How to Take Your Reputation Management Strategy to the Next Level

Your customers are your most important source of feedback. Their ratings and reviews impact how search engines and other customers make decisions about your brand every day. Essentially, if you're not creating a great experience across touchpoints, and taking your customer reviews into account, you're leaving revenue on the table.

So, you understand why your reputation management matters so much, and have started internalizing feedback by monitoring and responding to your business reviews.

What's next?

Get a holistic view through sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis — also referred to as opinion mining or emotion AI — is the process of identifying the opinions or feelings expressed in a piece of text or speech, with the goal of determining if the attitude toward a particular product or business is positive, negative, or neutral.

Why does sentiment analysis matter in reputation management? Because gathering data about how a person feels towards your brand (i.e., what words they used in a tweet, how much stress was in their voice when they asked Siri for your customer service number) can help you respond to queries more effectively and provide a better customer experience. It enables you to stay one step ahead when providing happy customers with the right experiences — as well as potentially anticipating negative reviews, and salvaging the brand relationship with disgruntled visitors. Sentiment analysis helps you take your understanding of what your customers are saying online to the next level.

With the right tools, sentiment analysis allows you to analyze customer feedback at scale to better understand how it's truly impacting your ratings and reviews as a whole.

Know how you stack up when it comes to the competition.

Understanding your online reputation and review performance relative to your competitors is crucial to winning and maintaining business.

Most marketers know the value of competitive intelligence, but it's important to make sure you're putting that information to work with actual metrics about your star-rating, how your review volume has changed over time, and which locations (if you have more than one) are performing best.

That said, developing an in-depth strategy for a multi-location business can be time consuming. If you're looking to streamline the process, Yext can help you learn how your rating, review count, and more compare to other businesses in your industry— so you can compare insights by location, and pinpoint areas where you can win more business by improving your operations and customer experience.

Generate even more reviews to help you stand out in new search experiences.

To show ratings in organic search results, Google requires that you generate your own reviews directly from your customers that live on your website. Additionally, reviews help power recommendations across many AI-powered services, like Amazon Alexa. If a customer asks Alexa or Siri for the "best tailor near me," it's reviews that inform the "best" term.

Fortunately, generating new reviews is easier than it sounds. 70% of consumers will leave a review if you just ask. You can start by simply asking your customers at checkout if they're willing to leave a review. Following up with repeat customers via email or in-app to ask for a review is a good strategy, too — provided you don't do so too often.

Even if you have plenty of detailed reviews across platforms, new reviews are an important part of your reputation management strategy because they help keep you relevant — and give your customers the up-to-date view they're looking for.

Looking for a tool that can save you time when it comes to generating new, high-quality reviews? Yext Review Generation, part of Yext Reviews, can help you collect first-party reviews from customers, add those reviews to your website, and more.

Explore more strategies inThe Complete Guide to Reputation Management.