Too many businesses seem to ignore valuable online feedback customers provide. Whether this is positive or negative, you can use it to your advantage in the right way. In fact, there are plenty of reasons you should pay more attention to your customers.
Be More Ethical
Committing to high ethical standards can only improve your reputation, boost sales and help you achieve success. If your company received an excess of negative feedback online, you can still try turning this around. For example, consider getting involved in the community by having employees volunteer to conserve the environment, collect much needed supplies for the students of a local school or participate in another charitable cause. Being positive and working towards saving your business can turn your life around.
You want to make sure that what you do is on brand with your business. You don’t want to seem like it’s something that you are just doing for social clout. This can backfire and you don’t want that either. For example, if you are a company that sells baby clothing then it would be natural for you to support a cause like the March of Dimes for premature babies. Matching charitable donations to a product or organization that falls within your brand makes a lot of sense. It would be more of a stretch say if you were to do the same thing for a cause like saving pigeons. Be careful of social media optics and make sure that even strategic moves come from an authentic place of good-will.
Boost Your SEO Reputation
Your online presence can serve to define your business. If you don’t talk or care about what people say then the only people talking about you will be the naysayers. This means that the amount of content mentioning you will be skewed from the truth by those few unsatisfied customers. For this reason and more, SEO reputation management is vital to keeping positive content in higher rankings than negative news. Protect your reputation by taking appropriate action with useful marketing strategies. After all, educating yourself about valuable tools you can use can give you the control you need.
If you want to combat negative press you may want to have the landing pages to articles that educate the public be a higher priority. Having these specific landing pages be part of a larger strategy can help them rank higher in google when people search for your company or product. Having your truth be more accessible to the clients will make it easier for them to know what you actually do than having the highest ranking pages for your company be negative reviews or false claims that aren’t really fair for your company.
Keep from Losing Customers
The fact is that plenty of customers read online reviews. This could have a seriously positive or negative impact on your company. You can try looking at it from the perspective of your customers. How would you feel if you wanted to purchase a product from an online store only to find that it received a low star rating and a high amount of complaints? Be smart by facing your fears so your business is more likely to succeed.
Companies can spend a lot of money for market research. Decades ago all of market research was done in specific campaigns. In today’s market you can know why people stop buying your product or what they think about your company through social media, online reviews, and product review videos and forums. This is valuable information for your business. For example, you may not realize imperfections with your products.
You may realize that the delivery service you use to ship your products doesn’t use proper packaging. If your products are arriving defective you may brush it off since they leave your manufacturing intact. However, doing research online by listening to customer reviews and responses you may be able to figure out where in the chain of distribution your product is occurring. This is valuable information that you are going to be able to address when you have a relationship that is being built with your consumers.
Improve Your Business
You can utilize negative feedback to improve the quality of your business. Customers want to do business with someone they can trust. If you already have positive feedback, you probably understand your strengths and weaknesses as a business person. At the end of the day, you’ll feel better in knowing you made an honest effort. You’ve made this much effort and deserve the success you work hard for.
You can comment on negative reviews and comments you find online letting people know that a member of your customer support team will reach them. You want to make sure that you follow through and don’t lie about making things right if you don’t want to. You can DM the person directly and figure out exactly what went wrong. Most people don’t want to cause harm, but validating their bad experience and making it right will make you look like the bigger person. Especially if they go back and retract their first experience as a response to your outreach. You can make lemonade out of lemons this way.
If how you run your business truly matters to you, you’ll do everything you can to maintain an honest reputation. Besides this, you should remember your customers are real people, and your actions likely have a serious impact on their lives. Doing the right thing is important to the reputation of your business, your customers and your own peace of mind. Making sure that you strategically place the correct messaging for your business will give you more creative control about what people hear about your business. Make sure that you listen to your customers and you create a customer service experience that will leave them satisfied before they go online to try and put your company on blast. If they do, remember you can overcome negative reviews and come out on top.