It happens every day: A customer searches online for a product or service you offer. They find your business, but before making a decision, they read reviews of your company and a few others. Negative reviews intermix with positive feedback — some outdated, some recent, and some unfair. Instead of choosing you, they go with a competitor, and you’ve lost a sale without even realizing it.
This is the challenge that online review management aims to solve. Reviews are the digital word-of-mouth marketing, with the power to build trust and shape opinions around the clock. That's why this is such a crucial piece of reputation management — if your reviews aren’t in tip-top shape, you could risk losing business and taking hits to your brand’s reputation.
Every review tells a story about your business. And yes, you can be in control of the narrative. Here’s what you need to know about online review management and how to make reviews work for you.
Contents:
What Is Online Review Management?
Why Is Online Review Management Important?
How to Monitor Online Reviews Effectively
Best Practices for Responding to Reviews
How to Encourage More Positive Reviews
Handling Fake or Misleading Reviews
Tools for Online Review Management
Managing Online Reviews with Meltwater
What Is Online Review Management?
Online review management is the intentional, proactive process of earning, monitoring, responding to, and taking action on your online reviews.
Successful brands don’t wait for people to leave online reviews; instead, they take the lead by sending reminders when customers make a purchase or running review campaigns.
And when those reviews start pouring in, they’re monitoring the feedback for helpful insights and potential harm to their brand image.
Managing customer reviews should be an ongoing priority. The more positive reviews you receive, the more they can offset the occasional negative review. And when you do receive a negative review, you can use that feedback to make impactful changes in your business — and emerge stronger than before.
Why Is Online Review Management Important?
Your business reviews are public. Every time someone reads a review, they’re getting to know your company a little better.
More than nine in 10 people say online reviews affect their buying decisions. They trust reviews and view them as credible sources of information. But reviews can only deliver on these expectations when brands take the time to property monitor and manage them.
People aren’t shy about sharing their feedback, especially in public places like Google Business Profile, which accounts for more than half of all online reviews. Reviews are highly accessible for users, plus they’re essentially free marketing tools for businesses.
While review platforms like Google have simplified the way people leave feedback, there’s also a dark side to the process. Anyone can post a review about a business or brand online, even if they’ve never purchased from you.
Without ongoing customer review management, your brand might suffer from false or misleading reviews. Bad reviews can drive good business away, and you shouldn’t lose customers at the expense of bad actors.
How to Monitor Online Reviews Effectively
Your customers might be posting reviews in places you aren’t currently checking, which makes it harder for you to manage and monitor online feedback. Let’s explore some steps you can take to improve your business review management online.
Know the key platforms to track
Regardless of industry or customer base, most businesses will get reviews on one or more of the following platforms:
- Yelp!
- TrustPilot
- G2
These will be the most important places for you to check for new reviews. Make sure you’ve set up your business profile on these platforms so that people can more easily find you and leave feedback. Having a clear profile lets your customers know they’re reviewing the right business.
Also, your customers might use other review platforms that are more specific to your industry. For example, doctors might collect patient feedback on HealthGrades.com or Doctor.com. Hotels and attractions often rely on TripAdvisor.
You can centralize your efforts by directing customers to the review platform you want them to use. For example, your feedback surveys, receipts, and home page might include links or QR codes to your Google Business Profile. This will let you generate more reviews in the same place, which gives potential customers a more in-depth look at your business.
TIP: Online review site G2 has named Meltwater one of the Top Media Monitoring Platforms. Check out the full report!
Use tools and automation for review monitoring
Review management tools like Meltwater’s media intelligence and social listening can automatically alert you when someone leaves a new review. AI features also analyze the sentiment of reviews and help you prioritize your outreach and responses.
These tools can also help you see the “bigger picture” of your brand’s online health. For example, a few bad reviews could indicate shifts in sentiment or a brewing crisis. Custom alerts will allow you to get ahead of the conversation and mitigate brand damage.
Best Practices for Responding to Reviews
Once you get a review, good or bad, it’s best to respond to the review to let your customers know you see and hear them. There’s an art to responding to reviews, so let’s look at some best practices to guide your words.
Acknowledge all reviews
Your customers took the time to leave their feedback, so brands should make it a point to acknowledge every review. Even if the review is positive or lacks detail, responding to a review shows your customers you care about their feedback.
Acknowledgements don’t have to be long-winded. A simple thank you can go a long way in reinforcing a positive brand image.
Respond to reviews in a timely manner
More than half of consumers expect companies to respond to their reviews. Responding as soon as possible benefits you just as much as your customer:
- Customers will feel seen and heard.
