Review management is the key to building and maintaining your online reputation. Over time, unmanaged online reviews and other feedback can start to hurt your brand image. You can lose customer attention and accidentally lose out to negativity.
While this may sound scary, the fact of the matter is that online reviews can skew towards negativity. Negativity bias can lead more customers to leave negative reviews, while happy customers just enjoy your products and move on.
The good news is that these days it’s far easier to encourage happy customers to leave good reviews. It’s also easier to build a review management system that fosters positive online spaces for your brand.
Main Takeaways From This Article:
- Effective review management significantly boosts your business reputation and customer trust, driving growth and profitability.
- Review management involves generating, monitoring, responding, analyzing, and marketing.
- Managing online reviews offers numerous advantages, such as enhanced customer engagement, better SEO performance, and valuable customer insights.
- Adhering to best practices like encouraging feedback at the right time and educating your team is vital for a successful review management strategy.
What Is Review Management?
Review management is the systematic process of monitoring, analyzing, and responding to online customer reviews. To manage your online review profile, you need to:
- Generate new reviews.
- Respond to existing reviews.
- Help online reviewers solve any problems.
- Use feedback to make improvements to your business.
- Spot and remove fake reviews.
If you want an optimal online reputation, you need to ensure your online reviews paint a positive picture. So, you need an online review management strategy to ensure the positive voices are maximized while negative reviews are made into opportunities for improvement.
Why Does Review Management Matter?
Review management forms a crucial part of your reputation management strategy. But review management focuses on the specific processes of gathering and handling customer feedback. The reason review management is crucial is because it forms how most online shoppers perceive your brand.
Reviews are an important part of any business’s online presence. If your business doesn’t proactively manage its only reviews, several bad things can happen. Your competitors can start to take control over your company’s narrative. The most negative reviews can be wrongly overrepresented online.
For small businesses, online reviews are even more crucial. You need to build credibility with people who have not heard of your company or who have had no contact with your brand. Online reviews can help you build that trust in a few ways:
- Build Trust and Credibility: Positive reviews demonstrate the quality of your products and the trust of your customers..
- Improve Customer Loyalty: Responding to reviews shows that you value customer feedback.
- Enhance Local SEO: Google prioritizes businesses with frequent, high-quality reviews, boosting your visibility in local search results.
- Drive Sales: Positive reviews are your social proof and make customers more likely to choose your business.
- Competitive Advantage: A well-managed review profile can distinguish you from competitors and attract more customers.
The Review Management Process
You need an effective review management strategy to build a robust online presence. The best review management process checks off four key steps:
- Review Generation: The first step is to gather more positive reviews from happy customers. Reviewshake enables you to automate review requests through multiple channels, such as email, SMS, and QR codes. This ensures a steady flow of new, authentic reviews.
- Review Analytics: Now that you have positive reviews, you need to monitor how online sentiments about your business change. Reviewshake’s dashboard provides a centralized location to monitor all your online reviews across various platforms. You can track your brand reputation changes on each platform in real-time.
- Communicate: Engage with your customers by responding to their reviews and helping them with any questions they have. Reviewshake enables you to reply to customer feedback directly from one inbox. We ensure timely and personalized responses that demonstrate your commitment to customer care.
- Market Your Reviews: Now, share your great reviews with potential customers! Reviewshake streamlines sharing over social media and offers a review widget. You can quickly and conveniently showcase your best reviews on your website and promotional materials.
Benefits of Online Review Management
Review management helps share the best of your business with potential customers and online search engines. It’s one of the easiest investments you can make for the greatest outcomes. If you invest in review management, you can receive several amazing benefits:
1. Enhanced Customer Trust
First of all, a good review profile builds customer trust. Potential customers naturally have an emotional response to detailed positive reviews. This often leads them to eventually make a purchase, but it always boosts business credibility and reliability.
2. Improved Customer Engagement
Effective review management encourages customer engagement. Responding to positive and negative reviews shows customers that their feedback is important. Responses add humanity to your brand image and give your customer base a voice.
3. Higher Conversion Rates
Positive reviews act as social proof, making potential customers more likely to convert. Positive reviews increase revenues through higher conversion rates.
4. Better SEO Performance
Search engines prioritize fresh, unique, user-generated content. Self-generated reviews are among the strongest content for SEO. Improved search engine rankings mean more visibility and potentially higher traffic to your website.
