Between quiet quitting and a 54% increase in LinkedIn members changing jobs year-over-year, it takes more than having a “cool office” to attract and retain great employees. In fact, lacking work-life balance, quality compensation and company culture are the top reasons people are leaving their jobs, according to LinkedIn.

Let’s get into what an employer branding strategy is, how it can feed recruitment and retention and why investing time into your employer brand is an investment in your bottom line.

What is employer branding?

Your employer brand is the perception and reputation of your company among current employees and job seekers. Employer branding is the set of strategies and tactics you use to actively build this brand and reputation.

In other words, an effective employer branding strategy actively answers the question, “What makes your company the best place to work?”

Building your employer brand can include a mix of creating content that promotes your company culture, brand mission and values, encouraging employee advocacy and making improvements to your hiring process.

The benefits of an employer branding strategy

Your employer brand will always exist—with or without your involvement. Taking an active part in building yours can attract new talent, retain current talent and boost your reputation.

And building reputation matters—50% of work candidates say they wouldn’t work at a company with a bad reputation. Not even for a pay raise.

Here are a few ways employer branding benefits your entire organization.

Recruit top-tier talent

A world-class employer branding strategy puts you in the enviable position of having your pick of the talent pool. According to Glassdoor, 75% of candidates are more likely to apply at a company that actively manages its employer brand.

And this is a stand-out benefit for teams feeling the hiring crunch. While 62% of marketers plan on filling 2-6 new positions, more than half also say finding experienced talent is their top challenge.

A strong employer brand helps you reach and build trust with prospective talent by showing them why it’s the best next step for their career.

Reduce turnover and boost employee satisfaction

Your employer brand starts from within—employees who feel cared for at work are 3.2x more likely to be happy at work, according to LinkedIn.

Part of employer branding is emphasizing what your employees love about your company—and fixing what they dislike. Involving employees by encouraging feedback and empowering their advocacy can help them feel heard and engaged.

In the Edelman trust barometer, 60% of respondents would choose a place to work based on their beliefs and values. Communicating your company values through employer branding helps set expectations with new employees, and attract those who share your values.

Manage your reputation and build consumer trust

Every step of an employer branding strategy involves assessing and improving your reputation.

Talking to employees about their frustrations, checking your company reviews and understanding how people talk about you on social boosts your image. And building your reputation as a great place to work among the workforce extends to your bottom line by reducing turnover and the time it takes to hire employees.

Create powerful advocates

Like we said—improving your employer brand starts from within. And this includes leveraging the people who know your business best: your employees.

Employee advocacy is all about building trust. People are 3x more likely to trust company info from an employee vs a CEO. And according to The Sprout Social Index™, 58% of consumers say they’d purchase from a company they trust over a competitor.

Empowering employees to post about their work experience is one of the best ways to build trust in your brand—with prospective talent and consumers alike.

Fuels more effective corporate communications

Maintaining a strong employer brand is a responsibility shared between corporate communications, social teams and among all employees. According to Edelman, managing brand and corporate identity is an increasingly key function for communications professionals.

An employer branding strategy paints a picture of who you are as a company, from your values as a brand to your diversity and inclusion efforts and more.

Companies that don’t show how they care for employees or put values in action will fall behind.

Steps to creating a powerful employer branding strategy

In short: To improve candidate engagement and employee advocacy while reducing turnover, employer branding is the key to success.

Here’s how to create an employer branding strategy that brings your company’s values to life to stay competitive in the market and desirable to current staff.

Step 1: Assess where you’re at

Start at the beginning: Do an audit to see where your employer brand currently stands.

Here are a few action items to consider:

Survey your employees

Ask for their honest feedback through anonymous surveys to understand what’s going well and what isn’t.

If the survey reveals problems with your corporate culture or internal communications, address them. Share your action plans with employees and show you’re willing to adapt to meet their needs. This helps build a team of loyal brand ambassadors and demonstrates you’re not just talking the talk.

Look at your reviews

Regularly checking and interacting with reviews is crucial—so much so that according to Glassdoor, 62% of job seekers say their perception of a company increases after an employer responds to a review.

Reviews are an unfiltered source of information about your company culture and brand perception. These reviews can come from external platforms, like Glassdoor, or internal resources, like exit interviews.

Dig into social media

When it comes to what people really think about your brand, social media is an insights goldmine.

Tap your social team—what common praise, complaints and FAQs do they see?

You can also take this a step further by using a social listening tool to check in on your brand health, sentiment, common keywords people use to talk about you and more.

Review recruitment and onboarding processes

The hiring and onboarding processes are the first chances you have to show a potential employee how your company operates.

Talk to current employees—especially recent hires—about how these processes went. And assess the process with your recruitment team. What can be improved? What isn’t working?

Identify content and resource gaps

Content can play a role at every step of the hiring process—from recruitment to retaining talent.

It’s also a crucial tool for building your brand’s story.

Here are a few areas to look at to determine whether more content and resources are needed:

• Social media content: Audit the type and frequency of content your team is publishing around your brand, employees and open positions.
• Website content: Do you have a career page? If so, does it need a refresh?
• Job postings: Are these as clear and as accurate as possible?
• Onboarding materials: Do these help new hires as much as possible, or do they leave gaps that new hires must scramble to figure out?
• Internal newsletters: Are you staying connected to your employees regularly? Is there value in the content you already send out?

Step 2: Develop your employee value proposition (EVP)

A strong EVP will outline rewards—both monetary and non-monetary—you offer to employees in exchange for their experience, skills and effort. Think:

• Salary
• Benefits
• Growth opportunities
• Diversity and inclusion efforts and promises
• Remote work flexibility
• Company culture and more

Your EVP is the basis for your employer brand messaging and strategy.

Remember to be honest. Your EVP must be an accurate representation of what employees can expect when working at your company. Setting employees up for certain expectations that you can’t meet will only hurt your reputation.

Step 3: Define your goals and KPIs

Setting goals and KPIs is a crucial part of assessing how your strategy is going—and to secure buy-in.

What do you want to achieve with your employer branding strategy? Set SMART goals and identify KPIs to measure success. On the recruitment side, your goals may include:

• Attracting more leads
• Implementing campaigns for priority roles, departments and more
• Desired number of new hires
• Receiving more referrals
• More engaged employees
• More qualified candidates for new positions
• A higher offer acceptance rate
• Higher employee retention over time

On the marketing or content side, your goals might include:

• More employee-shared posts
• Increase in employer branding related posts
• A boost in positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor
• Adding awareness campaigns around your employer brand to boost perception and awareness

Step 4: Identify target audience and candidates

According to LinkedIn, 40% of professionals say colleagues and work culture are top priorities when picking a new job. Before you can focus on attracting more talent, you need to first identify what kind of candidate you want to attract.

Who is your target audience? What environment are they looking for? This goes beyond simply looking at job title or sophistication level. Creating a rough picture of your ideal candidate will guide how you build your job descriptions and more.

Step 5: Determine your channels and stakeholders

Just like no one person is responsible for your brand as a whole, employer branding is a team effort.

Determine individual responsibilities and get stakeholders on board now to prevent burnout and disorganization later. Who needs to be involved? What will each person be responsible for? How will you align stakeholders with the strategy?

Think about all of your communication channels, like social media, newsletters and internal emails. Determine which channels will be key to strengthening your employer brand and will reach the right audience—internally and externally.

Step 6: Involve your C-suite

At the highest level, C-suite buy-in is crucial to making any changes to the organization that are needed to improve your employer brand.

