Amplify the Power of Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is a powerful referral source for most brick-and-mortar retailers, but the ways in which your customers share positive experiences they’ve had in your store have evolved over time. While the good old over-the-fence recommendation is still alive and well, many of your prospective customers are turning to search engines to help them vet your business through online reviews and recommendations.

These evaluations give your customers the ability to magnify the power of a single review—be it positive or negative—and this makes it absolutely critical for you to be tuned in to the conversation that is taking place online about your business. Even if you receive a less-than-flattering review, it can work in your favor. How and when you respond to reviews is key. Do so swiftly and politely, and offer to make good on any mistakes offline. Engaging with a negative reviewer confrontationally will never go well for your brand.

This article will walk you through many of the online review channels your team needs to be aware of to ensure you’re taking full advantage of the positive online recommendations from your customers—a component of the practice known as “online reputation management,” or ORM.

While I won’t dive deeply into the offline activities you can do to support positive online reviews, I will kick things off with a few basic pointers:

• Ask happy customers to go online and share their experiences with friends and family via their favorite online recommendation engines.
   
• Ask new customers how they heard about you—if a customer referral or positive online review drove the sale, thank the referrer or the reviewer, and consider rewarding them with a freebie or small discount on their next purchase.
   
• Harness your positive online reviews for your next print piece—a quote from an online testimonial is a great piece of social proof for your next direct mailer.
   

Ready to find all of your online reviews? Let’s take a look at some of the primary online locations you need to ensure you’re tuned in to.

The Search Engines

Google My Business: Let’s start with a quick exercise. Go to Google and type in your dealership name. In the right hand column, you will find a box that features your Google Reviews.

Anyone can leave a review for your business—good, bad or ugly. You can, and absolutely should, keep tabs on these high-profile online reviews by signing into your Google My Business account, scrolling to “reviews” and clicking “manage reviews.” From here, you can click “view and reply” to write a response to your reviews. If you don’t have a Google account, you must first claim your listing.

Bing and Yahoo! Local Listings: Bing holds the second seat in U.S. search share at approximately 12 percent, and Yahoo! comes in at a close third holding 11 percent. Lucky for you, both of the runners-up in the search engine business have partnered with the third-party site Yelp to auto-populate reviews in both Yahoo! and Bing local search results.

Third-Party Sites

Yelp: Yelp is by far the biggest name in online reviews. Since its start in 2004, “Yelpers” have written more than 77 million local reviews, and Yelp had an average of approximately 142 million monthly unique visitors in the first quarter of 2015 alone. As a first step, it’s important that you set up your Yelp profile to make sure the information listed about your dealership is accurate. As with Google, you have the opportunity to log in and respond to reviewers.

Over the years, there has been a level of controversy circling paid advertising on Yelp. While the company says that advertising has no bearing on positive reviews floating to the top and negative reviews fading to the bottom of the list, with such significant traffic, a small advertising investment may make sense if—and only if—your store is seeing a lot of traffic and reviews on the site.

CitySearch: CitySearch focuses on delivering locally targeted listings for its users, making it a great avenue for businesses to connect with consumers who are right around the corner. In order to respond to CitySearch reviews, you will need to create a free business listing, which also allows you to update contact information such as your address, website URL, phone number, hours of operation and more.

Social Media

Facebook: A well-managed Facebook presence is not only an informational portal with content you post for your fans, but also a collection of recommendations for your business from consumers as well. All reviews of your dealership will show up on your timeline.

If you aren’t seeing any ratings or reviews, check your Facebook settings to ensure your page category is set as a “Local Business.” Without this key setting, your fans won’t be able to rate your store on Facebook.

Twitter: While Twitter doesn’t offer reviews per se, it’s critical to monitor Twitter’s hyper fast-paced conversations—a negative tweet can quickly snowball. Monitor all tweets that mention your business, interacting with them just as you would on any review site, being sure to favorite and retweet positive mentions. You can search mentions via your Twitter handle and/or hashtags.

Your Website

Finally, your most prominent online space is the venue where you have total control of what you share. Cultivate your positive reviews from all of the online locations covered in this article and share them on a dedicated reviews and testimonials page. Be sure to give site visitors the option to submit reviews of their own, so that you can consistently update your site with rave reviews from happy customers. Also consider adding testimonials to your home page, landing pages and product pages for maximum impact.

Managing all of these online reviews and listings can become a bit of an overwhelming task. Services such as ARI Premium Directory Management can help you simplify the process by managing your business’s information across online directories and review sites and giving you a one-stop portal to manage online reviews across the web. Talk to your website or digital marketing services provider to see what tools they offer to make the overwhelming task of monitoring your online reputation much easier.