Online reviews are now one of the most common things that people look for when they want to learn about products, services, brands, and companies. It's important to have an online review monitoring strategy in place so you can address issues before they become a threat to your efforts. Take a look at four strategies organizations often employ.
Automation
The internet is big, and trying to absorb all of the available information even about a single brand is impossible. If you want to know what the state of your online reviews is, you're going to need a system that can keep tabs on all of it for you. That means investing in online review monitoring services that can automate the process.
Becoming Data-Centric
A good system should provide data, analysis, and insights regarding the current state of reviews. Sentiment analysis, for example, is a data-driven process that lets you know how many negative, positive, and neutral reviews are out there.
Your system should also help you monitor trends. Foremost, this allows you to spot problems as they appear. If you see a spike in negative reviews for a product, for example, you might want to check those reviews and see if there are some commonalities. For some companies, this has the potential to save millions of dollars by getting out in front of product defects.
Similarly, trend data should tell you how other efforts are performing. If you're rolling out a new marketing campaign, for example, demographic analysis can tell you whether it's hitting the mark.
Good and Bad Reviews
It's easy for some folks to narrow in on reviews that are either very good or extremely bad. However, as the old cliché goes, you have to take the good with the bad. Developing a data-centered approach to your online review monitoring strategy will help you to be more dispassionate about reviews. You can then balance both the good and bad as valid inputs that allow you to refine products, services, and brands.
Digging Deeper
Particularly with the emergence of paywalls, closed membership structures, and authentication systems, it's hard to monitor some sources of reviews. Oftentimes, groups with high interest in brands congregate online in these settings. That makes them invaluable sources of data, especially about high-information users.
When you pay for online review monitoring services, you'll want a system that can interact with these walled apps and sites. This will give you a closer look at home some of the most active internet users see your brand's reputation.
Reach out to an online review monitoring service to learn more.