1. Client Sign-In/Opt-In – You need to have a way of collecting client information for folks that have recently done business with you. Ideally you would have multiple ways to feed data into your system.
2. 24-Hour Delay & Data Check – You want to allow a little time between when you’ve worked with a client and when you ask them for a review. You also need to run a check to see if you’ve already asked a client for a review within the last 90 days. You don’t want to ask someone for a review who has already recently given you one.
3. Text & Email – Presuming they should receive a review request, you will have a process to invite your client to leave you a review. We recommend leveraging both Text Messaging as well as Email messaging. (NOTE: If you fail to get proper permission to send a text you could face a $10,000 fine per text that you improperly send.)
4. Follow-Up – If someone doesn’t properly respond to your initial messages, you need a strong follow-up sequence as it can take between 3-5 requests before someone responds.
5. Feedback – You need a clear and concise way for someone to leave you feedback. It needs to be easy for your customer to fill out.
6. Positive Review – If someone leaves a positive review you need to send them a thank you message. You might also consider including a special offer as a thank you. You might even ask for a referral at this stage.
7. Personal Follow-up – Positive reviews also deserve a follow up from someone in sales to give a personal thanks.
8. Direct Connection With Directories – Once you receive the positive review now is the time to ask the customer to go ahead and post it out on review sites. We always recommend starting with Google as that is the most impactful for most service oriented businesses. Next would be Facebook. After that could be Yelp. Then there might be industry-specific directories where having a client leave a review would be beneficial.
9. Reporting – All of this should be documented in some kind of reporting so you know in a glance how you are doing in terms of asking for and collecting high quality reviews.
10. Negative Review – If someone leaves negative feedback we need a different process. In this case we would route the individual to a more detailed complaint form. Our goal is to give them a chance to vent and to collect valuable information that can help you improve your business.
11. Apology Campaign – Your process should include sending an apology message out to the client.
12. Management Alert – Your process should also trigger an alert for a manager to immediately contact the customer to make the situation better. FAST ACTION will serve as a pattern interrupt and will prevent folks from leaving you negative reviews online.

Each step of the process requires paying attention to details and making sure the right information is routing to the right people. While the process can be performed manually, we strongly encourage automating the process. It’s too easy for steps to be skipped and for details to fall through the cracks.

1. Primary Review Sites – You need to actively monitor for reviews across all the major review sites available. This is critical because you must reply to ALL reviews (positive or negative). The reason is because this has a tremendous value from a marketing perspective and from a brand-building perspective. Folks viewing your reviews will be impressed you took the time to respond to each review.
2. Feedback Dashboard – You need a way of collecting, organizing, and tracking these reviews. At a minimum you could use a spreadsheet. Again this is a fairly labor intensive process to monitor for reviews. It is vital you check for reviews frequently. This is especially true if you have a negative review.
3. Review Response Strategy – You want your response to be written for future review readers IN ADDITION to the person who originally left you the review. This subtle shift in planning your responses is critical to ensure you maximize each impression you make. A carefully worded response to a negative review can actually build trust despite having the negative review!
4. Team Training – We strongly encourage that you implement team-wide training on the importance of maintaining a 5-star reputation and on why it is important to collect as many reviews as possible from clients. Your team members must understand that this has a direct impact on your ability to generate leads, win more business, and ensure the best possible experience for your clients.
5. Reporting – You must also maintain good reporting so that you can see your trajectory over time. Is your reputation stable, getting better, or getting worse? What is the general sentiment or “feeling” toward your brand?
6. Post Responses – Your review responses need to be posted back out to the sites where the reviews appeared. The responses will also show up in Google results pages when someone clicks on reviews.
7. SEO Impact – Your review management will pay dividends in terms of more traffic to your website.

As you can imagine, this too can be time-consuming to monitor for reviews, maintain reporting, creating staff training, etc.

