The way in which buyers research products and services has changed significantly in the past few years. In fact, eight out of ten shoppers look to reviews about a local business before deciding to purchase from them. Consumers tend to trust other consumers more than they trust companies. That's why online reviews have become more relevant than ever in the buying process.
Customer reviews are the new word of mouth. This practical marketing element is a powerful tool to influence consumers' opinions. They provide brands with valuable insights into how their offering is perceived by their audience, making it easy to improve them based on consumer feedback. As a result, reviews are an excellent avenue for catching your target audience's eye and drawing them into your business.
Online customer reviews are here to stay, and those businesses not taking advantage of the perks they bring to the table are already behind. Yet, if you're looking to start capitalizing on this digital marketing staple, you'll highly benefit from a review management tool to earn new reviews, respond to customer feedback quickly, and improve your overall rating on popular review platforms.
Here's a quick guide on the most relevant review management tools currently on the market.
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Review Management Tips
To better manage your reviews online, you'll first need to identify the review sites that are the most relevant to your business. Google reviews and Yelp reviews are some of the most significant, but building a robust presence on industry-specific sites is crucial to reach the right customers. Once you've identified where is best for your customers to talk about you, you must claim your business on these platforms. This measure will allow you to have complete control over how you manage your reputation and interact with customers.
Whether positive or negative, customer feedback is crucial to understand what your customers love about your brand and where you should improve. Keeping an eye on the negative reviews and responding to them as fast as possible is an excellent way to improve customers' perception of your business. Yet, be wary of fake reviews since they can damage your reputation beyond repair. If you spot them, ask the review site to remove them immediately.
How To Choose the Best Review Management Tools?
To maintain your brand's online reputation, you need to be consistent and proactive. Review management can notably increase your chances of converting online visitors to customers and generating brand loyalty among existing customers. However, keeping up with both positive and negative customer reviews across different sites and platforms can become a time-consuming task. That's why getting a review management tool is an excellent idea.
A great review management tool should be easy to use and allow for customization options to adapt to your specific needs. Here are other features you should look for in your software of choice:
- Multichannel review generation
- Monitoring dashboard
- Real-time notifications
- Data analytics
- Feedback management
- Moderation capabilities
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Top Review Management Tools for 2022
Because of the increasing popularity of customer reviews, there are many review management apps available in the market. Here are our top picks for the best review management tool in 2022.
1. Scorpion
The Scorpion review management tool allows small and medium-sized businesses to track their reputation online. By allowing access to reviews and ratings across the web, this platform enables users to better understand where they stand and how their customers perceive them. These insights are crucial to identify areas of improvement and to keep up the hard work on what they're doing right.
Scorpion also helps users gather more reviews. It guides users through the process of asking customers for reviews and encouraging feedback on specific sites. This platform collects customer reviews from over 70 review sites and lets users respond to them almost instantly — which is extremely useful when handling damage control. In addition, the Scorpion review platform will notify you when customers leave feedback on your site and business pages. This lets you respond faster and make your customers feel heard.
Through Scorpion, your review strategy can help you get more leads for your business. By tracking and responding to feedback on Yelp Reviews, Google Reviews, Thumbtack, and other popular review sites using the platform, users can positively influence how people see their business and improve their rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Pages).
Scorpion has a dedicated team of experts at the client's disposition to solve their problems and help them reach their goals. They also offer numerous resources to educate the user on relevant topics to enhance their strategy.
Pros
- Mobile app for review management on the go
- Instant review responses
- Access to 70+ review sites
- Lead generation support
- Easy to navigate dashboard
- Great customer support and expert backup
Cons
- Works better for small businesses
2. Podium
This customer interaction platform helps businesses manage their online reputation through text messaging. It's a good alternative for those looking to manage customer relationships across multiple sites. Podium offers extensive reports on business operations, sentiment analysis, and competitive benchmarking. This is an excellent feature that enables companies to know how they're doing when compared to their competition.
This platform combines online reviews and customer interactions in an intuitive dashboard, making it easy for users to monitor what their audience is saying online. Podium lets users send review invitations and real-time responses. It also lets businesses text existing and prospective customers.
Pros
- Intuitive platform
- Combined review and interactions monitoring dashboard
- Mobile app
- Analytics reports
- Real-time notifications
- Feedback management.
- Allows texting
Cons
- Customers complain about the app glitching
- Disappointing customer support
3. Trustpilot
This online review management tool allows businesses to build a favorable reputation for their brand. In addition, it's designed to promote transparency and trust between companies and their customers. Trustpilot is a review community that allows companies to better understand what their clients think through genuine and authentic feedback.
This system facilitates interactions between customers and businesses to improve retention rates. It helps companies offer unhappy customers answers and solutions to make them feel more satisfied after a negative experience with a brand. Trustpilot serves medium to large-scale businesses and helps them stand out in SERPs. It allows users to create widgets to showcase their best reviews and use them as social proof.
Pros
- Offers a free plan
- Provides insights
- Enables review requests
- Offers customization options
- Real-time notifications
Cons
- Not a great alternative for small businesses
- Hard to contact customer support
4. Yext
This marketing software allows users to track their online information through a convenient dashboard. It also lets them update their basic business information to keep their listings fresh. Yext offers subscription packages that allow you to perform sentiment analysis. The platform has an intelligent review response feature that uses pre-built text assets and dynamic templates to let users reply to happy and unhappy customers within seconds.
Yext offers a Knowledge Assistant tool. This feature lets users manage brand facts online and gain insights into how consumers engage and interact with their business without downloading any apps. All it takes is a simple text.
Pros
- Offers insights and analytics
- Allows customization
- Displays start ratings on organic search results
- Allows sharing feedback on websites and local pages
- Provides intelligent response templates
Cons
- It isn't affordable
- Big learning curve
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Why Do You Need Review Management Tools?
Customer feedback is an incredible tool to learn more about what your customer wants and needs. However, online reviews can pile up across numerous sites, and it can get quite challenging to keep track of all of them. Buyers often want responses as quickly as possible, and it's not humanly possible to reply to all of them without a little help.
Review management tools offer companies a shortcut to control their online reputation. These are just some of the reasons why your business needs a good review management tool ASAP.
A Good Review Management Tool Will Save You Time and Effort
This software allows you to collect reviews from most major review sites in real-time and handle all review management tasks from one place. This will spare you the need to review all of the sites manually by allowing you to automate the process.
Online Feedback Gathered Through Review Management Tools Can Become Your Social Proof
Having curated customer reviews displayed on your website is a great way to influence consumers' decisions. Social proof builds trust and may give your brand authority status.
Review Management Allows You to Understand Your Customers Faster
The insights and analytics you can get through this type of software will allow you to learn more about your audience to better satisfy their needs.
Reviews Management Tools Enable You to Get More Reviews
Online reviews often create a domino effect. They may encourage other visitors to speak their minds about your product or service for others to read.
Reviews Management Tools Help You Rank Higher on SERPs
Positive reviews improve your SEO and solidify your online presence. Review management software helps to enhance local SEO with a well-managed online reputation.
Conclusion
Running a successful online reputation management strategy can be challenging. That's why you should take advantage of a good review management tool. If you need more information on what this software can do for you, contact Scorpion Marketing today.
