Why Your Online Reputation Matters

​Why Your Online Reputation Matters
When it comes to online reputation, here are some important statistics* to consider:

1. 88% of shoppers incorporate online reviews into their purchasing decisions
2. Star rating is the number one factor consumers use to judge a business
3. 73% of consumers form an opinion about a company after reading six reviews
4. Only 14% of consumers would consider using a company with a 1 or 2 star rating
5. 57% of consumers would use a company with a 3 star rating
6. 94% of consumers would use a company with a 4 star rating
7. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
8. 95% of consumers suspect censorship or faked reviews when they don’t see a bad score
9. 86% of consumers will hesitate to purchase from a business with negative online reviews
10. It takes 12 positive reviews to reverse the damage of a single negative review**
    
    

Yet, so many small and mid-sized companies (and even some very large ones) don’t give their online reputations (which with today’s ubiquitous smartphones equals their reputations – period) the time or credence they deserve. As a result, they sacrifice sales and profitability to competitors who do.
In my work on many reputation management projects over the years, I’ve discovered that the number one reason companies have bad online reputations (other than providing a less than stellar customer experience) is a lack of focus on this very important issue.

Let me put this quite plainly for you, customers are 13.7% more likely to leave a review after having a negative experience than a positive one. Thus, if your company has no established program for soliciting reviews from happy clients, the odds are squarely tipped in favor of a negative online presence even if the majority of your clients are happy. Yet this fact is overlooked or ignored by many organizations!

If you feel your company is doing a great job and your online reputation isn’t reflecting it, chances are your issue is one of focus and it’s easily solved. How?

70% of clients will leave an online review if asked. So, how often are you asking? Do you have a formalized program in place to solicit and syndicate these reviews? If not, this is a great place to start and build momentum.

Consistently collecting positive reviews and syndicating them to high domain authority sites (like Facebook, BlogSpot, Google+, etc) will naturally push the negative reviews to the doldrums of Google search engine results – the dreaded page 2.

Your online reputation matters because if you are actively marketing your business (and you should be) or receiving word of mouth referrals, there is a very high likelihood your prospect will perform one of the following searches on their smartphone after hearing about your products or services:

• Your company’s name + complaints
• Your company’s name + reviews
• Your company’s name (which is guaranteed to show whatever reviews and content are out there if you’re not actively doing SEO to influence the search results)
  
  

Or they’ll just open the Yelp app on their phone, enter your company’s name, and read whatever happens to be there. And if you have bad reviews on Yelp, you’re dead, since Yelp will serve up all your high star ranking competitors (read advertisers) for your prospect to consider in your stead. This equals lost sales and lower profits for you.

Let me ask you to consider this: if you didn’t know your company as well as you do, and you performed an online search, would you do business with yourself? Answer honestly.

If you answered Yes, great job! You are focused on online reputation management or just providing stellar customer experience or possibly both. Either way – Kudos!

If you answered No, it’s certain beyond a shadow of a doubt many of your prospects feel exactly the same way and are at this very moment doing business with your competitors who answered Yes.
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Therefore, you will spend much more money on customer acquisition (sales & marketing) than your competitors which means your sales and profits are lower than theirs. Thus, you are at a massive competitive disadvantage and if you don’t focus on reputation management now, the hole gets deeper and deeper.

Fear not, all is not lost…

Stay tuned. My next blog will have definitive steps you can take to begin the process of fixing your reputation and managing it for the long haul.
 
*Source – Vendasta.com
**Source – Reputation Builder