Today’s consumer is extremely aware and astute and does not leave any opportunity to express their experience with any brand or product, whether good or bad, with people online or via word-of-mouth. Online reviews play a major role in how consumers perceive and judge brands in today’s world. Before deciding to go to your store, your potential customers read online reviews about it on websites such as Yelp, Google, Facebook, MakeMyTrip, TripAdvisor, and many others.
Why Should Your Business Care about Online Reviews?
If you consider online reviews as something that are “nice to have” or “just there” without having any considerable influence on your business, you could not be more wrong. Your customers are heavily reliant on these reviews to make purchase decisions. These reviews also affect your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and can have a significant effect on how your business is viewed by customers. Online reviews can also be an important factor that will affect the brand’s reputation.
However, the good news is that the increasing dependency of consumers on online reviews provides businesses with plenty of opportunities to increase sales and appeal to prospective clients. Hence, every business should keep an eye on online reviews to manage their online reputation and simultaneously grow their sales.
How to Leverage Online Reviews?
While the control of online reviews of your business lies with your existing and potential customers, there are ways you may use these reviews to your advantage.
Increase Brand Exposure
Earlier, people used to complain about businesses via word-of-mouth. With the advent of the internet, online reviews have become the new word-of-mouth. Good reviews not only improve your brand’s reputation but also improve your visibility and help customers find you easily. It improves your SEO as well. This is because when a customer provides a review, it creates unique, fresh content which gives your business a bump in rankings.
Identify Keywords for Your Products and Services
Analyse how customers describe your products and services in their reviews. Then, incorporate these keywords into your product positioning, content creation, keyword tracking, and social hashtags. This way you can significantly improve your brand’s rank on different search platforms. It will also give you a better idea of how your product or service is perceived and searched for by your target audience.
Leverage Positive Reviews in Your PR and Influencer Outreach Campaigns
Local celebrities, notable public figures, and established professionals have a reputation to manage. Thus, they only want to associate themselves with well-liked brands. If your product or service has tons of positive reviews to back it up, you can confidently reach out to these journalists, influencers as well as PR professionals. They are more likely to endorse your product.
Improve Your Brand with Customer Feedback
Online customer reviews are a way to get feedback for free and increase sales. Monitor what customers are saying about your brand and identify product issues. Also, you should track patterns, check what your customers rave about, and keep a close eye on your competition. Train your sales team to look at negative reviews as objections and enhance their objection tackling techniques for future customers.
Improve Customer Experience
More and more customers are sharing their reviews online turning it into another channel for customer support. Stay on top of customer reviews and give timely responses to improve customer loyalty. Whenever a brand responds to a customer, it makes them feel appreciated and valued. This will help to establish a client-business relationship that strengthens your customer base. Never ignore online complaints. Instead, let your customers know that you are doing the best you can to provide a solution. At the same time, responding to positive reviews is equally important to build a rapport with your customers.
Increase Sales with Positive Reviews
Most people like to read reviews about a brand before buying. Moreover, they are willing to pay more if they come across good reviews. Leverage your five-star reviews and include them in your promotion emails to increase sales. You can put these reviews on your website and use them as a selling point.
Online Reputation Management
Online reviews are a reflection of the brand’s perception in terms of the product/service offerings as used and experienced by customers. These perceptions are important to the overall brand reputation. Given the importance of digital channels and the boost in online shopping, managing reviews effectively can really help in the online reputation management (ORM) of the brand.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, there are a number of ways online reviews can facilitate in the improvement of your sales, marketing, product development and customer experience. You should not let these opportunities slip away. Rather, you should focus on leveraging the power of online reviews. These reviews can prove to be an effective alternative to Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) initiatives and other marketing efforts. Simultaneously, they act as a reliable approach to establish your business as dependable and professional.
Tags: customer experience, Digital Marketing, Marketing strategy, Online Marketing, online reviews, reviews, Social Media Marketing