According to a McKinsey study, 62% of employees get some purpose from work, but want to get even more. Give your C-suite an opportunity to help provide that feeling of purpose by involving them in communications. After all, who wants to work on a ship when the captain doesn’t believe in its journey or purpose?

And don’t be afraid to involve your C-suite in your strategy’s day-to-day, too. Encouraging leadership to contribute to employer brand content, build their own social media presence or be active in internal communications can show current and future employees that they’re involved.

Step 7: Create a rollout plan

A rollout plan will keep your strategy organized and consistent. It will also ensure your stakeholders know what to expect and outline how employee advocates across your company can get involved.

Here are a few items to consider using in your rollout plan:

• An editorial calendar for blog and social media content focused on your employer brand (think: employee features, your values, etc.)
• Internal emails to source employee feedback, encourage posting, etc.
• Checking and responding to reviews, or encouraging current employees to leave reviews
• Regularly encouraging employees to post about open roles—regardless of team
• Updating career websites and your website as a whole to reflect your employer proposition

Step 8: Track results

Your strategy is a process—not a destination. Once you’ve launched your strategy, tracking your results will help you mark your successes, and pivot when something isn’t successful.

Track your KPIs to determine whether you’re meeting those goals you set. You likely already have a number of tools that can help you measure your success—from social platforms themselves, to employee advocacy tools. Set a regular review cadence to analyze your performance, evaluate your strategy and determine next steps.

Give employees a voice with employee advocacy

Employee advocacy is the internal and external promotion of an organization by its staff members—like posting on social media. Your employees are some of your best brand advocates. Employee content gets up to 8x more engagement than content on brand channels, so invest in amplifying their voices.

Encouraging them to post about your company is one of the most powerful ways to build trust with and attract talent.

With Sprout’s employee advocacy solution, Edina Realty saw a 674% MoM increase in social engagements.

Employee advocacy goes deeper than simply asking staff to post. Take an active role in making posting easier by curating content for them to share—72% of engaged users on social media say they would post about their company if content was written for them.

Using an employee advocacy platform, like Sprout’s, makes curating and sharing content with your employees easy. It lightens your load too by simplifying measuring the impact of your employee content.

If you use Sprout, you can curate employee advocacy content in the same place you schedule your brand’s social media posts.

Request a demo

Employer branding demands culture shift

Your employer branding strategy should be more than just a marketing effort—it should be a way of life.

Management and leadership teams must be fully devoted to the brand in order to follow through on commitments to their employees and adjust when growth areas are revealed.

A great employer brand starts from the inside out. Take it slow, and start from within by amplifying employees’ voices internally to reach new talent externally. Find out how Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform can supercharge your employer brand.

The post Employer branding for retention and recruitment appeared first on Sprout Social.

Of course you’re drawn to the bedside table with over 500 satisfied customers.

Why is this? It’s due to a psychological phenomenon called social proof.

Throughout this article, we’ll dive into what social proof is and how you can use it in marketing to make sure that people are choosing you over your competitors – like in our bedside table example.

What is social proof?

Social proof is a term that was coined back in 1984 by author Robert Cialdini in his book Influence. This phenomenon is also called informational social influence, and essentially it’s the idea that people copy the actions of others in an attempt to emulate behavior in certain situations.

For example, if someone isn’t sure how to act in a social situation they may not have encountered before, they take clues from the people around them. If someone is at a gala for the first time, it’s natural for them to observe their surroundings to ensure they’re fitting in and acting the way everyone would expect them to act.

In marketing, social proof covers a similar idea – when people shop, they look for reviews, recommendations and ways that others have used a product before making their decision.

This is why online stores work so hard to get people to review their products – it’s a form of social proof that works wonders for increasing the number of people making purchases.

Social proof in marketing takes the form of reviews, existing customers, media coverage and more. Let’s learn a little bit more about why social proof is so important and the various types of social proof your business should go after.

Why is social proof important?

Now that you know what social proof is, why do you need to incorporate it into your marketing? Why is it a valuable component to your business strategy?

• 83% of consumers recommend a brand they follow on social to friends and family.
• 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase.
• 82% of Americans ask for referrals and recommendations from family and friends before making any kind of purchase.

In a few words: social proof gets your business more sales.

How to use social proof in marketing

There are several ways you can incorporate social proof into your marketing to showcase your satisfied customers to potential customers. Knowing that people have been happy with your business and its products or services before is one of the best marketing tricks.

1. Case studies

One great way to showcase satisfied customers is by writing a case study about their experience with your business. Identify one or several clients that you’ve had significant success with and reach out if they’d be willing to participate in a case study along with preliminary questions.

Typically these are deep dives into how you and the customer worked successfully together, so ensuring you have their enthusiastic participation is key.

There are many different ways you can showcase your case studies, whether you choose to offer downloadable PDFs or host them on your blog like Visme.

At Sprout Social, we have an entire page dedicated to customer stories where we share both testimonials and case studies. Creating a page like this that’s visible in your main site navigation is a great way to showcase social proof.

2. Testimonials and reviews

Your business might receive testimonials and reviews online, but have you ever thought about sharing those on social media? Reviews are the quintessential example of social proof. And including ratings and reviews on your website as well as sharing on social media lets your audience know what others think.

Take a look at this Tweet from Leadpages sharing a TechRadar review of their SaaS product.

“There’s a lot to like about Leadpages. It’s easy to use, produces great results, and is reasonably priced.”

Thanks, @techradar for the glowing review! Check out the full #review for an in-depth breakdown of everything Leadpages has to offer. https://t.co/64kfn4ExVo

— Leadpages® (@Leadpages) March 30, 2021

Sharing content like draws potential customers through the door. And once you master how to ask for reviews, you’ll have plenty of posts in your arsenal.

In fact, using Sprout for review management will streamline your engagement and improve your online presence. When you respond to reviews and testimonials, you’ll show that you care about prior customers’ experiences. Sprout has integrations with Google My Business, Trip Advisor, Facebook and Glassdoor, and all customer reviews are aggregated into a single inbox.

3. Existing customers and clients

If you work with some well-known brands, sharing that information publicly is another great way to get people interested in your product or service. Obviously if big brands like Google like your business, that must mean you do good work, right?

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of this in action. The first is from the homepage of Envato’s website.

These are some big names, right? Showcasing this information is a great form of social proof.

Biteable has a similar approach on their homepage. The “Used by” caption above their customers’ logos highlights the big, well-known brands that people love and trust.

Especially with a video maker like Biteable, this bodes well for anyone looking to create the level of work that brands like Shopify and Disney are putting out.

4. Awards and accolades

Has your business won awards or been ranked on top lists in your industry? Show that stuff off! It’s a great way to let people know that your business is known for its excellence.

Take a look at how we at Sprout have displayed these types of awards and accolades on our homepage.

Most lists and awards will give you a badge image like the ones you see above that you can use in your website footer or on your homepage to showcase your brand performance.

5. User-generated content (UGC)

People will know you have happy customers when you share user-generated content on your own social pages. Instagram is the perfect platform for this. Simply create a branded hashtag, include it in your bio and encourage users a chance to be featured.

Take a page out of Aerie’s book, and share UGC on your brand’s account and tag the original poster.

This strategy can work on nearly any platform, but is most common and most effective on Instagram.

6. Influencer marketing

Similar to user-generated content is influencer marketing. This tactic involves compensating influencers for showing off your brand in their photos.

Here’s an example of fashion blogger Venita Aspen collaborating with Express in an influencer marketing campaign.