 

Positive reviews are worth celebrating! All your work in tracking and reporting pays off here because you can then work to share your successes with the world at large. This creates “buzz” around your brand and demonstrates why you are worth doing business with in the first place.

1. Social – You will want to promote your success across the major social channels. These MUST include a minimum of at least LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Business, Instagram, and Facebook. These must be VISUALLY INTERESTING and unique graphics that quickly grab attention and tell your story. So for each positive review you will need to create a unique graphic. Also note that the different platforms have unique image size requirements so you will be creating different versions of the same graphic for each of the different platforms. Time consuming as it may be, it is critical to elevate your brand. (Note that graphics posted this way could end up back in search results pages further enhancing your search engine presence.)
2. Video – We highly recommend you take your very best reviews and turn them into videos. The videos should be about a minute in length and they should quickly establish your brand and the fact that you have a fantastic review from a great client. Celebrating your clients in this way make them feel positive about your brand. And these videos have a may likely also appear in Google and Bing search results… which will make your brand appear to be that much better versus your competitors. You should plan to produce a minimum of 1 video per quarter or 4 videos per year.
3. Content – As reviews flow in, you need to feature these reviews on your website. So you will need a process established for regularly updating your website with reviews. We recommend you feature this in a way that is always present on your site and that is visually interesting.
4. Traffic – We recommend retargeting as an advertising strategy. Retargeting implants a tracking pixel so that ads can follow website visitors after they have viewed your website. The key to successful retargeting so that you aren’t annoying is to have ad diversity that speaks to needs and that demonstrates trustworthiness. Having unique ads that celebrate your 5-star reputation and that mentions specific clients is a fantastic way to do this. Again you’ll need to create custom graphics here but it will be worth the effort!

The marketing of your success is possibly the most critical and time consuming piece of the puzzle. It is what will allow your brand to punch through in your local market and help you rise above your competitors.

 

 I’m sure you’ll agree that the entire 3-part strategy we’ve outlined here is pretty thorough.

We’ve given you the exact map to follow to build a manual process that will allow you to surpass your competitors in your market.

You will walk away with a 5-star reputation that is growing and unbeatable over time. And even if you already have a somewhat working process in place, chances are high that you aren’t fully following all of the steps we’ve outlined.

(You might need a better training process… or perhaps you need to do a better job in marketing your 5-star reviews when they occur…)

So the question is this: How much time and money are you willing to invest in having your staff pursue this strategy? Remember, your reputation has a direct impact on your brand’s value which impacts how much you can ultimately sell your business for should you choose to retire.

Once business owners realize how important it is to build a 5-star reputation they quickly realize it is a daunting task to manually do the work. This is why so many folks ultimately outsource their reputation management to specialists

There are many companies that offer reputation management services, each with its own pricing structure and packages. Here are some of the top providers in the industry:

• ReputationDefender: ReputationDefender offers a variety of reputation management services, including online review management, brand protection, and crisis management. Pricing starts at $3,000 per year per location for their basic reputation management package.
• WebiMax: WebiMax provides reputation management services that help businesses monitor and manage their online reputation. They offer packages starting at $1,000 per month per location.
• Podium: Podium is a reputation management platform that helps businesses manage their online reviews, messaging, and customer feedback. Pricing starts at $399 per month per location.
• Birdeye.com: Birdeye.com provides a variety of reputation management services, including online review management and local business listings management. Pricing starts at $399 per month per location for reputation building and management.

It is worth noting that the cost of reputation marketing is not included in the pricing above. In fact virtually all reputation management services tend to focus on reputation building and reputation management. If marketing is present it is usually limited to social posting to Facebook and Twitter. 

• Our competitors charge between $399 to over $1,000 per month per location and they omit one or more critical elements to a complete reputation strategy.
• liftDEMAND’s solution precisely follows the mapping outlined above including Reputation Building, Reputation Management, and Reputation Marketing. You know exactly what you are getting when you work with us.
• Our rate starts at $275 per month per location.