How to Handle Online Reviews to Improve Your Brand Reputation

Online reviews are a powerful force in brand reputation management. If your business has an online presence, or even if you trade locally, how customers express opinions about your products and services in reviews matters.

Research confirms this perspective as over 95% of customers read online reviews before they shop. For some businesses, this may seem a daunting statistic. However, it is an aspect of brand management that can be turned to your advantage, particularly if your teams are familiar with review website tracking.

Building a compelling brand reputation strategy is essential to this process. Learning how to monitor, maintain, and maximize reviews about your brand is a key tool in your brand management kit.

Social listening to online feedback is a productive approach if you’re growing your brand and looking for ways to increase consumer trust. However, merely focusing on customer reviews isn’t enough to constitute a well-constructed and effective brand management policy.

Brands that invest in customer conversations and respond proactively to online review statistics are gaining ground ahead of their competitors. Getting to know your customers and understanding how to improve satisfaction levels are all vital steps in evolving your brand reputation online.

What Is An Online Reputation?

A brand’s online reputation is defined as the perspectives customers have about a brand online. It can be influenced by the content you share, plus the interactions of customers on social media and online review sites.

Managing your online reputation effectively is important because it acts as your public avatar for consumers. The perceptions of your brand shared in online reviews aren’t just brand commentary; they are a powerful facet of your business. Building trust requires planning and carefully incorporating strategies that benefit you and your customers.

5 Ways To Maximize Online Reviews

Try to integrate the following constructive methods into your brand strategy so your teams gain a competitive advantage and boost customers’ satisfaction levels.

Get to know your audience

If you want to know how people are speaking about your brand, then you need to understand your audience. Social listening is key to this process as being present where your customers like to air their views can deliver valuable insights.

Delivering a nurturing customer experience is crucial, with 88% of buyers saying experience matters as much as a company's products. However, recent data indicates that poor customer service was the most common reason for consumer complaints in 2023. This underscores the significance of prioritizing customer satisfaction and encouraging trust and transparency in business interactions.

Measure your social fingerprint

Performing a regular and broad-reaching social media platform sweep enables your customer service teams to gain a more profound sense of chatter about your brand and how to construct customer service policies better.

It’s sensible to include customer review sites so you have a panoramic view of customer perceptions about your products and services. Once you have regular feedback, this data can shape your goals and targets over the near and long term.

Respond with speed to online reviews

Dealing with bad reviews or complaints is a challenge for any business, but to grow, these perspectives should be monitored, analyzed, and addressed. If your company is aware of customer complaints, a rapid response policy can be helpful.

Never has this been more prescient, as today, 93% of customers expect a brand to reply to them within 24 hours. Ensuring that customer service teams are tracking online reviews across multiple sites and responding with helpful advice are critical methods of brand reputation management.

Request reviews and testimonials

Asking for search engine reviews and website testimonials can be productive strategies for maintaining a positive online reputation. Prompting a customer with a post-sale email is a compelling tactic to ensure you are capturing plenty of consumer feedback to help you respond quickly to any issues and celebrate happy customer experiences.

Encourage brand advocacy

Once you have a consistent online presence and your customers know they can interact with your brand, it’s time to start recruiting your unofficial brand advocates. Online review tracking will help, as nurturing customers through their purchase journey encourages them to return and share positive purchase experiences with others.

Do Online Reviews Boost Brand Reputation?

As a business, the way you interact with your customers—online and offline—will define your brand reputation. So, it makes sense to dive deep into online review sites to ensure you are addressing problems to provide a more frictionless customer journey.

Understanding customer feedback is the foundation for improving customer satisfaction levels. Once you get to know your customers and their buying patterns, you can develop a flexible approach to customer service that is more closely aligned with consumers' expectations.