How to Use Reputation Insight to Build a Content Strategy

Developing content for your multi-location business is no small task. As you begin to build out your next content strategy, it’s important to look at your multi-location business’s online reputation to inform your strategy. If your multi-location business is using the feedback provided from reputation insights, it will allow you to create content that is relevant to consumers. To get started, we’ll take a look at how your multi-location business can get an overview of its online reputation, and transform some of the learnings into an informed content strategy.

Analyze Your Rating and Review Metrics

Analyzing your business’s ratings and reviews will give you perspective into what consumers are saying about your brand. While your business’s average star rating can give you a quick look into how consumers generally feel about your business, it’s important to dive deeper. This is where reviews come in. Businesses that prioritize earning and leveraging positive reviews will be able to outperform competitors within the form of user-generated content (UGC). On the flip side, businesses should also have a strategy for managing and responding to unfavorable reviews. Through SOCi’s reputation management tool, you can look at all of the reviews your multi-location business is receiving across locations in one platform. By reading through reviews, you’ll be able to get a sense of what consumers think about the services and products your business is providing. Because we know that you may not have time to look through all of your business’s reviews to help inform your strategy, a tool like SOCi allows you to filter your reviews by their source, sentiment, and specific keywords. By looking at sentiment, you will be able to better understand the meaning behind words that are most frequently used in reviews about your business.

You may be asking yourself, how does this tie into your content strategy? Positive and negative reviews can influence future content. For instance, you can design an image around a positive review your business received across social platforms. You can also leverage positive reviews for customer testimonials. If you are responding to reviews and creating relationships with consumers, you can then reach out to them and ask if they’d be willing to do a video or written customer testimonial. For negative reviews, if you’re continuingly seeing that there is a negative sentiment about a particular aspect of your business, you can make proactive changes to your business to correct the issue, or create a FAQ-style blog to address common concerns. Once the content is created, you must come up with a plan to share the content - this is where your social strategy comes in.

Strengthen Your Social Strategy

While organic posts don’t cost your business anything in terms of money, it does cost you time and resources spent creating quality content. Business owners often enlist the services of copywriters and graphic designers to develop professional organic content, and while that approach does come with costs, there is a return on investment; 74 percent of consumers say their purchase decisions are influenced by posts from companies they follow on social media. If your multi-location business is trying to lessen the load when it comes to developing content, keep in mind that you can share user-generated content (UGC) like reviews or a customer testimonial. And the power of UGC is undeniable. Ninety-two percent of consumers trust organic UGC more than they trust other forms of marketing. And despite Facebook changing its algorithm regularly, there is still value in organic posting. It doesn’t take much time or effort to incorporate UGC by reposting a positive review or by congratulating an employee who earned a 5-star review. By adding the easy-to-use UGC into an organic social strategy, businesses can take advantage of the fact that 84 percent of millennial consumers say UGC influences their purchase decisions.

Utilize Google My Business (GMB)

Consumers are going local now more than ever, which is why GMB must be incorporated into your content strategy. GMB is a platform that has doubled down on localized features, which is part of the reason why it’s now the #1 ratings and review site in terms of total review volume. GMB represents the perfect opportunity to reach consumers through engaging, shareable, localized content. With features like Google Q&A and Google Posts, you can do just that. Google Q&A is a user-generated FAQ that appears on your local GMB profile. Google Posts are business-generated content updates that promote a business’s announcement, offer, event, or new products. Get more information on Google Posts by reading our blog on the topic. GMB is a great platform for both reputation management and leveraging organic content.

Prioritize Localized Marketing

Now that you have the tool-set to develop a strong content strategy, there’s one more thing to remember- localization is key! Localized marketing refers to the practice of building a business’ digital presence around a specific business location or locations, leveraging locally-driven communication channels to reach the specific local communities it serves. Multi-location businesses can use a localized approach when leveraging reputation insights as part of a social content strategy by:

Posting local reviews on local Facebook Business Pages, where 72 percent of all brand engagement is happening.
Pre-populating Google Q&A questions and answers in Google’s Knowledge Panels.
Creating posts highlighting local team members who earned positive reviews, or shine a light on local customers who left a glowing review.

Reputation management and a content marketing strategy are dependent on each other. One cannot be successful without the other. As you begin to develop a content strategy plan based on reputation insights, it’s important to track the success. To track this success you should be looking at:

Brand mentions
Comments
Shares
Positive sentiment
Response time

When your business begins to leverage more UGC it will lead to more high-value engagements - and the cycle will continue. Reputation management and social media work hand-in-hand, helping to build a consistent brand presence across leading social media and review platforms alike.