A Guide to Managing Your Digital Reputation
In the words of one of the great philosophers of our time, “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
By virtue of existing in the online space, you’re going to experience some hate from time to time. But luckily, there are things you can do to manage your digital reputation and try to get ahead of potentially damaging reviews before they turn into a headache for your business.
Cold, hard-ish facts about your rep
While statistics are often unreliable (and 73% are made up on the spot), some reports show that over 90% of consumers report checking reviews before making a purchase. Not sure about you, but I am incredibly quick to filter through reviews before I buy something. It’s incredibly rare that I’ll buy something without scanning reviews, and that’s probably because it came highly recommended from a trusted friend.
No matter your personal habits, it’s highly likely that your potential customers are checking you out online and rummaging through reviews before they ever come into your store, buy something from your website, or call you.
A history of negative reviews can not only influence the perception of your business before someone interacts with you, but it may also impact your SEO and other digital marketing efforts. So, let’s get ahead of the game and start by checking into all the potential places where someone can see your digital reputation online.
Understand all of the platforms where customers might be talking about you
The internet is a vast (often terrifying) hole, but there are a few critical sites you’ll want to keep an eye on to see how people are talking about you.
Google reviews: If you have a Google Business Profile (GBP), customers may be leaving you reviews there. If you’re not eligible for a GBP since you’re an online business, don’t worry about this.
Yelp and Trustpilot: These review platforms are more general and capture a wide range of reviews. Since these platforms tend to rank well in search, it’s worth your time to monitor them and respond accordingly.
Industry-specific review sites and apps: In addition to the more general platforms like Yelp, there are also industry-specific sites where reviews are captured, like Houzz for a contractor or Healthgrades for a physician.
Reddit and other forums: The masses take to Reddit to express frustration about a particular service or to promote the companies they love. To search the whole site, type this into your Google search bar site:reddit.com “Your company name”.
Facebook: People can leave reviews on a company's Facebook page, but not if you’re using your personal page to promote your business.
Social media: Outside of just Facebook, customers are now comfortable leaving comments about their experience on random posts, so while it’s not an outright review, you will want to be cognizant of what’s happening across your social media pages to look for instances where a complaint falls into a broader comment section.
Traditional/mainstream media coverage: It’s likely you’ll know if your business is going to be featured in a story on mainstream media unless heaven forbid, you end up on the wrong end of one of those local “private eye” investigational stories. Don’t do anything that would make you a good subject for one of those crazy segments.
Now that you know where to look, it’s time to talk about how to effectively manage potential negative reviews.
Have a plan for how you’ll respond to negative reviews
Make it someone’s responsibility
Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s an intern, but for the love, don’t let it be an automated message from an AI tool. Your customers might get some serious “ick” vibes if you send out a canned response to reviews, especially if those reviews aren’t glowing.
Respond
Not responding to a negative review looks like you might be ignoring the issue. We’ll tell you how to respond to the review offline below, but it’s incredibly important that you at least put a response so that the original poster (and other potential customers) know that you’re the type of business that doesn’t shy away from criticism.
Don’t make a mad customer jump through hoops
The last thing you want to do is take an already upset customer and make them jump through hoops to send an email to your support team or call a phone number. When dealing with mad customers, it’s up to you to go out of your way to make it right (if the complaint is valid and worthy of addressing, of course.)
Address the concern professionally and privately
As the business owner, you likely have ways to figure out who the customer is based on their review. We suggest trying to reach out to them directly via phone or email. Instead of going back and forth in a public forum (where someone will inevitably screenshot the interaction and post it on other social media platforms), take it offline if you can. Calling someone directly is going to have a much bigger impact in diffusing the situation than stirring them up with needless online banter.
Offer perks if needed
Have you ever had a bad experience that was made better by someone comping a dinner item or discounting your bill because of a long wait? Me too. Think creatively about what you can do to turn a 1-star experience into a 5 out of 5.
Is there something you can offer that costs you very little (a free dessert at a restaurant, a low-price item at your retail store, a free website audit from your digital marketing firm) but will be meaningful to your customer?
Play offense
If you know someone has had a bad experience with your product or service, follow up directly and promptly before they can leave a bad review. You’ll have a much better chance of turning that bad experience into a good one thanks to proactive behavior (and maybe a discount or freebie to use your product or service again and give you the opportunity to fix what went wrong).
Now that you’ve managed the not-so-great stuff, it’s time to focus on cranking up the dial on 5-star reviews.
Ask for reviews from customers who are happy with their experience
Reviews come from happy people and mad people. So it’s prudent that you do what you can to over-index on the happy ones.
Look at your entire user journey, from when people first find you online to joining your email list after they’ve made a purchase. Ask for reviews multiple times throughout that journey when it’s appropriate. For example, if you meet with a customer and they give great feedback about your product, look at including a link to your preferred review site when you send an invoice.
Be sure to ask for the review clearly and make it easy for people to do it. Someone is far more likely to click a review link in the personalized email you sent than to find your business on Google and leave a review on their own.
LISTEN AND LEARN
Reviews are a literal treasure trove of information for your business, but it’s up to you (or your team) to distill what’s actually important vs. what’s noise. Look for trends.
Are over 10% of customers talking about shipping time or mentioning that items shifted a lot and were a bit damaged when they got them? Take that and go look at your end-to-end fulfillment process.
Do over 20% of 5-star reviews mention a particular employee? Go talk to them, congratulate them, ask what they’re doing, and see if they’d be willing to share it with the rest of your team.
You’re bound to have haters and people who are just looking to be angry. Unfortunately, you might land in the crosshairs of those haters from time to time, and there’s actually nothing you can do to make it better. But 98% of the time, there is. Listen and learn and leverage the data in your reviews to make your business better.
Want support with creative solutions for managing your digital reputation? Book a consultation with the Big Bad Marketing team.
