How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 5)

 

How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 5)

TRANSCRIPT: All right, so we’ve investigated, we’ve done our repairs, replace, we fixed our business, our business is great. Now we have to devise a strategy to move forward. We can’t just jump forward and jump to 5-star reviews. Now that everything’s been fixed, how can I possibly go from 2 to 5 stars? You have to take these steps.

Remember step 1. Step 1, we gauged the buzz about our business, about our industry, about our market, and you need to find out, go back to step 1 and find out what the most influential sites were that impacted our business. For most of you who are watching this, the most impactful sites are going to be yelp and Google and 2 or 3 others, so I want you to look at this in tiers.

I’ve tiered this out just in general but every business in the industry is going to be a little bit different but for most of you, tier 1, the top left, that’s going to be Facebook, Google, Yelp, those are our tier 1 sites, that’s where we’re going to spend most of our effort to generate 5 star reviews. This is part of the strategy we’re building. Tier 2 on the right side, those are going to be top industry specific sites like TripAdvisor or Angie’s List or whatever, and then tier 3, the bottom, those are going to be the local or regional sites instead of obscure industry specific review sites.

Now, when we’re devising our strategy, we’re going to ask people, the reason that we’re determining what these sites are, we’re going to ask people to go to these sites and review us. We have hundreds of possibilities of sites out there, we have to determine which sites warrant the most attention, so as we devise our strategy, we’re going to have a strategy where we’re always going to be focused on tier 1, we’re always going to send people through our tier 1 sites to give us 5 star reviews and I’ll show you how to do that in a later step. Our tier 2 sites, we’re going to select a few and we’re going to alternate them in and out because we cannot send someone say an email with 32 sites listed on it and say, “Hey, review us on a few of these,” because they’ll review us on none of them or they’ll review us on some tier 3 site that we don’t care about.

We are going to dip in to tier 3, we’re going to ask for some reviews on some tier 3 sites that we determine but only ones and twos and only in the ones where our better competitors are focusing on, so for example, in the car business we have DealerRater. If you have a heavy user of DealerRater in your market, then you need to include that tier 3 site as probably a tier 2 site for you, or if you have a competitor who’s pointing to your lousy reviews on a site, right? They’re telling people, “Hey, look at Joe’s Plumbing, look at them on this site. They’re terrible. People hate them on Angie’s List,” then we’re going to move Angie’s List into a higher tier because we want to make sure that no one’s able to use that against us, so let’s go to sample strategy.

Let’s say that we’re a new car dealer in Omaha, Nebraska and we’re using CarGurus, so we’ve got a cross town rival that’s a heavy user of DealerRater. Let’s say they have over 400 reviews on DealerRater and they’re a heavy user of Facebook as well, so for me, I’m this Omaha, Nebraska new car dealer, my tier 1 is going to be Facebook and Google. My tier 2 is going to be Yelp, because Yelp’s not that big in Omaha compared to say Los Angeles, DealerRater or cars.com because they are now by cars.com, and CarGurus. That’s where I’m going to focus my review strategy that’s coming up in step 5 and step 6, and everything else, the people down in the third tier, everything else, we’re going to dip into that on occasion. On occasion when we need another say YP review or Edmund’s review or Angie’s review. Then we’ll send someone there to give us a good review.