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What is Online Review Management?

At a high level: Online review management is defined as a set of strategies and tactics that help you grow, monitor, and respond to your business’s online reviews.

For your everyday operations, that translates to: you understand that reviews can shape the perception that customers have for your business, and you’re putting in the time it takes to manage that perception.

Once you finish with this course, you will understand the pillars and strategies used to manage online reviews. You will also know how you can ensure that the offline reality of your business is accurately reflected online.

The Four Pillars of Online Review Management: Always IMPRove

We like to make things simple for everyone interested in online review management, so all you’ll need to keep in mind about what you’ll need to do to manage your business’s reviews is IMPRove!

Increase

If you’re taking this course, you’re probably already interested in learning how to increase the number of online reviews left about your business. These reviews can influence the decisions of a customer and will ultimately reflect positively or negatively on your brand.

To increase the number of reviews you’re getting, all you need to do is ask.

For real. It’s that simple.

Now, there are a few things that go into getting this asking thing done right, including training your staff, filling them in on why online review management is essential, instructing them to ask everyone and let them know what profile they should be sending customers.

You may also want to consider using a tool to help you with this process since it can help you save time monitoring all of your profiles, sending out review requests, and getting feedback directly from customers.

No matter what you do, the goal of increasing your online reviews is to shape and manage your brand’s perception and make it more appealing to savvy customers who are doing their research online first.

Monitor

One of the most important aspects of online review management is the monitoring process that you need to build into your business’s operational schedule. It’s not enough to go through your profiles once and consider your job done.

Once you’ve claimed your profiles and made sure all of the information listed on them is correct and appealing, you (or a point person) will have to consistently check each profile to make sure that you’re catching reviews on a much shorter timeline.

Monitoring should happen on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule at a minimum. There are two primary ways to handle this aspect of review management: one, visit all of your review profiles manually, or two, use a software tool to consolidate all your profiles into one central dashboard.

For some, figuring out which option works best really comes down to time and budget: Do you have enough time in your schedule to manage this process? Does someone else inside of the organization?

Promote

It’s not enough to just engage and respond whenever a new review rolls in. If you want to have an excellent ORM strategy, you’ll have to promote your reviews as well.

If you’re doing this step right, it means you are going to take great reviews and integrate them within your marketing and advertising campaigns. There’s a bigger picture at play here, where customers are both reminded that you want their feedback and feel appreciated as you feature their kind words.

Later in this course, we’ll return to this topic so you can learn more about how you can promote your online reviews the right way to get even more reviews and to build up your brand’s reputation.

Respond

People tend to accept the positive and try and hide from the negative. This is also true for people who are keeping an eye on their online reviews.

Here’s the thing: you’ll need to engage with both positive and negative reviews, even if you want to bury your head in the sand when that inevitable one-star review is published!

There are both good and bad ways to respond to reviews, and we will give you some great templates to use in Lesson 6: Tips and Tricks for Successful Online Review Management.

However, there are a few general points you should keep in mind when responding:

  • Keep your cool and don’t respond with anger –  even if you’ve received a particularly scathing negative review.
  • Timing is key. Respond ASAP to make sure the reviewer sees that you are invested in their feedback and to provide context to readers who may be reading a recent negative review.

Depending on how you respond, sometimes, negative reviews will get updated to positive ones following an appropriate and timely response from the business owner. If you are tackling a negative review that is complaining about one thing or another, stay solution-focused to spin things positively.