People follow influencers because they like seeing what kinds of products and services these content creators wear, use and love. That’s why influencer marketing is a great example of social proof and can expose your brand to a wider audience.

7. Integrations

Another form of social proof is integrations. These are typically seen with SaaS tools, especially in the marketing industry, that want to offer their customers the ability to make tools they already use work together.

In this example below, we see Calendly tweeting about their new integration with Slack (and Slack Retweeting it).

Knowing that your software is compatible with another software that a potential customer uses is a great selling point, but it also makes your business seem more robust and trusted.

8. Customer love

What better way to show off social proof than to share your customers’ praises and kind words? While this can come in the form of reviews or testimonials, customer love can also be a simple mention on social media.

We see this example in a Tweet below that mentions Notion, a project management software.

Notion Retweeted this, sharing genuine feedback with their own audience without it seeming at all promotional or salesy. This is the perfect example of how to put social proof in front of your customers.

Besides tagging and @mentions, social listening is an important way to get in on the conversation way as well. In Sprout, you can use the Listening tool to build Queries based on keywords and topics to monitor your brand or industry. These insights then give you an understanding of the sentiment around your brand and areas for your brand to focus on.

9. Customer base

Our last example of social proof is showcasing the number of customers you’ve served, products you’ve sold or users you have. This shows that your business is seasoned and knows what they’re doing since you’ve worked with so many people.

We can see this in action on Udemy’s Twitter bio, displaying that they’ve helped millions of students learn new skills.

Similarly, Teachable’s homepage shares that they’ve had over 100,000 creators host online courses with them, generating over $1 billion in collective revenue.

Sharing these numbers is powerful in proving how many individuals have taken advantage of a business’s service and the success they’ve seen as well.

Start using social proof in your marketing strategy

Learn how to incorporate these types of social proof in your own marketing. To help you understand even more about what customers want to see from brands, download the most recent Sprout Social Index™. Using this data can help you further manage your reviews and social proof.

The post Social proof: How to use psychology in digital marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

When your business is searched for online, these review sites show up in the first page of results. Having an online review management strategy is another essential part of the larger digital marketing toolkit. For any business, you want to have a positive brand sentiment because happy customers refer other customers and become brand advocates. With the reach and visibility of Yelp, it’s particularly important to know your way around the platform and how to manage your reviews there.

Why are Yelp reviews so important?

For businesses in industries like food and beverage, local services and medical, reviews can make a significant impact on brand sentiment. Whether people are praising your brand or criticizing it, you want to be around to address them head-on.

According to Yelp’s own data, the top three reviewed business categories are home and local services, restaurants, and shopping, making up 52% of the total categories covered.

In a BrightLocal consumer trend report, 87% of consumers reported reading online reviews for local businesses in 2020, up from 81% in the previous year. This may not translate into an obvious takeaway at first glance, but it’s what happens after potential customers read reviews that really matters to brands.

Reading positive reviews or negative reviews play a role in a consumer’s decision to use the business: 94% say that positive reviews make it more likely for them and 92% say negative reviews make it less likely.

After reading positive reviews, consumers say they will head to the business’ website (31%), search for more reviews (28%) and even visit the business (17%). Having reviews makes an impact on whether or not you’ll have potential customers.

How do you get these reviews? Yelp offers up some guidelines for this.

How to get Yelp reviews without violating policies

Let’s start first with what you can’t do. Yelp’s review guidelines are very clear in how businesses can’t obtain reviews.

• Don’t ask for reviews: not in-person, not online, not on your newsletter, not even from your grandmother
• Don’t offer anything in exchange for reviews: no discounts or freebies in exchange for them posting a review.

The idea behind the guidelines are that posted reviews are unsolicited and represent the genuine and unbiased opinions of the customers. So, now that you know what you can’t do, let’s explore what you can do instead to encourage a healthy amount of reviews for your business.

Best tactics for getting Yelp reviews

You can’t ask for reviews? Is there anything left to do? The short answer is yes and we’ll cover a number of tips to get you situated. Considering Yelp’s guidelines, your focus as a brand should be in demonstrating such great service that the customer has no choice but to share their experience on Yelp. Awareness is also a key factor: they won’t know you’re on Yelp unless you tell them.

To get started with these tips, it’s important that you’ve already claimed your page for your business.

Fill out your business page

Make sure that all of your business information is updated, including any temporary hours or methods of operation. Platforms add new spaces for additional information all the time, so it never hurts to check on your profile. It’s never fun to arrive at a business only to learn that, for example, they’re cash only and you hadn’t planned for that.

If you offer a service or food service options like delivery, connect those features so clients can easily book from your page or order food. The more seamless the customer experience is, the more likely they’ll leave a positive review.

Place a Yelp badge on your website

Alongside your social media icons, place the Yelp logo so customers know that you are present on the site. For additional Yelp branding that detail your review count and star rating, head to your business account to find the review badge.

Use Yelp branding in-store

Connect the physical with the digital by ordering a free window cling from the company. You’ve likely seen these before. They’re stuck right by the front door or the menu in the window. When deciding on a location, the cling should be noticeable when entering and leaving the business.

Yelp offers a few paid branded materials like hours signage on their print shop. These additional stickers serve to reinforce the reminder to your customers that you’re on the platform.

Share your Yelp reviews on social media

You can’t ask for new reviews but you can certainly post your existing ones. Think of reviews as content. Quote the best reviews, place them into an attractive social media graphic and then post them. There’s nothing wrong with sharing how much your customers love you.

Respond to Yelp reviews

Yes, even the good ones. It can be tough to respond to critical reviews and while every business would love a perfect five-star rating, the reality is that you’ll have unhappy customers from time to time. One survey found that 89% of consumers read local businesses’ responses to reviews and they will spend up to 49% more at a business that replies to reviews.

To help with writing these responses out, take a page out of your crisis plan. Having a plan in place prevents you from writing a heated response. The customer isn’t always right but you can certainly manage how you respond to them to ensure that the interaction leaves a positive impression.

Create check-in offers

One way around the no-freebie rule is to take advantage of Yelp offers. These are deals that appear for users when they browse the site.

This business is offering a free drink for Yelp customers that claim this offer on weekdays. The offer has a two-fold benefit: weekdays are likely slower so the offer might generate more orders,  and customers will typically want to make a larger order that includes the item on offer.

Post updates from your business

Getting more into the social media sphere, Yelp offers businesses the ability to post updates. Think of these as social media posts but for big news that you want to share with your customers. Some examples include menu updates, new dishes, new services and any logistical changes.

This business posted two important updates recently: the fact that they’re celebrating 30 years and that they’ve reopened. Seeing fresh updates from businesses lets the customers know that you’re paying attention to your Yelp page and they can trust the info on it is current.

Run an ad

Businesses that place ads on Yelp show up first in search results or in the sidebar. The benefit of this is that it makes you stand out a little more from your nearby competitors.

For example, when you search for an auto service, the fastest-responding businesses who run ads are listed first, followed by those who have paid to show in the sponsored results section and finally by all results. Depending on how competitive your industry is, it might take several scrolls to get to the organic results section and by then, the customer might’ve already decided on which one to go with.

Utilize review management software

Are you getting more reviews across various sites than you anticipated? It can be overwhelming and time prohibitive to constantly check multiple sites and respond to reviews on them. Instead, use review management software like the one that’s offered with Sprout Social, to collect reviews from TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, Google My Business and Facebook.

