Many experts and analysts will tell you that one of the most critical aspects of your business is your reputation. Consumers want to deal with an organization that they believe in, and they might look elsewhere if they feel like that particular company doesn’t share their same values or principles. If a competitor has a better reputation than your company, it could mean that you lose a significant amount of revenue.
Reputation management is especially important when it comes to the trades industry. In the trade industry, these professionals are often entering homes and working in close proximity to clients. There needs to be a new level of trust with the consumer, which might not exist if they were trying to find a restaurant to try or a clothing brand to order from.
Here are five reasons why reputation management is essential to the trades industry.
The Importance of Reviews
If you aren’t taking reputation management seriously, there’s a good chance that you have customers that aren’t pleased with your service. These customers could then end up writing about their experience with your company, and it may even end up going viral. When you consider that 63% of consumers search online reviews for tradespeople , it’s easy to see why reputation management could help you get better reviews.
While it might not be your top concern, reviews can go a long way towards getting new business and luring in new clients and customers. If you have many positive reviews, it helps create a successful “track record” that consumers can browse and read. Believe it or not, positive reviews can improve your bottom line significantly. A specific and prompt follow-up email to recent customers asking them to leave a review is often all it takes to start building a repository of testimonials.
Better SEO
If you are serious about reputation management, you are often focused on making sure that you are consistently getting positive reviews. This is extremely beneficial because it can establish trust and credibility, but it also means that you might end up more visible on search engines. In this sense, your business moves up the search engine ranks, and this is great for Cleveland search engine optimization (SEO).
Consumers tend to look for the first options for searching for businesses, which isn’t just limited to the trade industry. Business owners and marketers should understand that consistent reputation management could potentially land them on Google’s first page, which could translate to real revenue.
Getting Feedback
If you are taking reputation management seriously, there’s a good chance that you can learn more about consumers and customers. You might even ask your customers about the competition and figure out what they like about other companies in the trade industry. This feedback can prove quite insightful, and it might lead to revamping aspects of your company to adapt to the market.
We all know that customer service and customer satisfaction are vital to different industries, but the trade industry often overlooks this aspect of owning a business. While it might not prove fruitful immediately, getting the right feedback can help your business immensely in the future.
Establishing Trust
Some of the most powerful organizations in the world understand the importance of establishing trust with the customer. They might spend millions of dollars in advertising to try to drive this point home, or offer specific deals or promotions to ensure that customers feel valued and appreciated. The reason why reputation management is so important to the trades industry is because trust is so necessary when it comes to booking jobs.
If you end up establishing trust through reputation management and quality work, it also means that your customers are likely to refer you to friends and family. Of course, this will never happen if the consumer feels like they cannot trust you.
Hiring the Right People
If we are going to discuss how reputation management affects the trades industry, we have to discuss the fact that employees want to work for a reputable company. You might be eager to hire the top talent in your area, but they won’t be receptive to your offer if your business has a negative reputation for whatever reason. If you can’t hire the right people, it can have a devastating effect on your company.
You might have all the resources to hire the best trades people, but it won’t mean anything if your business has a terrible reputation and they don’t feel proud about working for you. If your company has recently experienced scandal after scandal, it can affect your ability to hire, which can then end up costing you dearly on many fronts.
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