A strong online presence is absolutely essential for any franchise that wants to stay competitive and succeed in today’s market. But if your strategy doesn’t include reputation management, your brand could all too easily fall through the cracks.
Prospective customers use major search engines like Google to look for information on businesses they’re considering. Poor reviews, ratings, or other negative/suspicious information will turn them away from your brand, driving them toward competitors instead. That’s exactly why reputation management is so important.
A good online reputation helps you attract and retain customers (and employees, too), leading to franchise success. Here’s how to harness the power of your reputation and turn the tide in your favor.
What is franchise reputation management?
Your reputation is what people think about your brand. Online, buyers use social media posts, reviews, and any other available information to help inform their perception of your business. Reputation management is the process of intentionally monitoring and guiding the information that people see about your brand online, making sure your reputation is aligned with the high value your business brings to the market. In other words, you want to ensure you have a positive reputation so that consumers will want to do business with you.
Reputation management includes practices like:
- Monitoring conversations about your brand
- Responding to reputation threats
- Proactively improving your reputation
Communications, marketing, legal, customer experience, sales, and loyalty functions all fall under the reputation management umbrella.
For franchise businesses, reputation management poses a unique challenge. If you have several locations and team members, it can be harder to get a handle on your customer satisfaction levels and understand exactly where your reputation is. Implementing a reputation management strategy, however, helps you maintain awareness and control over your franchise(s) — helping you rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages) and creating more positive awareness around your brand.
Why reputation management matters
Reputation management brings you more business and higher sales volume. Customers want to shop with brands they trust — businesses that provide high-quality products and an overall good experience. If your reputation promises these things, your revenues will go up.
Not only does reputation management help grow your audience and your revenues, it also naturally improves the customer experience. When you take actions that improve your reputation (like resolving customer issues), you’re making your current customers happy, too. It’s all about making sure your good reputation is warranted.
At the end of the day, reputation management benefits both you and your customers. What’s not to love?
3 reputation management tips
Get started improving your reputation by following these reputation management tips to help your franchise succeed.
#1. Build relationships to cement customer loyalty
Our top reputation management tip? Let your customers do the work for you. Strategically build relationships with your customers, getting them to engage with your brand so they’ll come back to purchase again and again — and so they’ll talk favorably about your business online.
Creating a customer loyalty program is a great way to retain those happy customers. Offer customers some type of reward or incentive for shopping with you again and again. This might look like:
- Discounts
- Freebies
- Coupons
- Gift cards
- Sneak peeks
- Exclusive events
- Free shipping
- Special sales
For example, you can give customers a punch card that gets them one punch per visit. On their 10th visit, they can redeem the card for a free gift, discount, or some other reward. You can also give customers points and rewards when they refer a friend, spend a certain cumulative amount, or write a review of your business.
Customer loyalty programs improve your reputation because they create satisfied customers who will share about your brand by word of mouth, on- and offline.
#2. Use social media
Social media is a great tool to help build your reputation. Create original content that gets across the heart of your brand, showing people who you are, what you do, and why you do it. For franchises, the key to social media is encouraging each of your locations to differentiate itself from the others. Each account’s username and hashtags should include its city or neighborhood. Your tone of voice might need to shift to speak to your local customer base, using different slang or visuals.
Sharing customer reviews on social media is also a great way to boost your reputation (and to get more brand awareness as customers repost their own reviews). Grab a screenshot of a five-star review and use it to create a graphic to share across your social channels.
Finally, we also recommend using social media as a form of customer service — a way to engage with customers, answer questions, and solve their issues. So keep a close eye on these DMs! 79% of customers expect a response within 24 hours, while 40% of customers expect a response within just one. A pre-programmed chatbot can help you answer FAQs as soon as possible.
#3. Encourage customer reviews
Positive online reviews = more business. It’s that simple. 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product, and positive reviews can increase customer spending by 31%. Reviews can make or break your online reputation.
You can encourage customers via personalized emails or text messages to leave feedback. Work to build up reviews on your own website as well as third-party review sites like Sitejabber, Google, and Yelp. Don’t pay or incentivize customers to leave a good review. Just provide the best customer experience possible and then ask for their honest feedback.
Alongside stacking up reviews, you need to respond to them. 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to negative feedback within one week. It’s good for other buyers to see you taking accountability and solving your customers’ problems. And you should be responding to positive reviews, too, saying thank you for the customer’s business and encouraging them to come again. Answering each review you receive is a great way to improve customer loyalty and to enhance your reputation online.
You can also use platforms like Jabio to monitor the reviews you’re getting. Keep an eye out for any trends — problems customers mention again and again. This proactive approach allows you to refine your operations, fixing potential issues before they blow up and damage your reputation.
Improve your reputation with positive customer reviews
By forging customer loyalty, leveraging social media, and building up online reviews, you’re well on your way to a better reputation online. Looking for help with collecting, monitoring, and publishing customer reviews? Jabio is the solution. As Sitejabber’s business platform, Jabio helps you tap into the power of customer reviews — providing a review management dashboard, automated collection methods, built-in review resolution, and tons of other features that make reputation management simple. Click here to get started today.
