It’s so easy for clients to fall in love with local business listings at first sight. That early stage of infatuation with all the fresh bells and whistles of a Google Business Profile is heady. The budding romance of being able to get your name and contact info just right, choosing a flattering cover photo, writing an attractive description…and knowing that Google will publish all this for free in a massively visible digital format! Pretty exciting.
Then time goes by and the flame begins to flicker. The listing partner your client once thought was perfect starts saying things like, “Your pizza is cold. Your bathroom is dirty. You are too pricey.” Pick, pick, pick. Local business reviews can be rough and no one feels warm fuzzies facing criticism.
What is the motivation to stick this relationship out for the long haul? What is the reward? A negative review goes unanswered, and then another, and another, creating a lonely hearts club of neglected customers and a falling star rating that has to be rescued before it causes the public to break up with the brand for good.
So this is couples therapy today. I’m going to teach you how to teach your agency’s clients to become better partners in a relationship too many of them are neglecting: the full digital marketing picture of listings AND reviews. They go together like a horse and carriage, as the old song says, and when local businesses try to have one without the other, they are on the road to failure. You’ve got a limited time to fix this with each client before they think you aren’t delivering success and walk away, so let’s get talking!
Heart-to-heart #1: Many of your local business clients have no idea that they’re in a relationship.
Why are lovelorn customers across North America left saying, “But they don’t even know I exist”? It’s because their reviews consistently receive no response from brands. Too often, the cause of this unhappy situation comes down to a single fact: local business owners have not been taught to see their listings as the basis of a relationship.
They may think of Google Business Profiles (GBPs) as a marketing asset, a place to promote their brand, get clicks, leads, and conversions, and to do a little soapboxing via Google Updates (posts). They frequently see the dynamic as one-sided, with them telling their story to the world. They misunderstand their listings as megaphones instead of smartphones designed to connect them in one-on-one conversations with individual customers in the community they serve.
This is why I can search any combination of industry + city and immediately pull up small-to-enterprise brands with tons of reviews that have received zero response from the business owner. A large percentage of the clients you onboard will have no idea that they signed up for a relationship by signing up for a GBP or other local business listing.
Your agency’s job here is to counsel clients to acknowledge that they are in a serious relationship. Customers are trying to communicate with them via reviews and it’s neither socially acceptable nor profitable to give them the silent treatment.
Heart-to-heart #2: Not every client is willing to do the necessary work to build trust with their customers.
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.” – Plato
There’s a reason long-married couples talk about the work they’ve put in to stay together. Whether that’s years of faithfully-kept date nights, private rituals like singing to your spouse once a day for 50+ years, or just holding hands through all the richer-poorer-sickness-health-better-worse times any lasting partnership goes through, the required effort is significant. Romantic and business relationships aren’t the same, but they are alike in the sustained commitment that is needed to achieve longevity.
Your agency’s job is to help the client honestly evaluate whether they have what it takes to commit to doing business in a modern context. 92% of today’s consumers believe that brands responding to online reviews is now part-and-parcel of providing good customer service. Your team can offer the client vigorous support and excellent reputation management software to make attending to owner responses as easy as possible. If, in the end, you realize you’ve got a client who isn’t willing to do their part to make their relationship with their community work, your agency may need to move on in order to avoid tying your brand to failing companies.
The most challenging version of this dilemma that I’ve seen for local search marketing agencies involves enterprise clients. Securing contracts with big brands can do wonderful things for your revenue, but too often, America’s corporate culture teaches the majors that they can rest on their laurels and let customer service suffer. Stunning numbers of bankruptcies say otherwise and I bet if you look at even a short list of them, you could create a catalogue of matching instances of neglected customer complaints like this one, which took me approximately 3 seconds to find:
Give the client all the tools they need to succeed with review management, but take it as a red flag for your own relationship with them if they simply won’t put in the work.
Heart-to-heart #3: Business owner humility is the basis of successful review management.
“Just don’t feel you know everything,” is the viral TikTok advice given by a woman who’s been married for 73 years.
The opposite of resting on one’s laurels is to be open to growth. In the business context, this means being willing to listen to customers, learn from them, and discover how to serve them better. The review scenario is tailor-made to deliver amazing insights into what communities want, if the business can commit to active monitoring and response, but it isn’t always a bed of roses.
