customers to leave positive reviews. This step will help you outrun the negative reviews.
Popular Review Management Software
Review Management Software are tools that collect reviews, respond to negative reviews and improve the customer’s insight about the business.
Features of Review Management Software
- Request Review: The software requests the customers to post a review.
- Monitor Reviews: The software monitor and collects reviews about the business across different review sites. This feature enables the owner to address negative reviews.
- Campaign Management: This feature allows you to complete marketing actions to achieve goals. You can also manage campaigns like improve your SEO or business reputation.
- Response Management: You can track reviews and resolve negative reviews by immediately responding to negative feedback. Answering will help you gain the customer’s trust back and refine the shopping experience.
Birdeye
Birdeye is an established review management software; it creates authentic reviews and monitors reviews from over 200 websites. It also allows you to share reviews on social media and get foresight about customer feedbacks.
Birdeye is the best software for businesses looking to establish a solid online reputation by boosting ratings and establish trust with the help of positive customer feedback.
Local Clarity
Local Clarity is best for businesses with many locations, agencies and franchises. Because they rely on local search to drive traffic by providing customer reviews and reputation management tools.
Local Clarity is a cheap and functional software that is suitable for big businesses with multiple locations. It builds relationships through direct reviews, insights, trends and driving local web traffic.
Podium
Podium is an exceptional review management software trusted by more than 60000 businesses. It focuses to simplify the process of review management. The tool is based on text messaging, allowing the customer to leave the review in merely 30 seconds. Moreover, you can automate reviews invites, monitoring, trend tracking and reviews response.
It is perfect for locally oriented businesses with 1 to 10000 locations that rely on the local online listing for business growth.
Benefits of Proper Review Management
A critical part of business success is review management. It is how a brand is maintaining its good name.
Having proper review management has a massive impact on business. There are many benefits if you are managing the reviews properly.
- Boost your Reputation: Business reputation is a key factor that determines the success or failure of a business. Consumers will not trust your brand if your reputation is not good. So, the positive reviews will increase your reputation and revenue.
- Boost SEO: Proper review management enhance your search engine ranking. Search engines also use reviews to rank the websites. So, a website with favourable reviews will have a better chance to reach the first page.
- Help gain Customer Trust: Customer trust is the most important part of the business. Everyone knows that a customer who trusts your company will buy your products. So, it is essential to have positive reviews, which is possible through proper review management.
- Higher Revenue: According to a study by Harvard Business School, a 1-star rating improvement will increase the revenue by 5%-9%. Companies with better reviews attract more customers.