Managing your business reputation online is fundamental to building customer trust in your brand. With ever-expanding technology, there are now multiple ways to do this and the process can even be largely automated.
As a result, businesses can save time and effort when trying to maintain a great online presence and reputation.
Artificial intelligence powered image analysis ensures that the best business images are present, in order to maintain a great brand reputation | Vicinus
Here are our top tips for how you can be managing and monitoring your business reputation online:
Monitor the reviews left on your business listings and website
Keeping an eye on the reviews left by your customers online is very important. It gives insight into how your customers feel about your business and how to improve negative perceptions. Sentiment analysis can help you understand the emotions behind the reviews your customers leave.
Vicinus, our hyperlocal marketing platform, uses Machine Learning-powered technology called Amazon Comprehend to perform sentiment analysis.
It identifies whether customer reviews convey sadness, anger, happiness, shock, or satisfaction. From the data gathered, you can plan so that customers don’t have similar negative experiences in the future.
2. Respond to all of your reviews – both positive and negative.
Responding to customer reviews is crucial to building trust and a great reputation online. If online searchers see your business actively responding to customer reviews – both positive and negative – they are more likely to choose your business over competitors because you are demonstrating reliability and attentiveness.
Vicinus can make this process easier for you with the review auto-responder feature. With the insight gathered from sentiment analysis, you can set up automatic review responses tailored to customer sentiments and the given ratings.
For example, you can automate grateful responses to reviews from happy customers who gave 5-star ratings. Likewise, you can create apologetic and resourceful responses for unhappy customers who provided low star ratings.
What can businesses do aside from engage with reviews?
3. Surveil user-uploaded images on your business listings
Online users can freely upload images to your business listings. These images may be irrelevant or reflect poorly on your business. Therefore, in order to manage your business reputation online, you need to check online images regularly.
However, this can be time-consuming, especially for businesses with listings for multiple locations and across multiple platforms. That’s where Artificial Intelligence technology can help.
Within Vicinus, you can utilise AI-powered technology called Google Cloud Vision API to monitor the user-uploaded images on your Google My Business listings. As a result the technology understands the text within images and recognises facial expressions and different objects.
For example, it can tell whether an image shows a happy face or a sad face. Similarly, it can tell the difference between a building and an elephant. AI image analysis like this ensures only the best images of your business are present online.
In addition, with the whole process automated and performed by AI, this usual manual laborious task is eliminated. Read our blog to learn more about how Vicinus is using AI to revolutionise local search engine marketing.
4. Keep your business listing information up-to-date
To build a brilliant reputation online for your business, you should frequently check and update your business listings. The way to do this is by making sure that NAP (business name, address, phone number) should be accurate and current on all your business listings for each individual location and across all platforms.
Moreover, make sure all other information is accurate too, such as opening times and the link to your website.
Solve inconsistencies and update incorrect data with listing management software like Vicinus. Our hyperlocal marketing tool allows you to manage all of your business listings for all your locations wherever they are listed all from one central platform.
5. Track how your business appears in local search results
Businesses should search for their own name and the keywords they are targeting monthly. This will show you how your business is performing in local search.
Additionally, you can even set up alerts on Google so that you are notified whenever new content is posted online about your business with specific keywords.
Remember how you appear in local search is how your customers see and find your business.