5. Valuable Customer Insights
Use review management processes to gain valuable insights into customer preferences. With features like review analytics, you can find trends in online reviews. Use this to find out what customers prefer and which areas need improvement. In this way, review management is your path to enhanced products and services.
6. Increased Brand Loyalty
People notice when businesses provide thoughtful responses to their reviews. If you make every customer who leaves a review understand that you care about their experiences, they will notice. Review management strategy also benefits your overall brand loyalty.
7. Crisis Management
Review management strategies include contingency plans for the next PR crisis. Review management SOPs prepares your staff with the skills to mitigate the effects of negative feedback quickly. Many of the review management tactics you employ will support your crisis management plans as well.
8. Competitive Advantage
When you actively manage your online reviews, you can gain a competitive advantage. Thoughtful, personalized, and on-brand review management practices set your business apart. When you maintain such high standards, you have an advantage over businesses that do not.
Best Practices for an Effective Online Review Management Strategy
So, let’s put together your online review management strategy. Each step will come with communication styles that help you maintain your brand. However, one way or another you will need to implement each of the following.
1. Time Your Customer Feedback Encouragement
Remember how we mentioned that you need to actively encourage happy customers to leave reviews?
In addition to knowing how to ask for a review, timing is the next important factor. Remember to automate this process so that customers are encouraged to leave reviews:
- After receiving the benefits of a product or service
- When making a new purchase
- After exceptional customer service experiences
Review requests can easily be automated, collected, aggregated, and marketed on platforms like Reviewshake. The first step is normally simple requests via email or text. Ideally, offering personalized and even in-person service will significantly increase your volume of business reviews. Automation simply helps you ensure you don’t miss opportunities.
Whether positive or negative, timely responses to reviews demonstrate that you value customer feedback. So, acknowledge positive reviews with gratitude and address negative reviews with empathy and solutions.
2. Designate Responsible Employees for Review Monitoring
Regularly check review platforms to ensure you stay informed about what customers say. Use tools like Reviewshake to automate monitoring and get notified of new reviews.
Review monitoring must be built into you review management plan for:
- Tracking common customer praises and complaints about specific product/service features.
- Following changes in sentiment due to issues like shipping or customer service.
- Preemptively preparing for PR issues.
Remember to designate responsible parties for review monitoring as well as review responses. When you’ve started gathering a larger amount of data, review monitoring becomes its own goldmine of business insights.
One example of review monitoring is using a review management tool and noticing a new keyword popping up. In that case, you may be noticing a trend with a new product. It could be a problem such as a common defect, or a benefit such as a new selling point your customers are pointing out! With a quick check, an employee can find many opportunities to:
- Bring up and solve commonly reported issues with products.
- Identify the most widely appreciated features.
- Find out what features cause the most emotional praises or criticisms.
3. Market New Positive Reviews
One mistake we’ve seen some businesses make is to not update which reviews they market. Remember, the first step is taking the time and effort to collect more positive reviews! What is the point of that effort if you can’t market them!
Review widgets make it possible to easily change which reviews you showcase on your website. So, take the time to check which reviews you are using for marketing. Every so often, it makes sense to switch the reviews you showcase if:
- A better, more detailed, more positive review comes up.
- Old reviews become outdated due to new products or features.
- You need to change your review management strategy due to branding or other changes.
Review marketing is one of the most powerful features we offer at Reviewshake. But to make the most of it, you need to pay attention for when it’s time to change which ones you market. Customers will only feel warmer toward your brand if your showcased reviews:
- Are relevant to the issues they care about.
- Speak about relevant up to date products.
- Offer enough detail to be understandable and enticing.
4. Training Your Team
Implementing a new review management plan isn’t the largest investment. However, incorporating review management into your teams’ SOPs requires:
- Some new responsibilities will be designated.
- Certain employees learn key new skills.
- Other employees incorporate small but important changes into their processes.
In short, members of your team will need some training. And why not? Investing in marketing team training offers many benefits.
Normally, learning how to manually perform the review managing tasks we’ve covered would be time consuming. Fortunately with review management tools like Reviewshake, it’s much simpler. As a simple web-based software solution, the Reviewshake application centralizes and simplifies review management processes.
In any case, a highly recommendable best practice is a series of short instructional sessions that cover:
- The basic theories behind review management.
- The steps that must be completed to implement a continuous review management process.
- Using review management tools like Reviewshake for maximum efficiency.
- New tasks designated into team members’ workflows to implement the new review management strategy.
