Does your company have an excellent reputation among consumers? It could hurt your business even more than you might realize if it doesn’t.
One recent report suggested that a company’s reputation can account for more than 60% of its total value. As a result, your business might not be worth as much as it would be worth otherwise simply because of its reputation.
With this in mind, reputation management will be paramount for your company. You must keep a close eye on your online reviews, including positive and negative ones, to ensure your company has the best reputation possible.
We will discuss at length what makes reputation management and online reviews important to your company.
People Have Come to Trust Online Business Reviews in a Big Way
Before patronizing a business, they usually quickly peek at its online reviews. It doesn’t matter if they’re looking for an excellent place to eat dinner or trying to find somewhere to buy a car. They’ll use customer reviews to guide their decision.
People do this because many of them have come to trust online reviews as much as they trust their family and friends. One survey found that more than 80% of people currently trust online reviews as much as those in their immediate circles.
This alone should illustrate how vital reputation management will be for your business. If you don’t have good online reviews to show people, it doesn’t bode well for your business since they may feel like they can’t trust you to do right by them.
Positive Reviews Will Make People Feel Good About Patronizing Your Business
When people look up your business and read its online reviews, what will they find? This should be your first question as part of your reputation management push.
If you see that they’re going to come across nothing but positive reviews for the most part, it’ll be a great sign. People will feel good about utilizing your company’s products and services when you’ve provided others with beautiful experiences.
Your ultimate goal should be to increase as many positive reviews as possible over time. It will give your business a good reputation and make more people want to patronize it.
Negative Reviews Will Make People Think Twice About Using Your Business
If people don’t see one positive review after another when they read through online reviews for your business, it could doom your company from now on. The more negative reviews your business has, the less likely people will be to call on your company for its products and services.
You will want to work to reverse this trend ASAP actively. It would be best to create a reputation management plan to address any negative reviews you receive and strive to get more positive reviews to push the negative ones to the bottom.
Negative Reviews Can Provide Your Business With a Big Opportunity
If your company has received negative reviews, it won’t benefit your business. But it’s also not going to be the end of the world.
It would help to see these negative reviews as opportunities to show how much your company cares about its customers. It would be worth responding to as many negative thoughts as you can so that you’re able to make things right with unhappy customers.
If nothing else, this will show other people that you run a company that does its best to make things right when customers aren’t satisfied. This could yield positive results for your business reputation in the end.
No Online Reviews Could Be as Bad as Negative Reviews for Your Business
If your company doesn’t have many small business reviews, this could be almost as bad as having many negative reviews. It will make it appear that you haven’t done enough to give people a reason to leave positive reviews for you yet.
It might also make it seem like your small business is just getting off the ground, even if that might not necessarily be true. You should encourage your customers to leave reviews for you so that you can build up a collection of them over time.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult to Manage Your Business Reputation
Reputation management feels like such a task to many small business owners. They aren’t sure where they should start when it comes to monitoring their reputation and working to improve it.
If you fall into this category, our firm offers reputation management services to small and medium-sized businesses. We’ll work to get your business the online reviews it deserves and ensure your reputation is as good as possible.