The Role of Reviews in Your Reputation

You might not think online reviews have anything to do with engaging your customers, but you’d be mistaken. In the B2C world where you’re marketing to real people, not businesses, it’s important for clients to know that you care what they think. And not just when they have a complaint, but when they are satisfied, too. In our leading consumer marketing agency in Raleigh, we believe asking your customers to post on legitimate review websites shows you are confident in your ability to provide good service, and you intend to take care of any problems.


Understanding What Customer Engagement Is

Customer engagement is the way you interact with clients across all your touchpoints or digital channels, from the way you communicate with them to your methods of selling and invoicing. This includes your website, social media profiles, guest blog posts, brochures and other advertising materials, and the way you react to feedback from them. Getting clients to talk to you on a one-to-one basis on a virtual forum builds relationships you can use to ensure they have good customer experiences.


Creating Connections

Communicating with clients in a way that fosters an emotional connection requires you to use channels that are available easily to the customer. In the 20th century, such channels included TV, radio, print advertisements and sponsorships. In this second decade of the 21st century, however, client engagement strategies have changed, and so have the ways companies reach their customer base.

Communication is mostly digital now, and to get their attention it needs to be transparent, compelling and personalised. Your clients will engage with your business if they feel connected, seen and heard during their customer experience, and they believe you care about them.


How Online Customer Reviews Boost Credibility

Online reviews are just one of the digital channels companies can use to connect with their customers. The rise of platforms offering online reviews are important locations for customer engagement, with Facebook, Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor just scratching the surface.

These days, there are literally hundreds of these sites available, including:
-Angie’s List
-Bing Places
-Epinions
-HundredX
-OpenTable
-SuperPages
-TrustRadius
-Yext
and although some are less well-known than others, any site that offers reviews you can’t tamper with is credible. It’s not just about having positive reviews, either—how you respond to negative reviews can make all the difference in the world to your online reputation. If you’ve ever wanted a direct line to get feedback from your customers, this is it.


Reviews Are a Good Research Tool

Review sites are also an important research tool for customers when they begin their journey with you. How does that help your online reputation? Because companies without reviews have less of an online presence. And since the first port of call for any prospective customer, these days is to see whether you’re known online, without a strong presence you have less credibility, less visibility, and are less likely to be found in search, regardless of how good your website SEO is.

Research from ReviewTrackers shows more than one-third of all searches are local, and local search results are based heavily on the number of reviews available. When you search for “home appliances in Greenville NC,” for example, the number and strength of the online customer reviews are one of the factors that decide which appliance stores show up in your results.


Improving the Customer Experience

Reviews give you data about the customer journey. What can you learn about your customers with data? A lot. You can discover what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what your customers think about their experience. As the leading digital and branding marketing agency in Raleigh, we recommend making your operational changes based on what real clients say. You can make changes to your offering based on an analysis of customer feedback, and by doing so you could make the client’s life better—not just provide a service. To engage with your customer is to be more than a supplier of a product or service. It enables you to deliver a more exceptional customer experience than any amount of traditional marketing and advertising will.

Reviews give you insight into what customers do and don’t like about the activities at your locations. Satisfied clients advocate for your business in positive reviews, and the data from online customer reviews can help you improve your customers’ journeys and increase your levels of customer engagement.

For more information on how to use online reviews as part of your client engagement strategy, please contact our marketing agency in Raleigh on 919.460.7978.