- Brands can take quick action to correct mistakes, mitigate damage, and potentially win back disgruntled customers.
Exactly how timely is timely?
It’s subjective, but most people expect a response to their review within seven days. They also agree that reviews older than three months aren’t relevant, so responding as soon as possible helps you extract the most benefits from each review.
Avoid deleting negative reviews
A cardinal sin of digital marketing: It’s never wise to delete a negative review — even if you think it’s bogus.
Consumers are emphasizing transparency from the businesses they buy from. If they see a negative review one day and it’s gone the next, it could reflect even more poorly on your brand image.
Don’t think of a bad review as all bad, though. In many cases, poor reviews offer opportunities for redemption. Crafting a good response can show you care about others’ experiences, and how you handle a situation could encourage others to do business with you (even if someone else was blatantly dissatisfied).
Craft professional responses to your reviews (especially bad reviews)
No matter what the review says, be sure to maintain professionalism in your response. While some people might love reading a juicy argument online, your business review page isn’t the place for it.
Don’t engage in a he-said, she-said situation. Be empathetic in your response and provide a way for the reviewer to get in touch with you to discuss further, if necessary.
How to Encourage More Positive Reviews
Online reviews can and do happen without your involvement. But just like writing your own story to ensure a happy ending, you can take control of the review process and fill your feed with more positive feedback.
Here’s some inspiration to help you earn good reviews from happy customers.
- Ask customers for a review after every purchase.
- Automate the review process with online review management tools.
- Make it easy for the customer to leave a review (e.g., QR codes or links to your review site).
- Run dedicated review campaigns and contests.
Never pay a review farm for online reviews. Most review sites can tell the difference between a real review and a fake one. If you pay for reviews, it can make your company appear dishonest and untrustworthy.
Handling Fake or Misleading Reviews
If you do suspect you’re a victim of a fake review (and it doesn’t put you in a good light), don’t panic. Deleting the review isn’t an option, at least not right away.
Instead, you can try these tactics to mitigate the review’s damage:
- Look for red flags of a fake review, such as having no record of that customer or vague or overly dramatic language.
- Report the review to the review platform (e.g., Google, Yelp!).
- Create a professional response indicating you suspect a fake review, like this: “We take customer feedback seriously and strive for the best service. However, we don’t have any record of your experience. Please reach out so we can resolve this."
- Focus on generating more positive reviews to outweigh the bad ones.
In some cases, where a fake review is causing damage to your brand, you may be able to pursue legal action. This is often a worst-case scenario, last-resort move.
Tools for Online Review Management
Tracking all of your online reviews can feel like a full-time job, especially if you’re using multiple review sites and/or get a high volume of reviews. The right tools can help you stay on top of review management and even automate some of the process of generating and responding to reviews. Here are a few essential tools to improve your review management.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s AI-powered intelligence platform gives you a bird’s eye view of your brand’s reputation. It tracks reviews and mentions across the biggest variety of review sites, forums, and media outlets. The platform alerts you in real time when there’s a new review or mention waiting for your attention.
Natural language processing tools analyze the sentiment of each message and spot recurring trends or patterns in feedback. They provide brands with a clear picture of what people are saying and how they’re saying it. You can customize different ways to score mentions and feedback, see when spikes in mentions occur, and get AI overviews of what every analysis means.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social unifies review management so you can see all of your reviews from a single dashboard. The platform works across all major review sites, Apple Store, Google Play, and employment sites like Glassdoor so you can see what people are saying about your company.
You can filter reviews by platform, coordinate responses, and track review trends over time to see the impact of reviews on your image. You’ll also see when to take action on reviews and get a basic analysis of the tone of each review.
InMoment
InMoment offers more than just review management. The platform digs deeper into each review to show you the sentiments and data behind the feedback. For example, it can surface recurring keywords or phrases your customers use about your business, which can help you gauge the tone of their responses and even learn what they like or dislike about your brand.
The platform also consolidates data to give you an overview of how your reviews look to the public. Tracking and monitoring sentiment around your brand can help you avoid potential crises and stay in tune with your customers’ preferences.
Managing Online Reviews with Meltwater
Your reputation isn’t something to leave to chance. Meltwater helps you manage your brand image with real-time alerts, ongoing media monitoring, and AI-driven insights to learn what your data is telling you — and how to act on it.
Meltwater’s comprehensive media platform helps you prioritize review management. With a bird’s eye view of all of your reviews and a centralized way to respond to them, you’ll never miss a chance to make a strong impression.
Request a demo to learn more about how Meltwater's suite of solutions can help you manage online reviews and safeguard your brand's reputation.