While having a software solution doesn’t directly help you collect reviews, it does help you manage them for quicker responses, leading to happier customers.

Next steps for managing Yelp reviews

Reviews, whether they’re in person from your friend or online from a stranger, are part of the consumer experience. As more businesses continue to grow in various industries, the competition for brands is only increasing, while consumers gain an even wider array of options. The best way to figure out where to eat next or which spa gives the best massages is to conduct research. And these come in the form of reviews.

While you might not be able to ask directly for reviews on Yelp, there are a number of other options that help you raise your brand’s visibility both in-person and online. Instead of worrying about shady tactics to ‘get around’ these guidelines, focus on offering a great experience and increasing customers’ awareness of the option to leave reviews and support your business. Ultimately, doing this only helps reinforce the legitimacy of your business in a time when consumers are getting more and more savvy about paid reviews elsewhere online.

Now that you’re armed with some ideas, it’s time to put them to use on your Yelp page and explore additional reputation management tactics.

The post How to get Yelp reviews & improve your online standing appeared first on Sprout Social.

Achieving that understanding can be challenging, especially when you’re selling to other businesses and their buyers.

B2B buyers have a lot to consider on their path to purchase, and that path is not linear or simple. In fact, 77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was very complex or difficult.

B2B buying is less about progressing through a stage-by-stage sales funnel and more about completing a set of non-sequential tasks: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building supplier selection, validation and consensus creation. While buyers take on these tasks, it’s B2B marketer’s job to know how, why and when their brand can assist and enable buyers to check each task off their to-do list.

This is why B2B market research is critical. Market research helps companies to:

• Understand and build B2B buyer personas
• Evaluate the changing needs of customers
• Differentiate themselves from competitors
• Refine their offerings
• Develop relevant, valuable content to assist buyers with their research

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on research firms. In fact, there’s a lot you can discover on your own with a few simple tools and methods.

Keyword research tools, social media listening data and review sites are goldmines for market research that are oftentimes overlooked.

Discover new depths of audience insights, empower B2B buyers and make better business decisions with these four fundamental market research methods.

1. Get to know B2B buyers through keyword research

In the early stages of the buyer journey, people are trying to learn what brands are out there and what solutions are available. Like most people, B2B buyers often start that research on Google or another search engine.

Where there are searches, there’s valuable data.

Keyword research, while most often associated with SEO, can also help you understand your audience and how they search for products and services like yours.

With Google Trends, Answer the Public, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Google Keyword Planner and other SEO tools can help you answer the questions:

• What questions are buyers asking about your industry, product or service?
• What pain points are buyers searching that your product can solve?
• Which brands in your industry also rank for specific keywords?
• Are people searching for your brand keywords?

With the answer to these questions, you can build out content, SEO and B2B social media strategies that improve the visibility of your brand and deliver hyper-relevant information to your target audience.

Buyers already have a lot of information to digest, so quality is more important than quantity. The more relevant information you can give your buyers, the better. According to Gartner, providing customers with information specifically designed to help them advance their purchase has the single biggest impact on driving deal quality that the research firm has ever documented.

Want to learn more about how to conduct keyword research? Get tips, tools and more keyword research benefits here.

2. Analyze industry and brand-relevant conversations on social media

Consulting peers—either in person, or online via product review websites or social networks—is consistently among the most trusted ways for buyers to source information. Getting recommendations from people in similar companies, roles and industries naturally sparks buyers’ confidence and interest in a product or service. With social listening, marketers can be a fly on the wall where those kinds of conversations occur.

There’s a lot of noise on social, but social listening tools like Sprout Social’s make it possible to cut through to specific topics and themes that you do and do not want to listen for. In Sprout Social, users have the power to build Listening Topics around specific accounts, hashtags, industry keywords and more.

If you’ve done keyword research already, your findings can help you refine your Topic queries and add filters to dig deeper into conversations. Once Topics are set up, your tool will collect candid conversations from the world’s largest focus group.

As you dive into performance data, metrics like message volume, number of unique authors, impressions, engagements and other quantitative data points can validate what conversations are occurring and quantify topic trends. Feedback, opinions, sentiment and other qualitative data signal why and where these conversations are happening.

While using listening for your market research, develop specific questions that you want to investigate. You might ask:

• How do people perceive our brand?
• What keywords are most often associated with our brand?
• Where do most conversations about our brand take place in the country or world?
• What challenges and pain points come up in conversations about our industry and the kinds of products or services we offer?

Sprout users can also use listening to gather market research from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Youtube and Reddit. The latter two are unique and valuable—but underused—channels for B2B market research.

As they do their own research, B2B buyers can easily find video reviews and product roundups on Youtube relevant to their needs. Even a quick search for something like “the best CRM software for small business” yields tons of results. Instead of watching every single video, scouring descriptions to see what themes come up, or checking to see if your brand was mentioned, you can have listening tools do the work for you. While you’re at it, you might even find some user-generated content that’s worth sharing on social.

Reddit has a reputation for being a place for real people to share unfiltered opinions, and where anyone who’s clearly trying to self-promote or sell something is shooed away by moderators.

If a B2B buyer is exploring the “Software” subreddit to learn about project management software, they can find authentic community contributions that draw on real experiences and trust that those contributions aren’t just a ploy to get new leads or draw attention to a specific business.

Trust is always an important factor in a business relationship, but marketers and sales teams have to work to overcome buyer skepticism. When you tap into online conversations and have research on your customer needs, you can learn how you can contribute positively to the buyer journey. Instead of using research strictly to sell or market your product, focus your attention on how you can use that research to inform and assist buyers and build new business relationships with trust at the foundation

3. Analyze what people are saying about competitors on social media

To come out on top in a competitive deal cycle, you need to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and use those to your advantage. Social listening can help with that.

In Sprout Social’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool, you get a side-by-side competitor comparison of key performance metrics across social, including share of voice, average positive sentiment and other metrics that can help contextualize quantitative competitor research findings outside of social.

Sentiment analysis in particular will show you how your shared audience feels about your competitor. Apply a positive sentiment filter to find what your audience likes about your competitor, what product features are most popular for them and more.

Conversely, you might also explore conversations using a negative sentiment filter to find online conversations where competitors, their products or services are getting negative feedback.

Let’s say you uncover that people are unsatisfied with the interface of your competitors’ software—but your customers consistently rave about your software’s interface. How can those findings influence your marketing campaigns or product development? What are the identifiable differences and advantages in your product? How can your business use that weakness to your advantage?

Bring together a group of stakeholders from various disciplines to digest your research findings and answer these questions. Colleagues from departments outside of marketing will have unique and additional perspectives about how to put your research to work. A group brainstorm might spark ideas for website copy, sales collateral, campaign strategies and more.

Turning listening insights alone into actionable business recommendations and deliverables comes with a learning curve. But when you combine listening with your intuition, additional market research and insightful colleagues, you can continue to find ways to differentiate your brand and gain a competitive edge.

4. Dig into ratings and reviews

In a recent survey of B2B buyers and/or buying influencers, 82% of respondents reported using online review sites to support buying decisions. Review sites have information that can serve a buyer at all stages of the buying process, so that’s not altogether shocking. But B2B marketers should also be monitoring and leveraging reviews for qualitative research.

G2, Capterra and TrustRadius house verified reviews for business software and services so buyers and businesses alike can glean insights from unbiased ratings on user satisfaction, features, price and more. Reviews typically include a clear breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of your products and services. These sites also have discussion boards where users can ask questions about the software they’re seeking.

