Reputation management stands as a cornerstone of your business’s success. Where every online interaction can influence a potential customer’s perception, managing your reputation has become more critical than ever. To excel in this domain, many businesses find it highly beneficial to enlist the services of a reputable reputation management agency or an agency with reputation management as a part of their service bundle. Today, we want to talk about what you should be looking for from your agency to ensure you have a strategy in place that will grow your business the right way. The key things here are getting quality reviews and responding to them. Let’s get right into it.
1. Review Generation and Enhancement
The first and foremost aspect to scrutinize is the agency’s ability to amplify your online presence through reviews. Not just any reviews, but positive ones. Leveraging email and SMS, a proficient agency should facilitate connecting with your past clients. This contact serves a dual purpose – nudging clients towards leaving public reviews and collecting feedback through internal surveys.
Nudging towards leaving a review is crucial. You need new reviews all the time. This is because reviews lose value over time. If someone says that place has the best service, and they went there yesterday, you will likely receive that same level of service. However, if that same person says they had great service when they went there two years ago, you have no idea if you will get that level of service. Maybe they have a whole new staff at this point. Maybe they have new managers or policies in place. Maybe the original owners sold the business. That “review” is less credible strictly because of time. That is why constantly asking for reviews is so important, and your agency should have you set up on some system to make this easy for your business.
Internal surveys are invaluable in their own right. They provide a direct line to your customers, allowing them to express what you excel in and where improvements may be needed. In a world where customer feedback is gold, this feature is non-negotiable. In addition, this gives potential negative responders a place to vent their frustration while allowing you to address and turn things around before it hits the public airwaves (online reviews). You want to ensure the reputation management agency you use creates an internal survey system for this use case.
2. The Power of Responses
The next critical area your reputation management agency, or even your digital marketing agency, should excel in is responses. Think of responses as the human face of your business in the digital world. They are your opportunity to engage with both positive and negative content, demonstrating your commitment to customer satisfaction and providing context to situations. Herein lies a delicate balance, as not all business owners are natural wordsmiths, and not all can adeptly navigate the intricacies of SEO and remarketing other services through their responses.
This is why ensuring that responses are handled with the utmost care is imperative. They should reflect your business’s unique voice, feeling like someone within your organization crafted them. Empathy and enthusiasm should be evident in each word, underscoring your dedication to addressing customer needs, while still checking off the technical requirements of a professional copywriter, which is why you are getting a reputation management agency.
A human touch is paramount when dealing with responses. It’s far more than just sending automated responses generated by a tool. It’s about conveying your business’s personality and values. Your reputation management agency should offer the assistance of a talented copywriter and employ efficiency tools to ensure this process is streamlined and effective. Do not let them utilize AI or Chat GPT for this. It will be obvious and only show your customers that you don’t care.
Remember, when it comes to responses, settling for agencies that provide a mere tool with the promise of making it “easy for you” is inadequate. Reputation management isn’t your core expertise, and you already have many tasks to attend to. Creating thoughtful, empathetic, and SEO-friendly responses requires skill, experience, and a deep understanding of your business’s nuances. That is the job of the agency you are partnering with. Don’t let them tell you to do this critical job. The opportunity to re-market your other services and SEO value is crucial. Would you be okay with an agency building your website to tell you to use Chat GPT and send over that copy? No way! This is just as important to the content you are putting out about your business.
Wrap Up Thought
In summary, when choosing a reputation management agency, emphasize review generation, internal surveys, and skillful responses. These three pillars form the foundation of a robust reputation management strategy that shields your business from potential harm and propels it to new heights. Reputation management agencies that excel in these aspects are invaluable partners in your journey to business success.
Here at Real Review Response, we partner with many agencies who believe in this approach to reputation management and help create efficiencies without sacrificing any of these wildly important aspects. If you want to manage it yourself, our platform can help you with these efficiencies, and you can run your business with the same tool agencies use, or we are happy to make some introductions to the many great agencies we partner with. They are a great Reputation Management Agency because of us (at least in our opinion), but also they are great at all the pieces they put together to build an excellent digital presence. Let’s get started by chatting. Click here to book a meeting with our founder, who is excited to learn about your business, or if you are an agency looking to have a robust reputation management solution that creates efficiency, then we should chat.
