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As a business owner, you know that following through on your products is everything. Putting effort into the goods and services you produce is what makes them special and attracts your customer base.
A great product and a great experience are what ultimately keep them coming back. But is this enough to survive and thrive in the social age?
When Murphy’s Law Strikes
Regardless of how ‘on it’ your business is, there are going to be instances where something unexpected and negative happens. Maybe it is a faulty product, an employee mistake, or a particularly difficult customer to deal with. Whatever it is, it isn’t the norm for your business; you’d like to learn from the experience and move on quickly.
In today’s digital world, it may not always be quite that simple. Today, one upset customer or bad review online can plague a business for weeks or months.
Now more than ever before, quality customer service is a critical component of running a successful business. More than that, quality social media campaigns can be implemented to ensure your business reputation stays positive.
Why Reputation Management Is Essential
Nearly all business owners can tell you that word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of advertising. Not only is it free, but 92% of potential customers value and believe product reviews from family and friends over standard advertising.
If a loyal customer raves about a product to a group of friends, chances are good that their friends will view your company’s products more favorably in the future.
But this works both ways. A bad review from family or friends is likely to be far more potent. Nearly 76% of potential customers read online reviews prior to committing to purchasing products from a new company.
One bad review — especially a bad review that isn’t addressed by your company — can have an outsized impact on the overall reputation of your company. In fact, over 94% of people indicated that a bad review they read online has kept them from doing business with certain companies.
This means it’s imperative to find ways to proactively manage your business’s reputation online.
Finding strategies to actively address and turn bad reviews into positive learning experiences for the company can be even more powerful.
Creating a Business Reputation Management Campaign
Now that you’ve appreciated the importance of an online reputation, what steps can you take to protect your business reputation?
#1 Take Stock of Your Social Media Presence
The first step to implementing a business reputation management campaign on social media is to assess where you’re actively engaging on social media. There are plenty of top social media sites that you may have a presence on.
For instance, maybe you maintain an account with product information and promotions on Instagram but your goals are more advertising-focused on a couple of other platforms, like Pinterest and Facebook. All of these should be evaluated for potential reputation management.
#2 Consider How Reviews are Managed
As you’re completing an audit of your business reputation on each of the social media platforms your business is active on, you will want to consider how reviews are already being handled.
Does your company have a reactive or proactive approach to both positive and negative reviews? For instance, if you were to discover that the general online conversation about one of your products is trending negatively, would you proactively make changes to the product?
#3 Determine the Workload Needed
As you’re implementing reputation management, it can be important to recognize the workload that it might represent, especially if your business is present on multiple platforms.
Some small businesses may be able to get away with monitoring social media interactions as a small portion of their job, while medium- to large-sized businesses may need to hire a marketing or public relations specialist who focuses on building brand awareness, creating a positive presence online, and managing the business reputation.
#4 Ensure Respondents are Adequately Trained
Whoever is doing this job, it is imperative that they have the appropriate training and understanding of how the company wants to react to negative comments. It matters whether or not you are setting the right tone and responding in a way that reflects the company’s values.
A reaction to a bad review that is perceived poorly by other customers can take a bad situation and make it much, much worse.
#5 Adapt to Your Audiences’ Preferred Style
It is also highly important to recognize your target audience while working through your business reputation management strategy.
If you’re mostly attracting customers from Gen Z, you might have a completely different means of monitoring and responding to any concerns than if your main audience is Gen X. A Gen Z audience is more likely highly connected to the digital world and also most likely to boycott a company for how it responds to criticisms.
#6 Invest in Social Listening
Regardless of your target audience, listening can be your most powerful tool. In today’s online world, customers recognize that they have the power to reach out and communicate directly with a brand in ways that they haven’t before. To ignore that would be folly.
Criticisms and pain points of customers can point you to exactly where your business has a need for improvement — they can be a really helpful sounding board.
The Takeaway
Your business reputation is critical to your overall success as a company. A great strategy on social media includes finding positive ways to interact with critical customers, listening intently, and building a strong social media campaign to monitor feedback and company responses.
BIO: Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest in the United States. She enjoys writing about better living through education and technology. She is frequently lost in a mystery podcast.