Marketers can collect, package and present that crystal clear feedback to leadership, product, sales teams and other disciplines. Combined with your other market research findings, customer feedback can inform:

• Product roadmap planning
• Pricing choices
• Customer service approaches
• Customer and buyer enablement resources

At Sprout, we rely on reviews to continually improve our software and the way we do business. When we understand what our users like and dislike, the recommendations they’d give to others considering Sprout, the problems they solve with our products and overall benefits, we can build upon what we know about our audience, better serve them and create content that fills knowledge gaps.

We also collect suggestions and feedback directly from reviews and discussions. Then, we’re able to bring that feedback to the necessary teams. We might not always be able to act on suggestions, but creating a feedback loop and letting reviewers know they’ve been heard is a win-win for Sprout and our customers.

Stay focused, stay relevant, stay informed with B2B market research

The path to purchase for B2B buyers is a long and winding road. But if you know who your target audience is and what they care about, you can empower them in their search. Use your market research to pave a smoother road for buyers and create better experiences for your current customers.

With market research on your side, you can:

• Create relevant, helpful marketing collateral like case studies and customer surveys.
• Empower your sales teams with research reports and customer fact sheets.
• Double down on customer success and training resources to ease pain points.

By doing strategic B2B market research, you can get into the mindset of your target market, better cater to their needs and cultivate relationships built on trust.

Take B2B social data further with our guide to turning your data into a revenue-driver. You’ll learn how to hone four key practices fueled by social listening and data that will help your B2B business level up. Download the guide now.

The post 4 overlooked B2B market research methods for understanding your customers appeared first on Sprout Social.

Glassdoor houses over 70 million reviews and insights on over one million companies, helping people make one of the most important decisions we can make for ourselves: where to work.

Given that 86% of job seekers are likely to research Glassdoor company reviews and ratings before applying, it’s critical for businesses to engage with that community and actively put their best employer brand forward. Sprout Social helps power that effort with our Glassdoor integration. It’s baked into our Reviews tool so social media managers, human resources and business leaders can unify their employer branding efforts with ease.

Check out these 10 clever ways to leverage the integration, improve your Glassdoor presence and create a better place to work.

1. Regularly monitor Glassdoor company reviews

You wouldn’t let your other social media platforms go unmonitored and unchecked, and Glassdoor should be no different.

Reading Glassdoor reviews is mutually beneficial for both job seekers and companies. The former group gets the inside scoop through first-hand employee experiences. The latter gets honest, constructive insights that they can use to further shape their employer branding strategy. Once brands connect their Glassdoor profiles in Sprout, they can evaluate their ratings and reviews with ease and collect feedback alongside other business reviews from Google My Business, TripAdvisor, Facebook Reviews.

2. Quickly respond to employee reviews

It’s not enough to just read your brand’s reviews. You need to respond to them too. When Glassdoor users see that an employer responds to reviews, 80% of them agree that it improves their perception of that company. Additionally, they’re more likely to apply to an open job if the employer is active on Glassdoor.

As Glassdoor’s Lead Product Marketing Manager Sophia Fox says, “The conversation that is shaping your employer brand perception is happening on Glassdoor with or without you, so you might as well join it.” When your brand responds to reviews, both negative and positive, you actively demonstrate that you are engaged, listening and invested in being transparent about what it’s like to work at your company. When reviews are critical, responding gives your company a chance to address how you will correct issues, clarify any misunderstandings and amplify the positives.

Similar to Sprout’s Smart Inbox capabilities, our Glassdoor integration streamlines engagement and powers quicker response times, which people have come to expect.

3. Embrace constructive feedback

Glassdoor reviews are paired with star ratings which act as a sort of grading system. The average of those ratings is prominently displayed in the reviews tab, giving users an immediate impression before they even start reading further.

Improving that rating comes down to understanding and reacting to the good, the bad and the ugly. Within Sprout, users can filter reviews by star ratings to see trends in both negative and positive reviews.

While it might be tempting to just revel in the five-star reviews, it’s equally important to dig into areas for improvement. Yes, people often express their experiences on Glassdoor to inform and help job seekers or support their company, but also consider that sometimes, the platform is an outlet where employees feel more comfortable expressing frustrations because they can remain anonymous. Hone in on one to two-star ratings, embrace the feedback and use those insights to create a path for change.

4. Tag reviews to track key topics and themes

As reviews come through on Sprout, users can apply tags that relate to particular topics to each message. Let’s say you’ve recently changed your work from home policy. As Glassdoor users leave reviews relating to that, add a tag. Then, use Sprout’s Tag Report to evaluate those review trends and gauge the overall sentiment around your offerings. Users can also export the Tag Report so they can share the results with leaders and other teammates with a stake in employer branding.

If you want to cut through the noise and get straight to the topics you care most about, you can also use the inbox search functionality in Sprout to find specific messages. As you search, consider that people may use different spellings or variations to describe something like “work from home,” such as, “remote work,” “WFH,” and more. Applying tags to messages that use those kinds of variations will help keep those reviews organized.

5. Save the dates

Occurrences like COVID-19, layoffs or newly announced benefits might spark a flurry of incoming reviews. In those circumstances, Sprout users can filter reviews by dates and do an A/B test of sorts.

For example, let’s say your company switched insurance providers. You could compare reviews before and after the change, monitor the changes in sentiment and further refine your plans based on the feedback you receive.

6. Share feedback across departments

Glassdoor provides reviewers a level of anonymity so they feel freer to be candid, but many users do choose to display their role. In that case, you may want to apply a tag indicating the employee’s department so that you can later share feedback with managers, especially if the review includes complaints or compliments on department processes, leadership and internal changes.

Many Glassdoor users might want or expect HR representatives to be the ones to address their review, but company leaders and managers may be the better choice in some cases. As you respond to Glassdoor reviews in Sprout, you can choose who you want to attribute as the author. This will give the reviewer more confidence that they are being heard by people who they work with directly and make decisions on behalf of their team.

7. Act with urgency

Our jobs are our livelihood, so it’s understandable that if things go awry for an employee, they may use Glassdoor to express those feelings and frustrations. Those reviews aren’t necessarily a good look for a company but brands cannot delete reviews on Glassdoor unless they violate community guidelines. This protects transparency and the integrity of the platform.

The sensitive and potentially damaging nature of these kinds of reviews may require additional input and oversight from leadership, HR and/or your legal department. Fortunately, Sprout users can email these types of reviews directly to the necessary people within the app. Each email message also brings in additional metadata with the review so they get the full story.

8. Store responses in the asset library

As you uncover recurring topics, experiences or call-outs on Glassdoor, it’s helpful to build out a library of responses, similar to how you might for FAQs. Social media marketers have tons of experience responding and engaging with online communities, company managers know their teams inside and out and human resources professionals have a wealth of knowledge on hiring, benefits, policies and more. Together, they can build a powerful response strategy.

Sprout users can then store those approved responses in the Asset Library so that anyone who’s responding can easily use them as a template. This strategy will help keep brand voice intact. Keep in mind that best practice is to use these responses as jumping-off points and then customize from there, especially if a Glassdoor user provides an in-depth review.

9. Drive workplace transparency and equity for underrepresented groups

One thing that we all crave is a sense of belonging and acceptance. When we feel that at work, we produce better work. More than 76% of employees and job seekers agree that a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating companies and job offers. Unfortunately though, underrepresented groups still experience inequity and bias in the workplace.

