An Online Review Strategy and ways in which it can boost your Business Marketing?
Even with enormous marketing budgets, businesses large and small rely on customer reviews to reach new and retain customers.
94.2 per cent will consult a review site before buying.
79% say customer feedback can change what and how they make a purchase
Don’t fear the negative reviews
People have always had opinions; the only difference is that it's much easier for those opinions to be seen and heard by the masses nowadays through smartphones and the internet.
Whether factually correct or not, those (online reviews) opinions expressed by individuals and their feelings about your brand will impact the reputation and attractiveness of your business.
By the law of averages, you will eventually get a negative review - don't fret. How you handle this review will make the difference.
Things to do
Read the negative review a couple of times to ensure you have understood the comments made. From experience, I have seen online reviews where the customer has given 1 star out of 5, only to go on then and write a fantastic review online as they didn't understand the scoring parameters - 1 star for a negative review rating and five stars for a positive review.
Learn a bit about the person who has posted the review. Check whether they have posted other reviews elsewhere, as you might start to see a pattern. These individuals may regularly dine in Michelin star restaurants, not small, busy, informal restaurants like yours. If this is the case, your open reply could highlight and promote the atmosphere you seek to create within your establishment.
Ask your staff if they remember the customer and what information they may be able to add. Did they express an issue at the time? A lot more people now book things online, so there is often easier to follow the digital paper trail. You can quickly learn if they have booked or bought from you in the past.
Take a deep breath and start to craft a constructive and polite response. A pragmatic approach always works best, so be reasonable and address each of the comments made individually. Readers will then see you're dealing with alternative opinions head-on, respectfully, and, in turn, make up their minds on the situation. Never be offensive - even if the review is. You need a calm and measured response that ends with a possible solution to the crisis.
Seek a second opinion - ask a colleague to sanity-check your response before posting.
Offensive reviews
A quick note on offensive reviews, not all review sites are the same. There is a good chance they may negate the review platform T&C's of posting.
Suppose the review in question in any way contains profanity, hate speech, discriminatory language, threats or personal insults. In that case, this will likely be removed by the site. Conversely, it will remain online if it's as simple as you disagree with/like the review.
Forbes magazine has a great article on the subject of bad reviews called - Why Negative Reviews Can Be Good For Business
Timing is everything with online reviews
The sooner you can respond to an online review, the better - nobody likes to be ignored nor feel their issue is not being acknowledged and dealt with - taking onboard, of course, the tips suggested above.
Things to do
Establishing an online review checking system is a worthy and robust discipline, perhaps early in the morning before the business is open or while guests are asleep?
Checking all of the different review sites individually is fine if you only ever appear on a few sites, but reviewing the reviews can become time-consuming as awareness of your establishment grows.
Consider a more robust system in that case. Several excellent sites can help with this process. One of our favourites is called Reviewtrackers.
Another 'belt and braces' free option is to sign up for Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to receive notifications when any comment is made online referring to your business - saving you time and speeding up your responses!
It is best practice to set up alerts for your business:
With inclusions of your business name
Your business name and the word "review."
Your industry
Your competitors
The location of your business.
Another top tip for the time-poor entrepreneur is to have a standardised sign off to your reviews, e.g. 'Visit soon, best regards.' This will ensure a consistent and professional close to your response whilst saving time in your answers.
Take the conversation offline and get it sorted
If you receive a genuinely awful review, it can sometimes be tricky to respond in a detailed manner online. In this instance, my recommendation is to take the matter offline - it's good to talk!
Write a short response to acknowledge the review and for genuine customer service and value, detail a personal email address or phone number to enable that individual to reach out for further dialogue.
Having a dedicated email address monitored frequently is another way to facilitate online comments and reviews - good and bad.
Online review management strategy - Look local, look further
The beauty of the online review is that you can see how other businesses perform, making this research hugely valuable. Learn from the successes and learnings of those around you.
As an example of your strategic research:
Read the reviews of 3 businesses which you consider competitors. Note their best reviews, bad reviews and which review platforms they are appearing on.
Read reviews of 3 businesses that are not related to your industry in the slightest but ones you admire and respect. Again look at their reviews and can you spot if they have an online review strategy. Are they replying to every review or are they only replying to negative reviews?
Take a holistic approach, looking out for positive reviews and negative reviews alike while seeking new ways to learn and apply those lessons to your own review management strategy.
Explore the social media feeds of your competitors and set up an email account dedicated to gathering and receiving email communications to uncover what others are doing. (Probably best to use a generic Gmail address rather than an associated company email address).
What do we seek to achieve in this exercise?
Establishing areas of high performance that can perhaps be replicated - i.e. you gaining more online reviews.
Highlighting areas of critical improvements for your online review management strategies.
Understanding how these organisations/brands add demonstrable customer value and gain more positive reviews and reviewers.
Exploring how their online interactions demonstrate their values and approach to digital conversations with clients. Make the findings a regular discussion point within your team plan.
Encourage an open dialogue
Gone are the days when customers would be reserved in expressing their views on the food they ate, the service they received, the staff that looked after them.
Nowadays, they are likely to tell the management their opinions in person expressly and then go onto multiple review sites and social media channels to let their thoughts be known.
Let's be clear; people will write about your business because it has never been easier to do so!
So my last word of advice is to embrace that dialogue. Actively encourage people to check-in, review, comment and post. It all will create that 'buzz' around your business and help to get your customers involved.
Small gestures can make significant steps in encouraging customers so that we would suggest:
Making the WiFi code easy to find for your customers making it easier for them to leave reviews.
Get your staff (if they are not too busy) to offer to take photos of a group. These pictures are most likely to be shared on social media channels.
The more user-generated content you can enable, the better. Recommendations and positive views expressed by your customers are much more robust and add enormous credibility and reassurances to other potential new customers.
Tell people where which online review websites they can leave a review about the business on. This means making sure all of your marketing literature clearly shows which review sites you are on.
Include the special #Hashtag you have for the business or campaign. Think about all of the different touchpoints you have with your customers and make sure that you actively encourage reviews, as these will help build and grow your online presence.
Also, there is another reason that you want more reviews, especially as you start to act on those improvement areas. The ratio of bad reviews to good reviews will reach a tipping point - for the better.
So in the case of TripAdvisor, your score out of 5 will go up, and you will get more complete circles in their scoring system. Secondly, the bad reviews will be pushed further down the list, and they won't appear on the front page of your review site (depending on the site in question).
A word of caution, never, ever be tempted to write your reviews for your own business to get your rankings back up - this will come back and bite you
Conclusions
It can be hard to hear criticism and negative reviews, but reviews and feedback are an important part of your business. The difference today is that these opinions aren’t limited to a small circle; they’re available for anyone on the internet to see. But don't let this scare you off from engaging and managing your online reviews, just do it!
Reply back to them, take their advice into account when making changes or improvements, and use reviews as opportunities for growth.