Your agency’s job is to teach clients that:
- Every good business can expect some negative reviews
- Reviewers are like any other segment of the public, meaning that some will have personal problems that cause them to be uncivil and sometimes difficult to speak with
- Where complaints are based on unmet customer needs, valuable opportunity is being surfaced by the reviewer for the business to become more profitable by making change
The best attitude any business can bring to serving the public is one softened with a dose of healthy humility. The brand doesn’t come into existence knowing everything the public wants. The brand is there to learn and grow along the way so that it can adapt to changing times and needs for many years to come.
Prepare your clients for this learning experience by showing them:
- How to say “I’m sorry” in response to a negative review
- How to offer to make things better in response to a negative review
Heart-to-heart #4: A local search marketing strategy without review management is like a sieve.
Because it’s one of the oldest commercial truisms that it’s less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to acquire a new one, your agency needs to help clients identify and plug up any holes through which patrons are slipping. The megaphone approach to local listings management being an entirely one-sided series of announcements by the brand acts as a leaking sieve until it is paired with professional reputation management based on one-on-one dialogue with customers.
Unless the business is actively analyzing and responding to its reviews, statistical realities like these, pulled from GatherUp’s recent survey of 1,200+ U.S. consumers, will begin to strain and drain the brand:
- 82% of customers prefer choosing brands that actively respond to reviews.
- 73% of consumers want to be thanked via an owner response when they leave you a positive review.
- 79% of reviewers expect your brand to respond when they complain.
- If your brand ignores negative reviews, 60% of consumers will never do business with you again, and 44% will tell their friends and family that your company treated them badly.
- Only 3% of customers will choose your business if its average rating drops below 3 stars.
As neglected complaints mount up in a client’s review corpus and their average star rating begins to deteriorate so that new customers aren’t inspired to transact with them, damage is done to both acquisition and retention goals. Reviews are public reading material; they generate conversions, but they also come equipped with public expectations.
Your agency’s job is to tie the risks of review neglect to tangible business outcomes so that clients understand that giving customers the cold shoulder will negatively impact multiple company goals. Brand viability is at stake, but fortunately, good news is at hand and your team can get a serious win by delivering it…
Heart-to-heart #5: Yes, reputation management can save this relationship.
By this point in the counseling session, good clients may be feeling scared that they are on the verge of losing it all if they don’t mend their ways. It’s a very uncomfortable (though necessary) feeling for them to experience, and your team’s empathy is a needed skill in this scenario, because:
- Your clients’ businesses represent their hopes, their dreams, and their livelihoods in an incredibly unstable economic environment; business closures are constant and a very real cause of owner anxiety.
- Fear of reviews is also real. Before the internet, most consumer complaints occurred in a one-on-one environment controlled by the business. Modern business owners have to cope with being criticized in public – an experience requiring not just humility, but a thick skin.
- Review neglect may be occurring due to a wide variety of personal and business circumstances. At the simplest end of the scale, a busy small business owner may be struggling to find the time. Or, something far more complex may be taking place, such as an illness, bereavement, or a last-ditch effort to save the brand from closure. Be sensitive in talking with the client about the barriers which have caused them to neglect reviews in the past so that you can be as helpful as possible in identifying a solution which will work for their unique needs in future.
The most positive news you can give to a client whose star ratings, acquisition, and retention rates are suffering due to review neglect is contained in the following stats:
Your agency’s task is to teach the client that customer relationships are salvageable when the business commits to responding to negative reviews. Instead of shedding unhappy customers, you can win them back with the right response, often resulting in them mending your average rating by updating their reviews and even helping acquisition trend upwards because they are recommending you to their circle.
When you get a client to the point of mastering the art of review responsiveness, it’s a major first step towards all the benefits that full reputation management confers. More growth can be had by clients who are enthused enough to move into sentiment analysis, NPS, and other outstanding opportunities for turning business intelligence into profits.
When relationships are at risk, it can help to frame thinking in terms of the rewards partners could enjoy if they are willing to commit to repair work. In the review scenario, owner responses are power tools! When properly managed, they can have extraordinary impacts on business outcomes, and all that’s needed is a readiness to put in the work and enjoy the rewards.
GatherUp can help. If your agency is looking for a committed partner to help small-to-enterprise clients put together a reputation management program that addresses their fears, meets their needs, and works for them and for your team, we’d love to have a heart-to-heart with you.
