Your online reputation has never been more important for business success. The past few years have seen a massive growth in online reviews, particularly across social media sites like Facebook and Google My Business. More importantly, consumers are increasingly relying on these peer-sourced reviews to find information about local businesses and make purchase decisions.
While you can’t control what customers say about you, you can control how you respond. And as it turns out, business responses to reviews have a huge impact on consumer perception and buying behavior. A whopping 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews, and 45% say they’re more likely to visit a business if it responds to negative reviews.* Now more than ever, it’s critical to incorporate review management into your overall engagement strategy so you can build stronger relationships with customers and improve your online reputation.
Unify social media and review management with Sprout
Sprout is excited to offer a unified solution to help you manage customer engagement across social media and reviews in one place. With our new Reviews tool, you can easily monitor and manage reviews for all your business locations across Facebook, Google My Business and TripAdvisor from one centralized stream. By integrating social media and reviews in one platform, you can save valuable time, stay organized and build a more cohesive and efficient engagement strategy.
Respond to every customer – promptly and thoughtfully
Although it’s no secret that today’s consumers expect a quick response from brands when they engage with them via social or reviews, the reality is that brands are having a hard time keeping up. In fact, a recent study showed that 53.3% of consumers expect brands to respond to reviews within 7 days, but 63.3% of consumers reported that they have never heard back from a business after leaving a review. There’s a big opportunity here for brands to close this gap and build stronger relationships with customers through review response management.
In Sprout, you can respond to all of your business reviews across Facebook, Google My Business and TripAdvisor from one unified stream. Access saved responses from the Asset Library to ensure a consistent brand voice, and mark reviews as complete to help your team stay organized and collaborate efficiently.
Prioritize your strategy to meet your unique review management needs
When it comes to your review management strategy, every business has their own unique approach and needs. This can include which networks you want to prioritize, which business locations you want to focus on and what the response cadence looks like. Stay focused by organizing your reviews by date, message status, rating and profile across networks and locations. You can also save specific filter sets to create custom views (ie. “5-Star Reviews,” or “East Coast Locations”) and then share with your team members.
Benefits that go beyond your reputation
The value of review management extends beyond strengthening your engagement and online reputation; it is also a powerful source of customer feedback that you can use to improve your brand experience. Through online reviews, your customers are providing you with real-time insights about your business and you need to be listening and taking notes. By streamlining your business reviews across locations and networks in the Sprout platform, you gain a more holistic view of the customer experience that helps you discover patterns about your performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
Another major benefit of review management is that it helps improve your SEO (ie. search engine optimization), which impacts where your business appears in local search results. This is particularly relevant for Google My Business reviews, as Google has confirmed that review response rate is a significant factor in how they rank businesses in Google search results. Considering the critical role online search plays in the marketing funnel, review management represents a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes to increase their search visibility and drive more foot traffic.
Start Managing Your Reviews From Sprout
Today’s the day to begin integrating reviews with your social media engagement strategy! To get started with Reviews, connect your profiles for Facebook, GMB or TripAdvisor in Sprout today — or click here to begin your free trial.
Sources:
Local Consumer Survey (BrightLocal, 2018)
Online Reviews Survey (ReviewTrackers, 2018)