Why are local business reviews important to national and regional brands?
Local business reviews are important to brands for a handful of reasons. Here are three biggies:
- Local business reviews affect brand reputation and the actions of prospective customers. As a result, negative reviews provide companies the opportunity to publicly engage dissatisfied customers and seek resolution to correct adverse customer experiences. As a brand, demonstrating that you care about what customers have to say is a best practice.
- Local business reviews inform brands about customer experiences and can provide actionable business intelligence regarding products, services, and policies.
- Search engine visibility. Simply having local business reviews increases your business listing rankings in the local business results of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Why do brands with multiple locations need a solution to manage local business reviews?
It is much more difficult for companies with multiple locations to manage local business reviews than SMBs. It is easy for the owners and management of SMBs with one or 10 locations to monitor and take action/respond to reviews.
For brands with hundreds or even thousands of locations, it's a different story. Location-based managers are focused on day-to-day operations, and corporate leadership is generally invested in a broader, brand focus. This is particularly true for chains, and to a lesser degree franchise models, whose ownership is generally more hands-on at the local level.
In my role as an online marketing and brand protection consultant, I have been advising brands throughout the better part of the past decade to directly engage customers who blog negative experiences, when appropriate. The results are positive. In the public forum of a personal blog or social media site, these customers have their grievances addressed and corrected. Many times the customer is a bigger fan than before their negative experience, and often it impacts word of mouth.
To put into context, the reviews on local business directories are generally more important to address than a blog with little visibility. Therefore, a reputation management solution that proactively monitors and addresses the impact of local online business reviews is a priority.
What is the solution to manage local business reviews?
There are three fundamental elements of a local business review management strategy: monitoring reviews, responding to reviews, and proactively generating reviews.
Monitoring reviews
There are a lot of top-notch brand monitoring/reputation management solutions out there like Cymfony and Trackur, but none detail local business reviews -- until now -- like the new Marchex Reputation Management tool, and it is currently accepting users for a free trial.
The Marchex dashboard monitors data from more than 8,000 sources and reports local business reviews, as well as news, blog, and social media mentions for specific locations.
In addition, Marchex ensures the accuracy of information in existing online business listings found on search engines, internet Yellow Pages, local business directories, and vertical business directories. The tool displays the details of each listing such as business name, address, and phone number. The tool also makes recommendations as to where to add new listings for more local visibility online. This information is refreshed daily.
The Reviews section displays reviews in their entirety, the review source, date, and a chart breaking out the percentage of positive, neutral, or negative reviews.
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