Your business is an outcome of your hard work and determination. When you put in so much of effort, spend extensive hours and work really hard to take your business to grow higher; why not be little more careful about its reputation?
Since it is a digital age your online reputation is really important. You cannot take it lightly or your business might be taken lightly by your consumers or potential consumers.Well face it; most of the business owners don’t really pay enough attention to their online reputation, even when it is a crucial piece of an effective digital marketing strategy. Though it is absolutely important to be paying attention to your top line KPIs such as percentage of new traffic, new customer acquisition, click-through-rates, revenue, conversions and so on, avoiding your online reputation could be harmful to your business.
Why is it so?
You know the search behavior has changed over the time and many of your customers will be typing in generic search terms to find out companies that cater to their requirements. After finding out companies inside that niche, your customers are going to do extra research to find out what business to work with, and they shall likely pick the one having stellar ratings and reviews. In case you are not shining above the competitors you have in search results with those 4 or 5 yellow stars, your possible customers might scan past you and go with the competitors instead. It is something that just goes to show that reviews have turned out to be more vital than ever to facilitate the decision making procedure for customers. There have been researches that showed more than eighty eight percent of customers trust online reviews more than that of word of mouth recommendations. The point is online reviews are more powerful than that of reviews that customers personally get from family and friends.
Manage your reputation
To manage reputation is actually a lot more than only scanning the internet for reviews—it is more about building relationships with your customers, diffusing positive sentiment, and taking negative feedback to heart to enhance your service or product. Of course you can talk to professionals for Online Reputation Management tasks and they will take care of your reputation. They would make sure that you do not look bad or your business is not getting tarnished by anyone anywhere.
There are a few mistakes that you should avoid while you are online and the most important one is always give a reply to complains done online but don’t stretch it more than three answers. After all there are nasty people who try to drag you down and if you respond them more than two or three times; your business might look bad and negative. Of course, you have to respond them politely and no harsh words should be used.
So, once you know that your reputation is important and you take actions to guard it; you would not face any unnecessary criticism.