Do you have bad online reviews? Here’s how to turn that negative feedback into a bottom-line booster

Adam Petrilli is a reputation management expert and CEO at NetReputation.coman award-winning Online Reputation Management (ORM) company.

In the digital age, online reviews are more important than ever, especially when it comes to maintaining brand image and gaining customer trust. But what happens when those online reviews are negative or even toxic?

While bad reviews can often pose a serious threat to your brand and reputation, they can also create a valuable learning and marketing opportunity. In fact, an effective review management approach can be a powerful way to bridge consumer connections, strengthen customer loyalty, and even convert prospects into buyers.

Regardless of the industry, every business owner should have a plan to manage negative reviews and unlock their potential. Here are five tips to turn negative feedback on its head and turn that unwanted comment into a boon for your business.

Build your company profile.

One of the simplest yet often underused ways to manage reviews and reduce their impact is to build optimized company profiles across a variety of online review platforms. So when potential customers search your reviews on things like Yelp, Amazon, or Google, they’ll find accurate, useful information you want them to see: photos, location, hours of operation, business description. Details that (ideally) help balance that negative feedback while increasing trust in your brand.

Ultimately, creating optimized business profiles helps establish authenticity and credibility when responding to reviews, especially since most customers would be quick to mistrust responses from accounts without photos or verifiable business information. Claiming and optimizing your profiles on major review hubs provides a basis to establish legitimacy and provide honest and genuine answers.

Keep an eye out for reviews.

Making time to regularly check popular online review platforms is essential to staying one step ahead of negative business feedback. Tracking how often your company is reviewed also helps you identify review patterns, such as “review swells” during periods of high sales volume or any correlations between reviews and specific products, employees, or situations.

Any patterns you discover can help identify which products (and which don’t) work well for your business. For example, if the Black Friday battle causes a delay in shipping, which then leads to an increase in negative reviews, you’re probably better prepared to make adjustments and avoid such problems in the future.

Respond quickly to reviews.

Once you’ve optimized the review site profiles and track reviews regularly, it’s important to develop a proactive and fast review strategy. Responding quickly and consistently to negative reviews (or all reviews, really) builds trust, shows genuine concern for customer issues, and ensures you address issues before they turn into full-blown brand crisis.

If possible, work on tracking and responding to every negative review (even a short “I’m so sorry!”) can often go a long way. By publicly addressing negative feedback, you show potential buyers that you take mistakes seriously and value each customer’s experience. And while it may not hurt to occasionally (politely and carefully) correct misleading information, apologizing and offering a solution is usually your best bet.

Request reviews from satisfied customers.

Getting reviews from happy customers on a regular basis can also help reduce negative comments and improve reviews on influential platforms, such as increasing brand credibility and increasing your review footprint and reach in the process.

By setting up customizable review request messaging that is sent at the point of purchase, you help capture positive brand sentiment when it’s furthest in the customer’s mind, increasing the likelihood of authentic, credible reviews your business can use later on. commend and promote is increased. Following up on purchases with friendly review request reminder emails can also help you get more reviews and capitalize on positive experiences before it’s too late.

Social media also offers excellent, up-to-date opportunities to encourage positive feedback. Posting links on Instagram and Facebook, for example, helps direct customers to specific review platforms, while making it easy to quickly leave a review in their spare time. A robust approach to review requests can not only improve your reviews, but also provide valuable, constructive feedback on which aspects of your business are driving the best results.

Show customers you’re listening.

As mentioned earlier, monitoring your review footprint can be an effective way to identify feedback patterns and use negative reviews to improve the customer experience. By incorporating what you’ve learned into your review response strategy, you can show that you’re paying attention to common customer complaints and use what you’ve learned to fix the problem and avoid similar mistakes in the future.

And if many customers share similar feedback, you can use those negative reviews to develop or revise your marketing, especially when launching a new product or business endeavor. Branding efforts that effectively consider and integrate the lessons learned from negative reviews can help strengthen brand appeal with new customers while enticing previous customers to rejoin the fold.

In short, negative reviews are not the end of the world for a company. They can even be a springboard for internal company change and public marketing efforts. By keeping a close eye on reviews and responding to them quickly under an authentic business account, customers will trust your brand again. Plus, feedback from your customers allows you to drill down into specific pain points your business is experiencing and implement the changes that will help you expand.

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