Fractional Chief Marketing Officer | Marketing Strategy & Analytics
There’s a lot of fuss and fixation over creating the perfect morning routine. We study the successful and try to mimic their habits. Just type “morning routine of” in Google and you’ll see top searches for successful people, CEOs, billionaires…but is that what we should be doing? Imitating their habits? We should be creating a ritual that works for us. That’s where The Miracle Morning comes into play.
[Read more…] about A Brief Overview of “The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs”
One of these days you will receive a negative review. (Have you already?) It will make you angry, frustrated, and sad. You’ll feel personally attacked and will want to set the record straight. But wait.
A bad response to a negative review will turn potential customers away from your business. Don’t worry about responding as quickly as possible. Take time to cool down and think about your phrasing because you will want to put together a response. Leaving a negative review unaddressed will also give rise to concerns about the quality of your services.
Fortunately, there is a way for business owners to respond to negative reviews and come out of the process looking better than they did before. Here are some simple rules for crafting a well-considered response to a negative review:
Start by Thanking the Reviewer
The customer wouldn’t be leaving negative reviews if they didn’t experience something negative related to your brand or business. Even if your team did everything right, you should extend an apology to the aggrieved customer to start off on the right foot. Emphasize that you’re grateful for receiving customer feedback because it will allow you to improve.
Keep Your Response Simple, Short, and Unscripted
Online negative reviews are, in their essence, impersonal complaints, but everyone leaving them still wants to be treated like a person. Using extremely unspecific scripts or bots is therefore not the best option. People can always tell if you’re using a canned response. That might further anger the customers and make them feel like there is no human on the other side of the line.
While it is desirable to add some details to the response, resist the impulse to write a page-long reply about your business, your many happy customers, and the values you stand for. None of that matters and it can sound as if you’re dismissing their complaint.
Provide an Explanation
When dealing with negative reviews, it’s important to remember that you are not only correcting a mistake for the previous customer to win his repeat business, you’re also advertising to curious potential customers.
You should explain what went awry in the particular instance that is the subject of the review. If possible, you should also elaborate on how you intend to prevent that particular mistake in the future.
Offer the Customer a Way to Contact you Offline
Asking open-ended questions online might lead the reviewer to respond to your response with further negative feedback about your business. It is best to move the conversation offline to prevent this from happening. You can do this by asking customers to send you an email so you can help them further.
Provide a Resolution to the Problem
Hopefully, the customer accepted the offer and got in touch with the business. At this time, you should explain how you intend to fix the problem. I like to phrase it in a way that doesn’t specify a full refund or money back because that might be seen as an opportunity for other people to try the same approach.
Don’t expect anything in return. You cannot ask them to take down their negative review. Some customers will come back and update their original review on their own to state that they are happy with the outcome.
While receiving a negative review online can be damaging, there is a way for business owners to mitigate the situation.
Responding briefly, politely, and helpfully will help your business in any online interaction with customers. It will also save your business from damage caused by negative online reviews.
If you need help managing your online marketing efforts, feel free to contact us! We’re happy to help.
You may have noticed an increase in the popularity of video marketing and thought to yourself, how can I make this work for my business?
One of the main obstacles that a small business encounters when considering video marketing is its affordability. Even though videos provide a great marketing avenue for businesses both small and large, creating them might cost more than a modest business can afford to set aside.
But does it have to be that way? It doesn’t. It is feasible to do video marketing on a budget. In fact, some types of videos are exceptionally well-suited for budget marketing.
[Read more…] about The Secrets of Inexpensive Video Marketing
Do you feel like you spend a lot of time crafting the perfect Facebook post only to share it with the world and …crickets? It can be frustrating to know the importance of being active on the platform but not see the results you want.
Engagement is a metric that helps you determine whether the content you are posting is resonating with your audience. It does so by measuring how many people interact with your posts. On Facebook, this could look like a reaction (happy face, like button, love button, sad face, angry face, wow face), a comment, or a share. The thought is: if a viewer is making an effort to engage, they must be interested in what you are posting.
Seeing engagement on your Facebook page is the first step to impacting your bottom line. Think about it: first, you have to connect with your audience, then you’ll be able to turn those connections into customers.
So, it’s not surprising that when a client wanted to tie their social media efforts to sales, that the engagement rate would be the first metric to indicate we were headed on the right track. What did we do?
[Read more…] about 8 Actionable Tips that Lead to One Client’s 1,400% Increase in Engagement on Facebook
There’s a graphic designer who creates her own cartoons to post on Instagram. She comes up with the idea, writes the copy, and draws the artwork. It takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it. She has a ton of engagement on her page and the custom cartoons help her get new clients.
Some people love her cartoons so much that they repost the entire graphic and tag her in the copy of the post on their feed. This is the right way to use someone else’s content.
But one loser took a screenshot of her post, cropped out her handle and website that are at the bottom of the graphic, and then reposted it as if it were their own creation. This is the wrong way to do it.
If it’s not your idea or creation, you need to give FULL CREDIT to the original poster. Plain and simple. [Read more…] about Stop Stealing Other People’s Content (and What to do if Someone Steals Yours)