How Review Monitoring Helps Increase Brand Reliability
In today’s online business world, there are two things most customers do before making a purchasing decision on an e-commerce website; compare prices and check for online reviews.
Online reviews posted by other customers may not seem like such a big deal but put so many bad reviews about one brand together and watch that business crumble faster than we could have wished for.
In the same vein, positive reviews do not only guarantee more sales and revenue but also helps to build a reliable and strong brand.
Both types of reviews are usually posted on popular platforms such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook. Review monitoring is how brands curate them and then use them to their advantage.
What is review monitoring?
Review monitoring is the process of checking for what is being said about your brand online and then taking full control of it.
It is a simple system that continually checks for your customers’ feedback on your products and services as well as your brand mentions.
Such honest feedback and mentions can appear on multiple websites and platforms at the same time. Hence, to be more efficient, review monitoring is integrated into whatever strategies the brand uses and allowed to run automatically to save time and other resources. If you want to learn more about review monitoring, we suggest you check the Oxylabs website or read the text below.
Why do companies use review monitoring?
Monitoring what is being said about your brand online can directly impact your search engine optimization (SEO) performance and, therefore, an indirect influence on brand profitability and growth.
Here are some reasons why companies use review monitoring:
- To boost local SEO performance
Whether negative or positive, reviews add up to what determines your placement on search engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore, companies monitor reviews and mentions to control how they perform on search engines. And remedying a negative review can help to boost such performance.
2. To maintain a healthier reputation online
Online reputation is simply a summed total of how a brand is perceived on the web. And because it helps to add to what makes a brand value, it would be irresponsible to leave it to chance.
When customers drop too many negative reviews unattended, the brand image and reputation will suffer. Likewise, when positive comments are made, brand value improves.
Tracking online conversations through review monitoring is, therefore, crucial in maintaining a healthy online perception.
3. Building better customer relationships and providing better services
The key to delivering better services is to hear what the customers are saying, and this can only be achieved by monitoring their reviews and comments on different platforms.
Interestingly, customers feel more respected, appreciated, and cared for when brands take their time to listen to them. This translates into trust and loyalty that ensures a better company-customer relationship.
4. Attracting Customers with Higher Intent
Statistics state that 90% of consumers usually read online reviews before visiting an e-commerce business website.
This means that people who search for products online generally are looking to make purchases, but it is usually those with higher intent of buying that make it to the business websites. And to attract customers with such high intent, it is necessary to have great reviews online.
As if that is not enough, buyers also reported that they would spend about 31% more on a brand if it has excellent reviews. Perhaps, this explains why companies initiate review monitoring and use it to make their reviews as satisfying as possible.
Best cases when monitoring customer reviews can promote business growth
There are certain cases and situations when using review monitoring can be especially beneficial to the growth of a brand, and some of these instances include:
- During product introduction
After a brand introduces a new product to the market, it is always important to see how it is faring. Review monitoring allows brands to see what customers are saying about such a product. That information can then be used to make necessary improvements and to decide whether to withdraw that product or not.
- During market penetration
Market penetration entails the process through which a brand uses to break into a new market or sell more products and services to an existing market. The penetration into any new market is usually a risky yet necessary adventure, and to mitigate such risks, companies use review monitoring to check for acceptance in the new market. This will allow them to know whether there is a chance of ever dominating such a market.
- When testing pricing strategy
Every business’s most basic goal is to optimize profit and grow, yet price optimization is never an easy task. Pricing strategies are used to decide how to determine the best prices. When not done correctly, companies can risk selling their products or services at too high prices, thereby losing customers. They can also risk selling at low prices and losing profit.
Review monitoring, therefore, help to provide information on what the customers are saying about the prices. This can then be used to make the necessary adjustments.
Conclusion
As it is today, e-commerce businesses that grow and succeed are those who can make their customers feel they can truly rely on them. And there is no better way to encourage brand reliability than to monitor and, appropriately, respond to online reviews.
The process which could be challenging becomes more comfortable when you throw in some web scraping for effective extraction of data such as brand mentions, reviews, and customers’ comments.
