Think about the last time you made a sizable purchase. How did you decide which business to buy from? If you’re like most people, you probably started with a recommendation—either from a friend, or an online review. According to a recent Gartner report, “consumers trust insights from their peers more than any other source; 78% of Americans say they trust their peers, versus just 40% who trust corporations.”
It’s clear that reviews matter today more than ever before. But managing an online reputation can be complex, especially when it comes to managing one across multiple locations. Here’s a list of best practices we’ve gathered from our customers on how to successfully scale and manage reviews as an enterprise company:
1. Be consistent online. Ensure that you have an up-to-date Google My Business listing. Use a tool like Yext to ensure that your business information is correct across all of your different online profiles. Maintaining continuity is key to unifying and boosting your online reputation.
2. Link to your online listing from your website. Include a link to your online reviews from your website. Once your business is claimed on a review site, most sites give the option to add a badge or widget to your website. When leads visit your website, they’ll see that you value customer satisfaction and are on top of managing reviews. This will help you not only rank well in search engine results but also acquire new customers as your reputation grows.
3. Manage your social media presence. Managing your social media means amplifying a consistent presence, a huge part of which is managing media messaging. With the right software, you can centralize messages into a single inbox so you don’t miss a single one, which is a pain point for many businesses when managing their social media accounts.
4. Keep social media at a local level. Customers are increasingly searching for products and services “near me” and want to connect with your closest location. Local brand pages also tend to engage more than national ones, as Facebook pages outperform a national brand page (with much larger followings) 40 to one. To boost your online reputation across multiple locations, keep your accounts on your different platforms divided at a local level instead of focusing solely on your singular brand account.
5. Produce locally focused content. Along with posting nationally branded content, push out localized content on your website and social media pages. It’s important to distinguish branches and locations from one another so that customers can easily find them in a quick search.
6. Use text. Have trouble collecting reviews? Implement an effective, location-wide review collection system with text—and watch the reviews pile up. Text messages have a 98% open rate and 95% are opened and responded to within three minutes of being delivered. Text can also significantly increase customer experience and engagement as 9 out of 10 customers prefer to interact with a business via text message. Train your employees to ask in person and then follow up with a text invite to boost your reputation across the company.
7. Use one review platform across all locations. Behind every strong reputation is a solid reputation management system. Integrate a software that saves your team time by automatically sending review invites through text at the proper touchpoints in your customer journey and consolidating all messages into one manageable inbox.
Many things about enterprise business can be complicated—but maintaining an online reputation across multiple locales shouldn’t be one of them. With these small changes, you’ll be well on your way to topping search results and becoming the go-to for customers, no matter your location.
Click here to see how Van Horn Auto successfully manages their reputation across 15 different locations.
