By Abi Buller
When 97% Of Business Owners Say Online Reputation Management Is Important, who could argue that a positive online reputation is paramount to the success of your business? From gaining initial momentum to developing a strategic approach in responding to consumer queries and complaints, online reputation management is certainly not a topic to be overlooked. This common business practice is relevant across all industries and sectors, requiring attention to your website as well as your social media presence and appearance in search results. While good consistent content will help establish your brand, customer engagement in online reviews will help you maintain your good reputation and build customer confidence. Consider the following points when building or refining your online identity:
Gain Respect
Gaining respect from consumers is achieved through honest, transparent communications. Do you have engaging and up-to-date content? Is your site professional and informative? Essentially, have you positioned yourself as a trusted authority? These will definitely help to gain respect from your customer base.
Authority and accountability — both from the company itself, as well as the people involved — are key components to earning respect. Global executives even estimate that 44% of a company’s market value is attributable to CEO reputation. Timely and relevant content from the members of your executive and development teams demonstrates a company that is fully invested and dedicated to the development of the company and its reputation. Providing content that educates your new and existing clients, answering questions and relieving pre-purchase anxiety, is the result of good content. Whether it’s an editorial about the state of technology or a product description featuring key benefits, everyone wants answers. If the people behind the products and services are seen as trusted authorities, it is likely that respect will follow.
A good reputation leads to referrals. Referrals are nothing more than one person’s opinion about another’s good reputation. Referrals will ultimately lead to higher rankings in search results. This is critically important because, as a Google Study on organic traffic found, 93% of searchers never go beyond the first page of search results. What’s the easiest way to develop a catalogue of referrals? The customer review. According to a report by BrightLocal, 84% of people will consult online reviews before investing in a product or service.
Maintain a Positive Reputation
It’s not enough just to employ a few digital whizz kids to set up your web pages and up your social media rankings. Being responsive, efficient, and open to growth in your digital presence is often the answer to achieving online kudos. Maintenance of a positive reputation requires you to be active and mindful in your approach to consumer interactions. You may have achieved a strong reputation as displayed in news stories, online forms, and on social media. But how many of these platforms can be credited as reliable sources?
Social media, in particular, has faced recent controversy with the tampering of algorithms and the unsettling ease at which networking giants like Facebook and Instagram can view and manipulate newsfeeds. Nevertheless, these platforms still remain as popular platforms among the mass public. Perhaps it is worth considering an alternative medium through which to raise awareness and discussion about your brand to augment your digital presence? By implementing a technology like blockchain into your online review strategy, your authenticity will be boosted because the blockchain-based review is permanent and unchangeable. If your customers know that they are seeing the whole picture — good and bad — your reputation is likely to be upped and maintained. Welcoming a blockchain-based review platform, such as Revain, into your company will allow you to build a collection of transparent user reviews to aid the longevity of your robust reputation.
Handle Client Disputes
Oftentimes, if a customer has the opportunity to start a dispute, they will absolutely exert their right to do so. Indeed, the majority of self-motivated customer reviews are driven by some form of negative experience with a company. Having the right method of resolving such issues should, therefore, be considered as an incredibly significant principal in your brand identity.
The tone, efficiency, and intent that you employ to a client dispute possess the twofold outcome of satisfying the issue to a professional and suitable resolve, as well as acting as a digital trace for future clients to base their opinions on you as a company. Depending on the scale of the dispute, it is often good practice to establish a happy medium between your technological prowess and good old-fashioned people skills. Applying the correct jargon within your responses is helpful and beneficial in assisting with a particular query. However, too much technical jargon can be detrimental to your reputation as it can be interpreted as alienating and unhelpful.
When it comes to responding to online reviews, the etiquette to employ is that of consistency, as well as ensuring your brand values are effectively represented. This is often easier said than done. A blockchain-based service can act as a backbone for your company when it comes to the just governance of client and company disagreements.
Using Criticism to Improve your Product/Service
Criticism and negative responses needn’t always be a cause for company crisis. When handled in the correct manner, these less-than-perfect responses to your product or service can actually spark new inspiration. As well as contributing to the general awareness of your company, and profiling you as the type to proactively engage with customers, negativity can also be the ignition you need to work towards a new or improved brand experience. Reacting quickly and politely, and then analysing the forthcoming chain of events, can also lead to invaluable insights into the best mode of address when it comes to customer interactions.
Always keeping your trusty mission statement handy, being open to criticism can actually leapfrog you into being a highly respectable company. Allowing negative reviews to remain visible in online spaces also contributes to the viability and transparency of your brand. After all,
95% of consumers suspect censorship or fake reviews when they see nothing but perfect ratings. The use of a blockchain review platform could mitigate this sense of distrust.
Conclusion: How Revain’s Online Review Platform Can Help
Knowing who and what to trust in the digital sphere is an increasingly complex state of affairs. Having successfully reviewed your existing digital presence, implemented a resourceful way of dealing with consumer responses, and considered looking to criticism to improve your services, the next step is to focus your energy on an efficient, trustworthy review platform.
Functioning with a decentralised system, Revain is an online mecca for well-reasoned and genuine reviews. Using custom-developed AI, the review system filters customer reviews for quality — either positive or negative — and makes all reviews available to the consumer so they can make an educated decision about the product/service. Revain’s AI-filtration is continually fed big data to train it to isolate unconstructive, highly emotional reviews (indicative of spam and overly sensitive, unreasonable human reaction), and is trained to identify high-quality, informative, and helpful content known to have been added by an authentic contributor. Serving the needs of both customer and company, the AI filter is designed to protect the company from unwarranted bad reviews, and the blockchain guarantees that the customer can see the entire review history, unaltered. Why not improve your own receptors for reputable sources by integrating Revain’s online review platform into your digital strategy?
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