Your brand is one of the most valuable things you have and yet it doesn’t even belong to you. Years ago a company could advertise and market its products or services and adeptly paint the type of picture about itself the owner wanted. Today that’s not the case.
With reviews and word-of-mouth powering much of the purchases made today, companies have very little say in their brand, at least in what’s said on the internet. But if you’ve taken that to heart and given up pushing your advertising, you’re missing the point.
While a good business brand receives a lot of help from the people who are talking about it and sharing it with their friends, it takes very little to start to erode that good reputation. It’s like middle school. One positive word about you from a popular student can go a long way toward your classmates thinking you’re cool. However, if that same kid says you have cooties, you might be sitting alone in the cafeteria at lunch for the rest of the year.
The same is true on social media and review sites.
A popular bad review can do a lot of damage to your brand. This is especially true for the people who don’t know you. But there are several ways to help mitigate those situations.
5 Ways to Safeguard your Business’ Brand
Don’t leave your business brand unattended. Make sure you are constantly monitoring it online so that you can protect it. Respond to issues as soon as they come up. One of the worst things that can happen when someone says something negative about you is for you to be unresponsive.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
The first way to mitigate damage against your business’ brand is to be beyond reproach. Provide the best customer service out there. That way when people are saying negative things, there are plenty of positives alongside it.
If you don’t provide great customer service, all of the reviews will be negative or you won’t have any at all. In either situation, negativity stands out. If you have many positive reviews, and one person posts a negative one, most people will ignore that one negative post.
Respond Publicly to all Reviews
It’s good practice to respond publicly on all reviews. For the good ones, that’s easy. For the bad ones, you want to take it offline as soon as possible. But you do want to show your audience that you are looking into a solution for the issue.
Apologize for their experience. Then ask if you may get in contact with them to help sort out the details. Posting this publicly will show you are trying to solve the problem without airing all the dirty laundry.
Listen
When it comes to social media and the internet you have to constantly monitor your brand reputation. That means subscribing to Google Alerts for your company name, the owner’s or president’s name, as well as any high-profile staff members. Once a month or so, you also want to search on the internet for those same keywords.
Next, monitor keywords that people might use to describe your business without saying your business name. When someone has a complaint about your business, if you’re fortunate, they’ll tag you in it. Tagging will notify you on the social media platform used by appearing in your stream. While the negativity may be disconcerting, it’s actually quite kind of the person writing the bad review. They’re making you aware of it and giving you the opportunity to get involved. However, most of the time you will not receive this “courtesy.”
People may mention your name without tagging. That way you will see it in a Google alert. But sometimes they won’t even do that. Sometimes they’ll simply give a description of your business so everyone will recognize you. They may refer to your type of business and your location by sharing something like:
“Don’t go to the pizza place on Main Street. Worst experience ever.”
That’s why you need to do searches under clusters of words outside of your name. Even if that reference is not directed to you, it may be referencing your competition. In that case, you’ve just discovered something very important about their operation.
Use Smart Fill In
When performing searches on the internet, you may have noticed that as you begin to type in words in the search field, Google offers suggestions. You should search periodically for your business. While it may not work if you have a very common business name, try it anyway. Start typing in your business name followed by the word “is.” See what auto-populates. Those suggestions are searches that other people have conducted.
Next, type in your business name again in the search field and attach a negative word like “sucks.” This may seem immature. But you might be surprised by what you come across. Some people dislike a business so much that they create websites named after your business and a negative comment or something designed to put pressure on a company like changewalmart.org. It’s best that you learn about that early on.
If you find results for either of these things, you can combat them by creating a blog post using the same words. For instance, let’s say you found an autofill search that added your restaurant is “a waste of money.” Write a blog post about that topic from your side. Title it using that exact same language in the search.
Original search (not yours):
Pizza Sam’s Is a Waste of Money
Your blog post:
Pizza Sam’s Is a Waste of Money Said No One Ever or
Pizza Sam’s Is a Waste of Money If You Hate Delicious Pizza
Hopefully, by creating this blog post, you’ll begin to rank for that long-tail keyword string just in case anyone ever brings that up again or asks if your restaurant is a waste of money.
Request Reviews
When someone gives you a compliment don’t be shy about asking them to review you online. You can also place a link at the bottom of your email signature or on your site. Some companies email customers after they purchase something. But this can be incredibly annoying, especially if you ask them to do it every time they interact with you.
While some businesses have long sales cycle and customers may only buy from them once or twice because there’s no need for the service or product more often than that, if you have a business where someone is stopping in weekly and you’re sending out emails asking them to review their experience each time it can get old quickly.
As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons you want to request reviews is that the more reviews your business has the smaller impact a negative review will have on it. A small ripple in a large pond is barely noticed but a large ripple in a small pond can wash out over the banks.
A Final Note About Negative Comments on Social Media
If you receive a scathing comment on social media your initial reaction may be to delete it. However, doing so can infuriate the person who wrote it, not to mention feed into their anger and make them feel like you’re not being heard. That’s why we suggested that you comment something and then try to take it offline.
However, that is not always possible. Sometimes the post is a rant from someone with far greater issues than the cold soup you served them. Many business owners know this and so they delete the comment for being invalid and not representative of their service or business.
But…
when someone is struggling with something that is much larger than the cold soup, you don’t want to feed their anger. Instead, if the comment was left on Facebook you can hide it. Hiding a comment means the poster we’ll still see it on the page but nobody else will. As long as they don’t log on to a friend’s account and see it’s not there, they won’t be the wiser.
It’s still good practice to apologize for their experience and tell them that you’ll do better next time. Only they will see that but at least they’ll feel like you responded in some way.
Your brand is precious to your business. A good reliable brand will bring in customers on reputation alone. However, a couple of bad comments can be devastating. Don’t leave your brand out there. Safeguard it with these tips.
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