A good reputation is one of the pillars of success in business. It helps to scale up, to conquer new audiences. If there are problems with your reputation, it can easily ruin your ideas, turning away both partners and clients. The difficulty is that it is much easier to spoil than to build. Therefore, today we suggest talking about the danger of a damag brand reputation, how to recognize problems in time and how to regain the trust of the audience.
A hit to revenues
It has been confirm by more than one study: the lion’s share of consumers (about 98% according to RBC estimates) really do read reviews before buying. Moreover, for 91% of buyers, such opinions of other people are a significant factor when making a purchase decision. Therefore, it is important that a person, entering the query “Your product/brand + reviews” into a search engine, sees positive or at least neutral comments.
The influence of user ratings is fully confirm by the figures. Researchers from the Harvard Business School have come to the following conclusions after a series of experiments:
- Increasing brand rating by 1 star can give +9% to sales volume
- Ratings of 1-2 points can cost you 86% of new clients
That is, improving reputation produces much slower progress than worsening it.
Important: the option “No reviews at all” will not work either. From the consumer’s point of view, this is an indicator that the company’s products are not interesting at all and are not in demand. Or that this is some kind of untri new product – buy telemarketing data and few people like to test new things on themselves.
It is also important that positive reviews are as high as possible in the top of search results. Users, using reputation queries, almost never go beyond the first page of results. Therefore, what is issu in the top of search results will create your image in the eyes of potential clients.
Ultimately, all this can hit the financial indicators. The link “Online Reputation — Product Value” is form quite quickly. As a result, you begin to be automatically associat with a bad image. It can be very difficult to correct this state of affairs. As a result, new clients simply do not reach your offers, turning away after reading reviews. And business revenues begin to fall.
What to do? The right thing: work on your online reputation. And now you have a wide range of opportunities to do so.
It’s not just sales that suffer
It would be wrong to say that a damag awb directory reputation only affects sales. It is dangerous for the business as a whole, causing damage in various directions:
- Growing Marketing Budgets
Many companies try to cover up the negativity on the Internet with large-scale advertising campaigns. The bet here is on the fact that potential clients can see the advertisement earlier than low ratings on review sites. As a result, solid budgets have to be constantly pour into image and promotion.
- Problems with staffing
A company’s declining reputation can turn away not only customers, but also employees. Especially if the latter are personally confront with negativity. This not only creates an additional burden, but also affects the employees’ self-perception. It is possible that many of them in such a situation will start looking for a place where they will feel involv in a respect cause. Difficulties with finding new personnel are also possible: reviews of employers are also very popular. If you are spoken of here as a company that is not respect by customers, the old man and the mortgage there may be difficulties in attracting new valuable personnel.
- Difficulties in relationships with business partners
If you have a bad reputation, it may prevent you from establishing favorable terms of cooperation, attracting capital, etc. For potential partners, this is a signal: “Clients do not have the best opinion – there may be problems with profitability.” And they will be right. Plus, reputational risks for the partners themselves are not exclud.
So negative reviews online about your company are not just unpleasant words. Accumulating, such content can have a painful impact on the results of your activities. Moreover, it can hit several pain points. And it will take a long time and a lot of time to recover from the consequences. Therefore, we will repeat once again: reputation nes to be taken care of on an ongoing basis. And actively, and not just by reading new reviews. Otherwise, they will ruin you.
How to tell if a company’s online reputation has been damag
The sooner the problem is detect, the easier it will be to get rid of it. Therefore, ideally, it is better to catch the moment of a decline in reputation when the first signs appear. For example, here is what may indicate impending problems:
