How a business can analyze online reputation
Having a good online reputation translates into customer trust, and, by extension, into reduced costs, the creation of better problem-solving strategies and improved sales. All this sounds like solid reasons to build a good online reputation, doesn't it? But to achieve it, businesses should first learn to analyze their online reputation. In this article, we answer the question ‘How to do it’.
What’s inside:
What is an online reputation for business and why analyzing it is important
An online reputation is the way that a business is perceived based on the information that appears about it on the Internet and digital platforms. It consists of reviews that your clients leave on digital platforms, what they talk about your business on their socials, what information appears in search results when people google your company.
Your online reputation affects how your clients think about your company and can be the deciding factor in whether they choose you over your competitors. Numbers speak for themselves:
Online reputation of your business is so important that it is even classified as a non-material asset that can influence the company capitalization.
The benefits of a good online reputation include but are not limited to:
- Positive brand image
- Enhanced customer trust and credibility
- Enhanced local SEO efforts, and, by extension, improved visibility
- Standing out from the crowd of competitors and being chosen by your target audience more often
- Sales boost
This works for any business, no matter if you manage banks, retail stores, spa salon chain, or a cozy café.
The good news is that online reputation can be managed. It’s not that hard but certainly deserves your diligence, thorough attention and marketing efforts. The thing is that managing online reputation (and getting benefits from having a good one) starts with analyzing it. When you have data and can interpret it, you can make more conscious and informed decisions about your brand and adjust your online reputation management strategy if needed.
What to focus on when analyzing online reputation
In the world of local marketing, reviews are pure gold. They are the second most important ranking factor in local search. Moreover, they are the source of insights for your business. That is why we suggest that the review management becomes one of any business top priorities.
When we are talking about reviews, those are factors that are important both for Google ranking and customers (even if they don’t realize it):
- Recency: are a business’ reviews new or outdated?
- Velocity: how frequently does a business receive reviews?
- Diversity: where reviews are posted?
- Format: there are reviews with or without text, as well as reviews with customer’s photos or videos. Actually, 62% of customers are more likely to buy a product if they can view user-generated content.
Excellent, you now know what exactly you can focus on. The next step is to actually learn how to manage reviews. The strategy is simple: react and reply to all of them (even negative ones and those without text). This will give your customers a feeling that your business actually cares about their opinions and that you’re transparent and have nothing to hide, thus worth trust. If you need more information about review management, we share all magic tricks in our in-depth guide.
Big guide on how to manage positive and negative reviews
Discover how to respond to reviews to make your customers fall in love with you brand
It all makes sense and sounds easy. But when you start working on it, you’ll see that analyzing and managing online reputation can become a tall order.
Why is analyzing online reputation often hard?
There are 5 main reasons to that:
1. It’s hard to analyze big number of reviews
When you run or manage a business with multiple locations, there will be a huge amount of reviews from customers that you’ll have to analyze. Reading and analyzing hundreds and thousands of reviews could take weeks. And only after that reply to them or come up with a solution to the problem that customer has faced.
2. It may be hard to understand what customers’ experience was
Sometimes your customers share positive and negative aspects and the review is so contradictory that you can’t really tell whether they are satisfied or not. Or they put 5 stars but wrote a devastating review.
3. The review makes no sense
Maybe they’ve written it by accident or the review was about another company.
4. It’s hard to make competitors’ review analysis
Knowing what customers think and write about your competitors is extremely helpful for your business too. However, when there are many, collecting and analyzing reviews can be a very time-consuming process.
5. Sometimes you can’t really tell whose job is to respond to review
A customer can write about the quality of your product, your marketing campaign and their experience of communication with the HR department… in one review. In this case, who has to respond to it: Production, Marketing or HR manager?
How to actually analyze online reputation?
Here are 5 main strengths of our product:
1. The reviews from 13+ digital sources are aggregated and displayed on comprehensive dashboards, so you’ll never miss a single review. This is a true lifesaver for multi-locations business managers. You'll see not only the total number of reviews for a certain period, but the percentage of reviews not answered, as well as NPS (customer loyalty index).
2. BrandWizard uses machine learning algorithms to perform sentiment analysis and find out major trends in customer reviews; whether they are positive, negative or neutral. So, you can understand the mood of customers and timely adjust your responses.
3. The service analyzes a large amount of data to uncover trends and patterns in reviews, and extract valuable insights from text data, like words or phrases that your customers use frequently. You can use this data to improve your product or services, and provide your clients with better experience.
4. Competitor analysis has never been easier with a detailed outline of your competitors’ reviews categorized by ratings, locations, sources, words and phrases. With this comparison, you will see the strengths of your business and what could be improved to satisfy your clients and overtake competitors.
5. BrandWizard’s online reputation analysis service monitors the number of answered reviews and who answered them, the response time, and the number of complaints, so that you can manage the review management in your team even more effectively.
Summary
At this point, let’s make a quick checklist of what’s important when you analyze online reputation:
- Constantly keep an eye on customers’ reviews on different digital sources
- Discover major trends and patterns in customer reviews
- Use this data to improve your products and services
- Make a competitive analysis
- Manage the team responsible for replying to reviews
So many aspects to consider, and not so many convenient ways to store and analyze that data. You can go for Google Sheets or get insights from Google Business Profile (GBP) reports, but there is one huge pitfall.
When you run a multi-location business, collecting and analyzing data from all locations is often hard and time-consuming for marketing managers. Not to mention online reputation analysis, when you need not only to process a big amount of data but to delve deeper into the meanings and сustomer motivations. That's why BrandWizard provides businesses with a smart and technologically advanced tool of Online Reputation Analysis service.
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