“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody from the chairman on down just be spending his money somewhere else.”, says Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. Walmart is the biggest retail shopping chain in many countries. They sell their products at lower costs than their competitors.
To make your business as successful as these big brands, you must focus on one aspect; the customer. The customer must be the central focus of the company.
As a brand owner, you should always be aware of what your customer is talking about you online. There are many ways to check your customer reviews, opinions, and your online reputation.
This article will explore more about customers and how to engage with them. But before jumping into it, let us first understand how to keep track of your customers online.
How To Check On Your Customers Online?
93% of the people read online reviews before buying or rendering any service from a brand or business. That is why listening to what your customer is saying online about you becomes crucial.
Here are some tactics to connect with your customer to understand their requirements and expectations of your brand.
Ask Your Customers
The best way to know what your customer thinks about you is to ask them directly. You can ask them their choices, what they want from you, the pros and cons for them as your customer, what you can improve, and many such questions.
Dealing with positive criticism is one of the best things to maintain your reputation online. The people who do not use your brand or once were your customers can be the biggest asset for your growth.
Conduct Surveys
Conducting a survey can help you know about the people and their choice all over the place. As a brand, you must remember that working on the ground level proves to be the best.
Surveys can we a wealth of information. For example, if you own a makeup brand, you can include the following question in your survey form.
- What are your favourite and go-to brands for makeup products?
- What do you like the most about your favourite brand?
- What is that you don’t like about your go-to brand?
- What should a brand do to improve this issue?
- Have you heard about us/ used our products?
- What do you think about us?
All these questions include two questions about your brand and all others through which you can understand their choices. It will help you to make a clear-cut success plan for your brand.
Attracting Them To You Is The Key.
Showcase yourself in front of your customers or future customers is a necessary part of connecting with them. You can use the following methods to present your brand in front of them:
- You must be on social media to keep yourself in front of your customers because 4.62 billion people use social media regularly.
- You must avail them of special offers on different occasions to keep them engaged all the time with your brand. In 2020, 88% of survey respondents said they use coupons for shopping.
- You can also conduct an event for your regular and loyal customers. Loyal and happy customers are what you desperately need to be successful.
Keep A Check on Sentiment Analytics.
What Is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing technique (NLP) that helps determine whether the review or data is positive, negative, or neutral. All the brands and businesses are using this technique to get customers’ feedback and their requirements.
What Are The Types Of Sentiment Analysis?
There are four types of sentiment analysis, by which you can understand your customers’ sentiments through their feedback.
Graded Sentiment Analysis: It denotes the grades of analysis
- Excellent
- Best
- Good
- Average
- Not good
- Worst.
Emotion Detection Sentiment Analysis: It denotes the people’s emotions to analyze the market’s sentiments in the form of emoticons.
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: This analysis helps you to understand and analyze the reviews based on a specific aspect.
For example, if you own a clothing brand, the aspect-based reviews can be like, ‘The fibre of the shirt is not soft and uncomfortable to wear.’ Here the customer is explicitly talking about the fibre, which indicates that you need to work on the softness and comfortability of the thread.
Multi-Lingual Sentiment Analysis: A customer’s review or data in different languages falls under this category.
Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?
Knowing about the customer’s sentiments will help you to build your brand in the direction of success. Whenever customers share their reviews with the brand (be it positive or negative), they expect the brand to look into the issue.
You can build great brand trust if you resolve all the negative reviews from your customer. Once you fix the issues, connecting with them personally makes your brand a well-reputed and trusted entity.
A brand sentiment analysis tool can help you build your brand reputation. These tools are present across the internet for free or in the form of paid tools.
Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are the easiest and most direct way to understand your online reputation in front of your customer. Unfortunately, you can never get all the positive customer reviews.
People love to try new brands and services and then compare the two. Around 65% of customers love to have at least three brands for every niche. You as a brand can now understand by this data that getting your brand in these top 3 choices is your job.
A business can easily understand a customer’s choice from their reviews, thus making them an essential part of brand awareness.
What Is Online Reputation Management?
There are almost 1.8 billion websites on the internet. All these websites have an online reputation in front of their customers.
Online reputation management is managing the online presence of your business in front of the customers. When a brand or a person users ORM, they should work on the three elements of it:
- Accuracy of the data.
- Sustainability of the data.
- Controllability of the data.
We have mentioned some significant points you need to manage to optimize your online reputation.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the most significant part of your online presence and is equally important to managing your online reputation. 75% of the people never leave the first page of the search, which creates massive importance of ranking your business or brand in the search results on the first page.
SEO experts do this job for you to maintain your presence on the first page of whatever your niche is.
Social Media Presence
78% of customers want brands to have some social media presence to build connections. A brand needs to focus on social activities as they can help to create a significant reputation in front of the customers.
Brand Awareness
Promoting your brand to the customers is called brand awareness in front of them. A customer needs to capture any brand’s name or hear its name at least seven times so that they can buy and render their services.
You can now understand the importance of being available to your customers when they need you. Brand building also plays an integral part in having a good impression in front of the customer.
Conclusion
Remember the following points to establish an excellent online reputation in front of your customers.
- Be available for your customers 24/7.
- Give the customers what they want.
- Listen to your customers more often.
- Be proactive about the future.
- Advertising and promoting yourself is crucial.
- Take care of brand building and brand awareness is a must.
You can consider all these points to be the critical element for online reputation management. We are here to assist you if you still have any queries regarding the topic. Call or email us, and we will be more than happy to help.
