Damaged Reputation: How Reviews Affect Sales

Damaged Reputation: How Reviews Affect Sales

Content:

  • How reputation helps in promoting a product
  • How Reputation Affects Marketing Tools
  • How is reputation formed on the Internet?
  • How to Maintain Your Online Reputation
  • What is needed to work with reputation: 3 main approaches
  • Summary

How reputation helps in promoting a product

The reputation of a product greatly influences the level of sales of a company. This is confirmed by research by Demand Sage, according to which 93% of consumers before buying a product are reading reviews about it. In addition, according to statistics:

  • 48% of people are willing to visit a company’s website if they read positive reviews about it, found out Vendasta analysts.

  • 9 out of 10 people are more likely to buy a product if it has positive reviews, according to Dixa experts.

  • One review on a product page can increase conversion rates by 354%, according to Bazaarvoice.

  • 36.4% of consumers read 1 to 3 reviews before making a purchase, Bizrate Insights analysts found.

  • 91% of respondents aged 18 to 34 trust online reviews as personal recommendations, counted Qualtrics experts.

  • A one-star increase in online ratings can increase revenue by up to 9%, according to Harvard Business School.

At the same time, 82% of people will not buy goods from a seller with a rating below three stars, and 48% of consumers ready Avoid a brand that has no information on the internet.

How Reputation Affects Marketing Tools

A good reputation not only brings new clients to the company’s website, but also improves the SEO indicators of the web resource:

  • Link mass. A positive brand reputation helps increase the number of links to the company’s website. This has a positive effect on ranking and helps promote the resource in search results.
  • Social signals. Popular brands have high activity in social networks, which results in frequent transitions from the company’s accounts to its website. This increases the resource’s targeted traffic – an important element of SEO promotion.
  • Audience loyalty. Working on reputation helps to increase trust in the brand and optimize the behavioral factors of the site – for example, increase the session time or the number of repeat visits. All this has a positive effect on the SEO optimization of the resource.

At the same time, you shouldn’t fill your site with sponsorship, affiliate and other advertising – Google may consider such behavior as abuse of reputation and lower the resource’s position in search results.

Brand reputation also influences the effectiveness of contextual advertising:

  • Click-through rate (CTR). Users are less likely to click on ads from brands with low ratings. This can reduce CTR and lead to a deterioration in the overall performance of the advertising campaign.
  • Price and quantity of advertising. Search engines Yandex and Google evaluate the quality of advertising, including by the company’s reputation. If a brand has many negative reviews, the ad rating may be lowered. This will lead to an increase in the cost per click (CPC) and a decrease in the frequency of ad impressions.

On the topic. Company reputation on the Internet, the influence of reviews and how to work with them — a guide

How is reputation formed on the Internet?

Research by Ashmanov and Partners showedthat the most popular resource for searching for reviews is online stores and marketplaces. 41% of users search for brand data there. Internet advertising and searching for reviews through search engines are also considered popular – they are preferred by 30% and 25%, respectively. Next come social networks, geoservices, review sites and other channels.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the cases.

Marketplaces

This is one of the trendiest channels for sales. In 2024, here committed purchases by 84% of Russians.

To encourage users to comment on your product more often on this platform, we recommend:

  • Use the internal functions of the marketplace. For example, offering points for reviews.
  • Ask for feedback. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account a number of restrictions of some platforms. For example, on Wildberries it is not allowed to motivate clients with money or other rewards or ask them to refrain from negative comments.
  • Make thank you cards asking for feedback. They can be attached to a package and sent to the recipient. The leaflet can also include a QR code with a link to the product page. This will speed up the customer’s path to repeat purchase.

Additionally, you can offer to leave a review on the marketplace by mentioning it through your own website, social media, email newsletters, or other company communication channels.

Search engines

Another effective way to search for information about a brand. To ensure that it produces high results, it is necessary to work on two main points:

Ensure maximum presence in search results. It is necessary to place information about the brand on all possible thematic platforms – create company cards on review sites, start blogs on information resources, etc.