To help people better understand the current state of diversity equity, and inclusion at a company, Glassdoor has introduced three new product features, including a diversity and inclusion rating, diversity FAQs and the option for reviewers to provide demographic information.

“We have a responsibility as a platform and employer to bridge the information gap that’s blocking the path to equity in and out of the workplace. By increasing transparency around diversity and inclusion within companies, we can help create more equitable companies and more equitable society, too,” said Glassdoor Chief Executive Officer Christian Sutherland-Wong.

Pay special attention to the reviews that highlight your company’s diversity and inclusion efforts or shortcomings, and use responses as an opportunity to articulate your commitment or plans for the future.

10. Use key insights from reviews to develop content centered around employer brand

The insights your company gains from monitoring, organizing and reporting on Glassdoor reviews should be actively applied to your employer branding strategy. Use the “pros” in reviews to reinforce your strategy and inspire new employer brand content.

If your rating is skewing toward the lower end of the scale, hone in on the “cons” in reviews to determine where you need to improve. Then, consider using the common themes to develop an internal survey to investigate further and gain a more holistic understanding of how your employees perceive company culture.

Get your foot in the (Glass)door

Glassdoor is more than a review site. It’s also a branding platform, a resource for job seekers and an opportunity for businesses to create a better, more transparent company culture. Help your company become one of the best places to work. Get started with a Sprout demo today!

The post 10 clever ways to improve your Glassdoor presence using Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

It’s essential to incorporate asking for reviews into your marketing strategy to make sure that you’re getting quality reviews from your customers.

The importance of customer reviews

Figuring out how to use customer testimonials as part of your brand’s marketing process can boost credibility through social proof, improve your reputation and relationships with your customers, and improve your brand’s SEO and visibility.

Better brand reputation

Having a lot of reviews can improve your brand’s online reputation and inform new potential customers. Shoppers will see that your brand has helped others solve a problem and use it as a solution of their own.

According to a study conducted by BrightLocal, 85% of online shoppers trust reviews just as much as personal recommendations. So when shoppers see a high number of positive reviews, they’re less likely to have concerns, or second guess purchasing your product.

Increased social proof

Social proof is a concept rooted in customers’ sense of belonging. Customers want to feel good about who they’re giving their money to and they want to feel like they are making the right decision. Having a lot of customer reviews can reinforce potential customer’s feelings of certainty about your brand. It makes them secure in their buying decision by showing them that others have made the same decision and that they are satisfied enough to recommend the purchase to others.

Improved SEO

Once your brand receives five reviews on Google, your business will begin to show up on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This strategy is most beneficial for local businesses. However, it can also create an advantage over your competitors if you have the most reviews on your Google My Business page. The more reviews you have on Google, the higher your business will show up in local search results.

How to get more reviews from customers

Most brands hope that their customers will love their product or service enough to leave glowing reviews organically. But if you’re not actively seeking out reviews, customers may move on and forget to write them. For this reason, it’s important to incorporate intentional strategies to ask your customers for reviews.

If you’re unsure how to ask for customer reviews, here are some strategies you can use to encourage your customers to provide reviews more frequently.

Reach out to power users or repeat customers

One of the easiest ways to get customer reviews is to reach out to customers who you already know enjoy your products. For e-commerce or B2C brands, follow up with customers who have made multiple purchases. For B2B brands or Saas companies, take note of the people who continually use your service or software and reach out to these power users for feedback or even participation in case studies.

This outreach can be as simple as sending an email expressing your appreciation for their continued support. In this email, ask if they are willing to leave a review and create a direct link for them to use to review a product they purchased.

Make it as easy as possible

The easier it is for your customers to leave their review, the more likely they are to do it. Creating a template or form that the customer can quickly fill out will lower the barrier and streamline the process. While you want the review to be authentic, creating a streamlined process makes it easier for your customers to share their thoughts.

A lot of brands, like Expedia, create forms that give customers the option to rate different parts of the experience. All it takes is a few clicks to rate and review various aspects of their trip.

Offer an incentive

Sometimes people need an extra push to share their experiences. After all, people are busy and leaving a review or testimonial can be time-consuming. Show your customers that you value their time and feedback by offering a small incentive to anyone who leaves a review. This can include things like a small discount on their next purchase, a freebie or a shoutout of some sort.

ActiveCampaign implemented this strategy by emailing their users a request to leave a review in exchange for an Amazon gift card. To promote transparency, they even encouraged customers to disclose that they received an incentive to leave this review.

Create review options on different platforms

To make it even easier for your customers to leave reviews, give them the option to leave reviews on a variety of platforms. If customers are more active on Facebook, they’re more likely to leave a review on your Facebook Page. Some of your audience might prefer to use Yelp or Google reviews and choose to leave you a review there. Make sure that you’ve claimed your business pages on various platforms to allow your audience to share their experience more easily.

Share user-generated content

Keep an eye out on social media for people who are already, organically talking about your brand. If your brand receives a lot of user-generated content, highlight those customers by sharing their posts with your audience. It demonstrates that you have fans who value your product enough to talk about it on their own. You can also show your appreciation for your loyal customers by replying to them on social media and sharing their messages on your accounts.

You can also create a branded hashtag and encourage your audience to share their experiences using that hashtag.

Use a Review management tool

If you’re not sure how to track and manage your Facebook or Google My Business reviews, Sprout’s Reviews tool can help. The tool enables you to manage and monitor reviews across multiple business pages. The Reviews tool makes it easy to keep track of all of your review platforms. In Sprout, you can Google My Business, Facebook Pages and TripAdvisor reviews, all from one easy-to-use dashboard.

Using a review management tool that helps you integrate all of your review platforms can save time and keep you organized. It will also make it easier to respond to reviews and track where they come from. Knowing where your reviews most frequently come from can help create a more streamlined strategy when asking for them in the future.

Create case studies

For B2B brands, creating case studies can be a lucrative way to show how you’ve helped other businesses. Case studies are much more in-depth than standard testimonials. When done right, they can be an incredible way to showcase your product or service in a new light.

At Sprout, we use case studies to highlight customer success stories and showcase how brands are using our tools to meet their goals. Case studies are mutually beneficial for clients because they also highlight the other business. They also demonstrate new ways existing customers can use product features that they may not have thought of previously.

Creating a case study will require more of a time commitment on your part and on that of the client. You may need to conduct multiple interviews and it helps if you have been tracking the client’s progress over time.

Things to remember when asking for customer reviews

Yes, asking for reviews is an integral part of your strategy. But you still want your customer reviews to be as authentic as possible. There are some strategies you should avoid as they can promote dishonest reviews and even damage your brand’s reputation. Keep the following guidelines in mind when asking for reviews:

• Encourage honest reviews. Always encourage your audience to be as truthful and authentic as possible in their review. Offering incentives can encourage more reviews, but never pay someone to write a positive review. The purpose of the incentive should not be to sway their review in any way.
• Avoid asking too soon. Wait until your customers have enough time to form an opinion before asking them for a review. Asking too fast or too often could come off as pushy.
• Create a feedback loop. Make sure that you’re engaging with your audience before asking for a review and have a good feedback loop cycle. If you consistently receive negative reviews, find ways to make improvements and incorporate customer feedback into your product before asking for additional reviews.

Customer reviews have the power to propel your brand’s reputation and build trust with your audience. Whether you’re collecting reviews on your website, social media, or another tool, these strategies can help streamline the process. For a more in-depth look at how reviews can impact your business, download our complete guide on Building a Better Reputation with Reviews.

The post Effective ways to ask for and get more customer reviews appeared first on Sprout Social.

