Fractional Chief Marketing Officer | Marketing Strategy & Analytics
Social media should be fun! You have an opportunity to spend time creating ways to entertain others and make them smile. In turn, your business will receive higher engagement and people will want to share your posts with their friends. Have you put some thought into how you could create enjoyable posts?
[Read more…] about What a Weird Video Reminded Me About Social Media
Having a social media presence helps brands get their name out, and business owners market their products and services. Since it’s been purchased by Facebook, Instagram has begun limiting organic reach by rearranging users’ feeds, and engagement rates have suffered for both brands and influencers.
If it looks like the engagement rate of your brand’s Instagram account is down as well, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone! Here are three reasons why your engagement might be down on Instagram.
[Read more…] about Here’s Why Your Instagram Engagement Is Down
It’s clear that online reviews are one of the keys for business success in 2019. Research has shown that a staggering 91% of individuals read online reviews, and 68% make up their mind about the product or service after they have read between one and six online reviews.
Receiving excellent reviews won’t simply happen on its own. You must facilitate review generation and I have some helpful tips.
Build a Space for Reviews
“If you build it, they will come” is an old slogan that doesn’t quite apply anymore. We know online success won’t manifest if you simply maintain a business website. But, if you don’t build it, there is no chance for anyone to leave a review, so it’s an important first step.
Yelp, Facebook, and Google are the three most popular and trusted sites for online reviews. Each platform has useful tools to help you claim or create a page for your business. You should focus on Yelp for Business Owners, Google My Business Page, and Facebook Business Page.
Send a Follow-Up Review Request
Reports suggest that 70% of customers who were requested to leave online reviews went on to honor the request. However, it is not as simple as sending your customer an email with a link and hoping for the best.
Before you ask for a review, it is often best to start with an open-ended question, collecting feedback from the customer. If they have had a bad experience, this will give you one more chance to improve your customer service and the clients impression of your business.
Make It Easy for Customers to Review
An often overlooked aspect of requesting reviews is ensuring ease for your customers. You must offer customers a way to get to your online review site in a few clicks.
If you have your customer’s email address, but it’s not a Gmail account, don’t send them a link to review your business on Google. If you want to be reviewed on Facebook, start the conversation through Facebook’s Messenger.
Bonus Tip: Respond to Reviews
Even a simple expression of gratitude provides the personal touch your customers need to remember your business and make a repeat customer. This will help your customers feel like their opinion is valued and that they haven’t spent their time writing a review for nothing. That’s the kind of relationship every business should nurture with their customers.
Key Takeaways
Online reviews are a great asset for any business because they allow you to gather feedback and market your products and services more thoroughly.
You can keep the reviews rolling in by establishing a simple routine. Maintain a presence on a site that allows reviews, and make sure you are requesting customer feedback in the right way.
If you need help managing your reviews and your business’ online marketing strategy, feel free to contact us!
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.
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)