Online Reviews: How they Make or Break your Business.
As a business owner, you don’t need to be told that online reviews matter to your business. You already know that. I’m here to share with you how MUCH they actually matter, and impact your business in ways you may not realize. Not just the bad ones, but the good ones too…
If you’ve been doing business a long time, you’ve pulled your hair out over an unhappy customer or two – hey, it happens. Usually there’s a dispute of some sort, you settle it on-site, and you move on to the next problem – because it’s fixed. But now, that same customer can rush home in anger, get on to DOZENS of online review sites and slam your business. It’s not just Google, by the way, it’s Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angieslist, Facebook, the BBB, Manta, Etc, etc. Unfortunately, that complaint WILL be shared to MANY potential customers – and they’ll only hear one side of the story, not yours.
Now, pair this up with the study showing that 72% of consumers say they highly trust online reviews, even from other people that they have never met in their entire life – you get an ugly picture.
Online Reviews are part of our world now. Studies show that nearly 70% of consumers are viewing or sharing buying experiences online, and also that a single bad review will turn away 1/10 potential customers. It doesn’t take much napkin math to see how even a low count of bad reviews can cost you significant money.
Also, 57% of consumers recently surveyed say they would NOT patronize a business with review average of LESS than 4.0 Stars.
It’s sad to type this, but we also are seeing an increasing pattern of competitors leaving Fake reviews to try and damage a competing business. Yes, it happens.
Here’s some more bad news, Google has recently changed some of the ways their policies interpret reviews with their GMB (Google My Business) listings. Google is now starting to pull review scores from multiple outlets such as Facebook, HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, and many others, and display an aggregate ‘review score’ for those sites on your business page. In other words, if you have some bad reviews hanging out there across the internet, it’s going to further damage how customers percieve you on Google.
Okay, so you understand that bad are reviews are bad, and there’s lots of places out there for them to be left. Fear not, this problem can be solved.
First, let’s talk about Good Reviews.
Good Reviews are often your biggest and best weapon against Bad Reviews. They drown out the negative with the positive. They also help improve your review ratings on your GMB page. Interacting with positive reviews helps improve your brand equity amongst customers. Good Reviews actually CREATES customers who otherwise wouldn’t have bought your product. It pays big to get as many as possible – but how? Customers will often go out of their way to post a bad review, but rarely a good one.
Online Reviews are the modern day ‘Business Credit Score’. You need to manage the bad ones, maximize the good ones, know where to find them, respond quickly, and do it in real time.
That can be difficult. We can help.
The Tomlinson Advertising Agency offers a comprehensive solution to this problem faced by many business owners. Our Reputation Management service and easy-to-use software tool will do the following for your business:
- Monitor and Track All Reviews across All platforms. This enables a quick response for both Good and Bad, which is by far best practice.
- Request Reviews from your daily customers with every tool at our disposal, including SMS Text, E-mail, Scan Codes and POS Materials. This is the crucial push it takes to get them to actually leave good reviews.
- Automatically display your BEST reviews on your website and social media pages. Every business ought to put their positive customer experiences to where other potential customers can see them. We’ll make that seamless and easy.
- Provide experienced support and consulting on addressing Bad Reviews, as well as removing Fake or Malicious reviews. This is the part where we work to scrape bad reviews from the internet, with a couple of different strategies.
- Partner up with a dedicated advertising agency that is committed to your success and improving your brand. Our clients enjoy a partnership of a team with many layers of experience across several decades in the advertising field. We want to help.
We help businesses manage their online reputation. It’s effective and it’s affordable. It’s one of many tools we offer to help grow our client’s business.
If you have any questions at all, or would be interested in a complimentary demo of how it works, call us – I’d love to chat.
-Matt Tomlinson, Founder / CEO – The Tomlinson Advertising Agency
(864-421-4471)
Matt@TomlinsonAdAgency.com
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