5 Ways to Get Positive Online Reviews for Your Brand

Positive Reviews as you may know are the ideal outcome marketers covet as a result of customer engagement with a brand’s product or service. With today’s online social community, Positive Reviews are gold and can mean the difference in your business making or losing money.

Positive Reviews are Like Gold

Why Positive Reviews Matter:

• 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know
• 44% of purchases are influenced by consumer reviews
• 87% of people think the CEO’s reputation matters
• 78% of people research a product/service online before purchasing it

These five secrets will help you protect your brand and build bridges to your next customers.

1.   Pay attention to the reviews you already have.

You can’t generate good reviews unless you have real customers to write them. Start by making sure to resolve any current complaints from your customers.

2.   Engage your customers on Facebook and Twitter

Create a Facebook group and Twitter account for your business. Younger customers in particular will share their thoughts here without any prompting.

3.   Respond quickly to bad reviews.

If a bad online review is warranted, thank the customer for their feedback and apologize   for the bad experience. Respond quickly and you turn a negative into a positive.

4.   Remember it’s a numbers game.

Even if you are providing the best product or service you can, some people will tend to     complain. The more reviews you get, the more likely you are to get one or more bad reviews so your goal should be a large number of mostly good reviews.

5.   Make reviewing as easy as possible.

Give customers easy ways to provide reviews and feedback on your website and on your social profile pages. If you are a bricks & mortar retailer-consider using mobile devices and QR Codes to gather reviews.

Enjoy and Prosper!

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Related articles

• How to Use Social Media to Establish Trust (smallbiztrends.com)
• Use Online Reviews to Grow Your Business (boom360.com)
• Yelp and Others Change the Way Small Businesses Do Business (prweb.com)

So You Want To Open a Restaurant

How many times have you heard a family member or friend tell you they secretly wanted to own their own restaurant?

It may seem glamorous to those on the outside, but those in the know realize that it’s not. You will require an all-consuming passion for the restaurant and the patience of a saint. You will be open six or seven days a week. You will definitely start earlier than you thought and have later nights than you bargained for. It is relentless day in and day out with no sign of a break.

The strongest advice I can give is to work in a restaurant before you buy one. The most successful owners have waited tables, tended bar, worked in the kitchen and managed front of house and operations before investing.

Chances of Success

Restaurants fail at a 57 to 61 percent rate with the highest failure rate of 26 percent during the first year, 19 percent in year 2 and 14 percent in the third year. According to H.G Parsa, author of a study on restaurant failures and associate professor of hospitality management at Ohio State many restaurants close not because they couldn’t succeed financially, but because of personal reasons involving the owner(s) such as divorce, poor health or simply a desire to retire. “The successful owners were either very good at balancing their family and work lives or single or divorced.”

Fire A Client Today!

I took me a good ten years in business to muster the courage to fire my first client.

Since I am not Donald Trump, my early reluctance was based on a modest bank account, coupled with the lack of confidence that I would be able to replace them with a better client.

I am quite sure if you examine your customer list you can identify a few who are exceptionally demanding of your time, are very slow to pay for your service, who undervalue your contribution and are constantly looking for a discount. I have found that 10% of my worst clients (call them the bottom feeders) take up to 50% of my time and provide me with less than 2% of my professional satisfaction or sense of accomplishment.

Reputation Management-5 Tips to Protect Your Online Brand

One of the worst fears for any business is finding out that you are the victim of an unfair, dishonest smear campaign on the Internet.

As much as the Internet can help your business gain exposure and grow, it also provides a huge microphone to people looking to spread terrible rumors about your business.

You can’t afford to be defined by underhanded competitors or eccentric former customers!

Here are 5 Tips to help you take control of what is being said about you company on the Internet.

1. Browse the web and set up email alerts for your brand to be sure you know what is being said about your business. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and be informed via email when new occurrences of your brand show up on the Internet.

2. Participate actively in your online community with blogging, email news and group forums to help give your brand a positive image. As you get more involved, the number of positive online reviews will occur.

3. Use Social Media to Your Advantage as many of your customers turn to Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest as a way of sharing and reviewing their experiences. This is one of the easiest ways to get feedback on your products or services and react to offset any negative press quickly.

4. Promote Customer Reviews to keep information about your company fresh and accurate. Business citation sources such as Google Places will aggregate information from third-party sources that may be old or less than favorable. Ask customers on you Website or in your store to give you a  review of their experience at the point of sale and offer a thank you incentive to do so. Then simply post this great new testimonial content on your Website and Social Profiles.

5. Leverage your positive reviews by asking publishers if you can link from the review to your site. This gives your Website fresh, relevant and positive content for new visitors to see and helps you conform to the new Google “Unnatural Links” algorithm that keeps your rankings from organic search  higher than your competition.

If you have any questions or need help with this topic, contact me at emorydigitalmarketing.

Steve Emory, President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Related articles

• Google’s Unnatural Link Algorithm May Affect Your Website (dmdejavu.wordpress.com)
• 6 Ways to Boost Your Rankings Using Google Authorship (searchenginewatch.com)
• Maximizing Google+ For Your Business (dreamgrow.com)