This will help:

  • Appear more often in search results and speed up the brand’s entry into the field of view of potential customers.
  • Raise review site pages to the top of search results or a directory with information about your company.
  • Communicate with the audiencerespond to their feedback and create an image of yourself as a customer-centric brand.

At the same time, you need to choose platforms carefully. Search engines will value a brand mention on a couple of actively developing and visited platforms more than on a multitude of “dead” resources.

Work with the site rating in Google or Yandex. The company rating is assessed on a five-point scale and is important for any resource that is promoted through search results – both through organic promotion and through contextual advertising.

High ratings build user trust, increase ad click-through rates, the number of clicks to the site and, as a result, increase conversion and sales.

Third party sites and platforms

It is also necessary to develop the brand’s reputation on other platforms – anywhere where users can leave comments and rate.

Create company pages, monitor reviews, and respond to them on behalf of the company. This increases the brand rating, and subsequently its attractiveness in the eyes of customers.

Here are some examples of sites:

  • Callback sites. These platforms are designed to collect recommendations from people who have already purchased the company’s products. That is why such resources have an audience of many thousands and millions of visits per month.
  • Aggregators and directories. With their help, you can tell about the brand as a whole, and not just about its specific products. Such resources publish information about the company’s location, its contacts, rating, etc.
  • Geoservices. Platforms like Yandex Maps or Google Maps are aimed at people looking for nearby retail outlets.
  • Social network. One of the most effective channels for popularizing brands. Statista research for 2023 showedthat social media promotion increased the visibility of 86% of the companies surveyed. At the same time, 76% of respondents saw a significant increase in traffic, and 64% saw an increase in the number of potential buyers.

Also, to improve your reputation, you can use reviews on thematic platforms (Banki.ru, Drom.ru), in application stores (App Store, Google Play), on the company’s own website, etc.

What else do you need to maintain your online reputation?

Here are some tips:

  1. Respond to reviews. Ideally, you should respond quickly to each review, especially if it is negative. At the same time, you should avoid template phrases, emotional statements, and thank the client, regardless of their position.
  2. Stay active on social media. Interactive content, giveaways, etc. work great. To quickly engage users in interaction with the brand, you need to not only post useful materials, but also respond to comments under them.
  3. Create your own content. This may include posting PR articles, product reviews, company news, expert articles and other useful materials on thematic resources.
  4. Analyze feedback. This will help determine the effectiveness of the current reputation marketing strategy. If it does not provide an increase in sales, customer base, ratings and other indicators, then the chosen vector does not work and needs to be changed.

Here’s what to track:

  • relevance of communication channels with users;

  • productivity of review monitoring services;

  • topics and issues that are often raised in the comments;

  • number of positive and negative responses, etc.

On the topic. “Luxury” or “cancelling”: how to buy advertising from a blogger and at the same time maintain the company’s image

How to Work with Reputation: 3 Basic Approaches

There are three options for organizing reputation marketing, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

  1. Manually. You can study search engines and review sites yourself or with the help of a full-time specialist. This is the most economical format of working with reputation, which is quite suitable for young small and micro businesses. However, it involves risks associated with the human factor, for example, you can miss important information or spend a significant amount of time analyzing data.
  2. Using special monitoring tools. Services such as Brand Analytics, Medialogy and others significantly increase the efficiency of monitoring and offer extensive opportunities for analyzing online reputation. However, they are not free and require a trained person on staff who can work with these services and respond to reviews on behalf of the company.
  3. Through a reputation agency. Turning to an agency is an approach that saves the business owner’s time and ensures high quality work with reputation. Agency specialists themselves conduct monitoring, process data and respond to reviews on behalf of the company. However, this option requires significant financial investments and time to establish effective interaction with the agency.

Summary

Reputation marketing is an important tool for increasing the popularity and profitability of a company. It can significantly increase the brand’s audience and its loyalty without using expensive traditional marketing solutions.

However, reputation should be handled carefully and systematically monitored. According to statistics, it may take about 10 positive reviews on average to cover one bad review.

Cover photo: Freepik

Source: rb.ru