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)

Should You Use Google+ for Your Business?

By now  you already have  a Facebook and Twitter account or at least are considering how to leverage social media for your business.

If you haven’t taken advantage of a Free Google+ profile page yet and you want to keep your SEO strong and fresh this post is for you.

Add Recommended Links

In order to drive traffic to your website and create business leads, you should post helpful links under the ‘About’ tab that’s located on your Google+ Page. If you link to your helpful and informative blog posts, offers or anything that you think customers can benefit from, people will click them and be taken to your website. Take full advantage of this area of your Page, because if not, you won’t be making the most of what Google+ has to offer.

Promote

Why wouldn’t you promote your Google+ Page on your website and blog? If you promote your Facebook and Twitter Pages, you should also promote your Google+ Page. This is an easy way to be added to more Circles. Because your website and blog get a lot of traffic, it’s a no-brainer that you should be cross-promoting on these sites as well as on Twitter and Linkedin. By doing this, it’s a great way to build new leads and be added to more Circles.

Get more information at Google+ for business

Steve Emory, President & Managing Partner Emory Digital

1 in 5 Tap Social Media for Healthcare Information

Yes Healthcare is getting personal according to a new Pew study with 80% of  consumers going online for health-related information. Furthermore 1 of every 5 use social media as their go-to resource for what ails them. Of those who use social media for healthcare information, 94% cite Facebook as their primary platform according to a National Research Corporation study.

Back in the day, all the way back to the late 90’s…WebMD created the first true platform for consumers to help themselves to valuable researched healthcare information. They continue to be a first online choice for an estimated 15 million unique visitors each month who check personal symptoms and potential solutions that prepare them to have an informed two-way dialog with their doctors and caretakers.

Today we as marketers must include social media as an integrated component of our online ad campaigns to compete regardless of how difficult it may be to get started or how long it takes to make it a seamless, measurable and lucrative media channel. Marketing today is all about being in the right place at the right time for your prospects to search and find your voice (and brand).

For insurance and healthcare marketers, the days of standalone campaigns that push your message out to a list or that try to guess which websites prospects are most likely to visit are long gone.

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital