Featuring your business on Yelp as well as any other consumer review websites is imperative to growing your business, especially in 2020. However, what do you do when a bad review begins to tarnish the online reputation of your business. How can you save your business?
You’ve launched a website and you’ve started to build your profile on a number of other sites online including Yelp!, the internet’s most popular review site, and BAM, out of nowhere, a bad review.
Where do you turn?
Who can you call?
How can you disproven fake reviews?
Typically, as a business owner, you understand that what the internet says about you or your company has the ability to make or break your business.
Bad Yelp! Reviews Cause Emotional Anguish For All Businesses
- Denial: “This review doesn’t indicate anything. These people are ignorant. Nobody is going to see this right?”
- Anger: “Who do they think they are? They don’t know anything about who we are or what we do? This is probably a competitor out to destroy my business.”
- Bargaining: “I can probably convince someone working at Yelp to remove it! Maybe if I just explain the situation…”
- Depression: “That’s it – our business is done! Nobody will shop here with that review. Time to pick up and move shop out of town.”
- Acceptance: “You can’t please everyone – let’s learn from this experience and make it right in the future.”
Acceptance is a significant place to position yourself as you cycle through the five stages. The fact is, negative Yelp reviews can surely impact your business in a negative fashion.
“Millennials” and “Generation X’ers’, both are newly developing groups of maturing individuals now entering the market with increasing income.
Young consumers rely profoundly on internet reviews prior to making any buying decisions. A proactive response to negative reviews is your key to turning negative reviews into a good thing for your business.
A Good Thing? Are You Kidding?
No, we are not joking.
With traditional marketing, companies use to spend tons of capital attempting to generate real customer feedback in order to create more “curb appeal” for new potential customers.
Turning Lemons Into Lemonade
- Examine the content of the review.
This can be a troublesome step particularly if you have a lot of self-confidence in your business.
Evaluate your online reviews from an unbiased perspective – put yourself in the shoes of a new customer seeing you for the first time.
- Conduct a comprehensive business audit
The three P’s of the marketing are Product, Pricing, and Placement which is the foundation of your business
Typ[ically, if you accumulate poor online customer reviews, you most likely need to tweak your efforts amongst those three P’s.
That’s when you can leverage now newly existing online reviews as a chance to increase your business’ reputation online and in-person.
Getting poor reviews about your product or service?
Perhaps your product/service is flawed – if so, time to go back to the drawing board and make serious fundamental changes. Are your prices are too high?
Consumers rarely complain about low prices, and perhaps you miscalculated your price positioning based on the competition.
Complaints about product delivery or customer service? Your product placement/distribution needs a tune-up. Time to look at your overall distribution model and implement new training.
- Reply to the comment as soon as you can.
Don’t let your bad reviews burn a hole into your online reputation. Websites like Yelp! and customer reviews on places like Amazon.com are there to provide transparency for the consumer.
Show the consumer you understand this by replying publicly to the review online in a calm and respectful manner. Address the issue and how you plan to resolve it.
Most consumers perceive your willingness to interact with both happy and gruntled customers to be not only impressive but an excellent way to generate repeat business.
Why? Because your audience knows that you want to find a solution for them regardless of the request – the end goal is to generate a positive review.
For example, consumers who are researching a new business/brand to buy from, individuals tend to scan for your response to each negative review to see how you are on a more personable level.
In this digital era, online reviews (i.e. Yelp!) businesses are beginning to rely more heavily on their online reputation. So – what does Yelp!, say about you?