We strive to make it as easy as possible for you to stay connected with your customers, no matter the situation. That’s why we’re excited to share that you can now post to your Google My Business (GMB) profiles directly from the Sprout platform and mobile app.

Provide fresh content and relevant updates

Providing fresh content and business updates on your GMB listing is a very effective way to engage your audience and drive them to learn more about your business. You can now use Sprout to publish “What’s New” posts to give your audience a general update or share relevant content about your business, products, services and more.  You can also publish “Event” posts to share details about upcoming events (and they work just as well for virtual events)!

Including photos and CTA buttons (e.g. “Learn More) in your posts is a great way to increase engagement. According to Google’s internal research, businesses with photos get 40% more requests for directions and listings with website links get 25-35% more clicks.

Highlighting relevant product information also helps your business stand out from the crowd. Sprout customer Parsons Xtreme Golf (PXG), a luxury golf equipment and apparel company, has remained open with modified operations during the COVID-19 quarantine. They wanted to ensure customers knew they were available and providing flexible services in light of social distancing guidelines. Knowing that Google is often the go-to place people turn for information, PXG posted an update that custom club fittings could still happen via phone.

Share your brand voice

It’s important to keep in mind that GMB posts don’t always have to be directly sales-oriented. These posts are also a great opportunity to create deeper connections with customers by sharing your unique brand voice and telling stories that shed light on what matters to your business.

Liberty Humane Society, a non-profit organization focused on animal welfare, is using their GMB presence to do just that. Animal adoption has seen a huge surge since the lockdown started, as people crave the companionship of a furry friend and have more time at home to care for a new pet. Liberty Humane Society is making the most of this opportunity by posting frequent GMB updates from Sprout about animals available for adoption and happy pets who have found their forever homes. Stories like this (and of course, cute photos) can go a long way in helping you capture your audience’s attention.

Improve your search performance

Google has confirmed that posting fresh content and updated information to GMB profiles helps improve businesses’ ranking in search results. In a world where the majority of customer journeys start with an online search, your visibility in search results is critical to introducing new customers to your business.

In addition to posting, there are several other components of a GMB profile you need to manage to optimize your online presence and improve your performance in Google search results. To ensure your online presence is as strong as it can be, you can leverage the following tactics:

1. Ensure your essential business information is complete and up-to-date. This information includes your address, phone number, store hours, and website. While this first step may seem obvious, it’s an important foundation for your online presence (and you might be surprised by how many businesses fail to update it!)
2. Provide details about the products and services you offer. Consumers may be looking for something specific, so make it as easy as possible for them to find that information. 
3. Offer a visual sneak peek with photos and videos. Visuals help capture consumers’ attention and give them a better understanding of the experience they can expect.
4. Engage with customers through online reviews. Responding to reviews shows consumers that you care and increases their trust in your brand. According to Google, consumers said that businesses that respond to reviews are 1.7X more trustworthy than businesses who don’t.

In today’s rapidly changing economic climate, it’s critical that businesses leverage their online presence to stay connected and engaged with customers. Google My Business posting is an easy and effective way to communicate important updates and provide relevant information to searching consumers. Start posting from Sprout today! 

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Reviews can also offer you an opportunity to identify flaws in your business or operations. In turn, they can inform your brand messaging and marketing strategies.

You might also be familiar with reputation management – this is a larger umbrella terminology for maintaining the consumer’s perception of a brand. It includes listings management, social media and search visibility and review marketing and generation strategies as well, but review management is a key element. If you’re looking to start taking a more active role in your brand’s reputation management, having a review management strategy in place is an essential first step.

This guide will walk you through all the fundamentals of implementing a review strategy for your brand.

Why review management is important

Online reviews are not new, but they are more important than ever to brands online. As a consumer, you know how many places you can find them: formalized on TripAdvisor, posted about on Twitter or talked about in a blog post. Reviews have only become more accessible with the proliferation of mobile apps and the addition of readily visible ratings in search results. It’s easier than ever for customers to search your brand on the go and make a quick decision about where they want to take their business.

The prevalence of reviews isn’t just positive for consumers, it also provides a valuable source of feedback for your business.  This can help you understand where to improve, or what customers are loving that you could highlight even more in your marketing.

You might be familiar with looking out for brand mentions and feedback on social media, but there’s a difference between a review posted on Facebook versus chatter about a restaurant on Twitter. Sites with formal star ratings like Facebook and Google get tallied up and averaged for all your future customers to see. This factors into your overall online presence since these ratings can increase your SEO visibility and show up in search results for your brand terms.

According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey in 2018, 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. When further subdivided into age groups, you can see that 25% of those aged 55+ years old have never read an online review while only 5% of those aged 18–34 years old have never read a review. This contrast is helpful to note if your company mostly serves a different age range than those who normally read reviews.

But what do people think about these reviews? They react with their wallets.

The same survey explored if reviews affected the consumer’s use of a local business. A majority of 68% surveyed said a positive review would influence a decision to use a local business while 40% said negative ones would make them not patronize a business.

The good news is that these sites also offer a way for businesses to publicly reply to the review.

Why you should reply to online reviews

Just as you keep on top of your social media messages and engage back, replying to reviews helps build trust and repeat business for your brand. No matter what the tone or content of a review is, it’s a best practice to always respond. 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews, so they’re an essential avenue for cementing your brand identity and forging connections to your customers.

Plan for common review situations in advance so that you know your team is ready to stay on-message. You’ll  want to draw up a document of items frequently mentioned in reviews and appropriate responses. During your audit, you probably saw some of these common scenarios. Use your audit as the base but not the limiting factor.

For a retailer, common topics might include staff demeanor and customer service, product selection and stock, ambiance and checkout wait times. Within each category type, you’ll then identify where reviews might focus on, even if they didn’t come up in the audit. For example, even if you don’t have many negative mentions about customer service, you should be ready to react to a situation where a customer couldn’t find a staff member to answer their question or didn’t get a discount applied at checkout.

If you’re stuck with coming up with new scenarios, ask your customer support team or whoever currently runs frontline with customers. Ask not just for the common scenarios but also for the unique ones. The extreme ones may be rare, but they might also run the risk of becoming viral.

After each category and scenario has been identified, start in on the responses. What will you tell someone if they claim that a shoe’s sole fell off within the first month of use? What will you say if someone says a staff member was making discriminatory or controversial comments?

Preparation for these scenarios is key so you don’t feel lash out defensively if and when a crisis comes up.

Tips for responding to online reviews

When reading a critique of your business, you may feel attacked and frustrated that the customer doesn’t understand you. While this is a valid reaction, it’s important to move beyond this and see the opportunity to rebuild trust with your audience. Setting aside the frustration can open the door to connection – 33% of customers who received a response to a negative review subsequently changed it to be more positive, while 34% deleted their negative review.

Keep your tone friendly and understanding. When writing a response, personalize it with a name if available, acknowledge what was written and add remarks if steps will be taken internally. Sign off with your name and position if that’s not readily apparent.

In this example, The Stinking Rose restaurant responded to both positive and negative reviews. Notice that in the negative review response, the restaurant mentioned the actions that would be taken.

Regardless of how positive or negative a review is, each customer deserves to be responded to. Harvard Business Review reviewed tens of thousands of TripAdvisor hotel reviews and if available, the hotels’ responses. When hotels started responding to reviews, they received 12% more ratings and increased them by an average of 0.12 stars. TripAdvisor rounds to the nearest half star. For a third of the hotels that were studied, ratings increased by half a star or more within the first six months of responding to reviews.