5. Address Fake and Inappropriate Reviews
Unfortunately, there have been examples of companies using bad reviews to undermine their competitors. It’s also not just competitors who may leave bad reviews. Some reviews are entirely fake, spreading not just low star ratings but also harmful misinformation.
You are able to remove bad reviews from Google in some cases. For example, using a false identity, offensive content, harassment, and conflicts of interest are not allowed. You have options for fighting back against these particular violations on Google.
In addition to Google, you may have options for responding to and possibly removing similar content on other platforms. When you see a review that is fake, breaking the law, or in some other way questionable on another platform:
- Check for the platform’s content rules to see if there is grounds to have it removed.
- Contact customer service on the platform to get clarification if necessary.
- Go through the process that that platform lays out to remove unethical reviews.
Review Management Tools for Your Marketing Arsenal
Your review management arsenal is crucial for your business’s success. But what does it include, and what do your teams need to be able to work with?
Fortunately, most online marketing teams are familiar with some of the platforms, practices and ideas needed for successful review management. To kickstart your online review management strategy, consider using these tools for maximum efficiency.
1. Reviewshake
Reviewshake is a comprehensive tool designed to streamline your review management process. Reviewshake takes the tasks of review generation, management, marketing, and analysis into one robust platform. It takes all the hassle out of maintaining your online reputation.
Our all-in-one solution is tailored to meet the needs of small businesses and larger enterprises. Reviewshake was designed to enable you to focus on what truly matters—growing your business.
By using Reviewshake, you equip your business with an effective review management system to boost your brand’s reputation, foster customer trust, and drive growth.
2. Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is an essential tool for managing reviews on Google. Google reviews are crucial for local SEO and visibility. It can benefit your business through:
- Review Collection: Encourage customers to leave reviews directly on Google.
- Review Management: Monitor and respond to reviews from your Reviews dashboard.
- Visibility: Enhance your business profile on Google Search and Maps.
3. Social Media Monitoring Tools
Social media platforms are a crucial space for customer feedback and reviews. Social media monitoring tools can help you effectively manage and respond to these reviews. Some of them can be used for:
- Real-Time Monitoring: Track mentions and reviews of your business across various social media platforms.
- Engagement: Engage with customers by liking, commenting.
- Analytics: Use analytics to gain insights into customer sentiment and engagement trends.
- Content Sharing: Share positive reviews and customer testimonials on social media.
4. Customer Feedback Forms
Customer feedback forms are a proactive way to gather reviews and insights directly from your customers. Here’s how they can be beneficial:
- Customizable Forms: Create personalized feedback forms tailored to your business needs.
- Direct Feedback: Encourage customers to provide detailed feedback through forms.
- Integration: Integrate feedback forms with your website or email campaigns.
- Actionable Insights: Analyze the feedback to identify trends and areas for improvement.
5. Survey Tools
Survey tools are another effective method for collecting structured customer feedback and reviews. They can help you with:
- Survey Creation: Design customized surveys to gather specific customer feedback about their experiences.
- Distribution: To reach a broad audience, send surveys via email or social media or embed them on your website.
- Analytics: Analyze survey responses to gain detailed insights into customer satisfaction and areas that need attention.
- Follow-Up: Use the feedback to follow up with customers, addressing their concerns and improving their experience.
Implementing these tools can help you manage and enhance your online reviews, boost your brand’s reputation, and drive business growth.
Streamline Your Review Management Strategy with Reviewshake
Implementing a strategic approach to your online reviews can enhance customer satisfaction, attract new customers, and build lasting trust in your brand. Reviewshake simplifies this process by offering a comprehensive features suite that streamlines every aspect of review management:
- Effortless Review Generation: Reviewshake makes generating reviews through automated emails and SMS easy, ensuring a steady flow of positive feedback.
- Centralized Management: Manage reviews from multiple sites in one centralized dashboard, simplifying the process of staying organized and responsive to customer feedback.
- Effective Marketing Tools: You can easily share your positive reviews on social media and embed them on your website, amplifying your online presence and attracting more customers.
- In-Depth Analytics: Leverage detailed analytics to gain valuable insights into customer sentiment, allowing you to make informed decisions to improve your services.
By choosing Reviewshake, you equip your business with a powerful review management system that boosts your brand’s reputation, fosters customer trust, and drives growth.
Ready to transform your review management strategy? Try Reviewshake for free and see the difference it can make for your business!