This study followed similar results to The Sprout Social Index, Edition XII: Call-out Culture where we studied how responses mattered to consumers on social media. The consequences are high for brands who don’t respond to a social complaint: 35% of consumers would never buy from them again.

But if you respond poorly, the percentage of consumers who would never buy from you again increases to 50%. This is why you need to have a review response plan in place as part of your overall strategy.

But fear not, you can win back customers even after a negative social post or review.  44% of consumers say that a great response would win them back.

In crafting a response, keep in mind that while a response may be directed to a customer, your future customers will be reading it also. They’ll take note of the efforts you make to respond and the changes you implement in your business practices.

As you can see, managing reviews has a lot in common with what you may already have in place as a social customer care strategy. Being receptive to your audiences’ feedback and willing to respond in an authentic, personalized and constructive way can help you connect with your customers, whether you’re dealing with online reviews or comments on social platforms.

Identify review networks to focus on

To start implementing a review management strategy, you need to identify the networks that you want to focus on. The fastest way to do this is to perform an audit of each review network you can think of and explore how many reviews are left there. You could either look at how many your business currently gets on a given site, or how well your niche is represented there.

Review sites vary between industries. For example, TripAdvisor is geared more towards hospitality, travel, and the international audience, while Google My Business is important across industries, but is particularly important for smaller local businesses. If you’re a restaurant, then you likely have reviews on TripAdvisor, Google, Yelp, Facebook and maybe even your preferred delivery app.

Learn how to strengthen your reputation with reviews

It doesn’t matter if you’re actively managing your presence on these review networks or not. People will leave reviews regardless of your brand presence. The trick is to identify which ones matter to you the most. If you are just starting out in review management, some of the top networks in terms of volume and reach include Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor.

In 2019 alone, NetMarketShare.com showed that Google dominated the search engine market at 81.38%. China-based Baidu came in second with 9.94% of the market share. Where you and your customers are will determine which search engines you want to focus on.

Google My Business encompasses your business’ presence on Google. This includes a short summary that displays in the Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side of search results. It also includes the same details that pop up if you’re searching for it on Google Maps.

TripAdvisor reviews are popular with audiences planning for their next travel destination. To get started with this platform, be sure to claim the listing for your business.

On Facebook, reviews and recommendations need to be turned on from the Page’s settings. In 2018, Facebook turned reviews into recommendations only. However, previous star ratings still exist on the Page and are still shown out of five stars.

In Sprout’s reviews tab, you can see your Facebook reviews, Google My Business reviews and TripAdvisor reviews all in one stream, allowing you to easily manage replies as well as filter these incoming reviews and assign tasks just like the rest of your social media workflow through Sprout.

To find the most opportune networks for your reviews, it may be best to set up a social media listening strategy that will bring up online chatter about your business. If you start seeing more reviews from one network, maybe it’ll be time to join it.  Plus, with listening you’ll be able to find other sources of valuable feedback about your business across social networks.

In the above scenario, the account name was mentioned by the user. But if they had only mentioned the name of the game or other branded key terms, a listening strategy would’ve brought it up in a search for brand name mentions.

Conclusion

When it comes to writing online reviews, customers have a lot of power. But with the right tools, preparation and knowledge, businesses also have the power to change brand perception in a positive way.

Acknowledging and responding to online reviews, good and bad, not only strengthen your brand’s online image but also gets folded into social media engagement. Social customer care and online review management go hand in hand. Master these two and you’ll have an excellent customer care strategy.

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While you can’t control what customers say about you, you can control how you respond. And as it turns out, business responses to reviews have a huge impact on consumer perception and buying behavior. A whopping 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews, and 45% say they’re more likely to visit a business if it responds to negative reviews.* Now more than ever, it’s critical to incorporate review management into your overall engagement strategy so you can build stronger relationships with customers and improve your online reputation.

Unify social media and review management with Sprout

Sprout is excited to offer a unified solution to help you manage customer engagement across social media and reviews in one place. With our new Reviews tool, you can easily monitor and manage reviews for all your business locations across Facebook, Google My Business and TripAdvisor from one unified stream on web or mobile. By integrating social media and reviews in one platform, you can save valuable time, stay organized and build a more cohesive and efficient engagement strategy.

Create a mobile alert for high priority review types so your team can promptly identify and address critical new reviews.

Respond to every customer – promptly and thoughtfully

Although it’s no secret that today’s consumers expect a quick response from brands when they engage with them via social or reviews, the reality is that brands are having a hard time keeping up. In fact, a recent study showed that 53.3% of consumers expect brands to respond to reviews within 7 days, but 63.3% of consumers reported that they have never heard back from a business after leaving a review. There’s a big opportunity here for brands to close this gap and build stronger relationships with customers through review response management.

In Sprout, you can respond to all of your business reviews across Facebook, Google My Business and TripAdvisor from one unified stream. Access saved responses from the Asset Library to ensure a consistent brand voice, and mark reviews as complete to help your team stay organized and collaborate efficiently.

Prioritize your strategy to meet your unique review management needs

When it comes to your review management strategy, every business has their own unique approach and needs. This can include which networks and review types you want to prioritize, which business locations you want to focus on and what the response cadence looks like. Organize your reviews by date, message status, rating and profile, and create mobile notification alerts to stay on top of reviews activity. You can also save specific filter sets to create custom views (ie. “5-Star Reviews,” or “East Coast Locations”) and then share with your team members.

Benefits that go beyond your reputation

The value of review management extends beyond strengthening your engagement and online reputation; it is also a powerful source of customer feedback that you can use to improve your brand experience. Through online reviews, your customers are providing you with real-time insights about your business and you need to be listening and taking notes. By streamlining your business reviews across locations and networks in the Sprout platform, you gain a more holistic view of the customer experience that helps you discover patterns about your performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

Another major benefit of review management is that it helps improve your SEO (ie. search engine optimization), which impacts where your business appears in local search results. This is particularly relevant for Google My Business reviews, as Google has confirmed that review response rate is a significant factor in how they rank businesses in Google search results. Considering the critical role online search plays in the marketing funnel, review management represents a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes to increase their search visibility and drive more foot traffic. 

Start Managing Your Reviews From Sprout 

Today’s the day to begin integrating reviews with your social media engagement strategy! To get started with Reviews, connect your profiles for Facebook, GMB or TripAdvisor in Sprout today — or click here to begin your free trial.

Sources:

Local Consumer Survey (BrightLocal, 2018)

Online Reviews Survey (ReviewTrackers, 2018)

The post Strengthen your online reputation with Sprout’s new review management tool appeared first on Sprout Social.

In an age when mobile-empowered consumers have limitless information and options at their fingertips, brands are finding it harder than ever to stand out from the crowd. Almost every customer journey starts with a search engine like Google, so your brands’ presence in local search results is a critical opportunity to capture consumers’ attention and drive sales.

Online reviews are playing an increasingly important role in this search process, with 63.6% of consumers claiming to check Google reviews before visiting a business or making a purchase. (ReviewTrackers, 2018). Now more than ever, brands need to integrate review management into their overall engagement strategy to build stronger customer relationships and improve their online reputation.

Download this guide to learn how to:

• Strengthen your Google My Business presence to increase SEO and discoverability in local search results
• Leverage review management to improve your reputation and build better relationships with customers
• Unify your social media and review management for a more cohesive and efficient approach to customer engagement

The post Building a Better Reputation with Reviews appeared first on Sprout Social.