Corporate communication: use Google reviews throughout your company

Are you taking full advantage of your online reviews? We've previously looked at the importance of online reviews for SEO and social trust, as well as ideas for using reviews in-store, but there's another way to think about it: as business intelligence. Online reviews are unfiltered feedback from your customers, a wealth of information that can help you improve your service and grow your business. Here, we look at how different departments could use reviews more effectively, explaining why they should be part of your corporate communications strategy.

The brand team

Thinking of branding as a one-way broadcast to your audience may never have been accurate, but it certainly isn't now. Mark Lange of Reputation.com, an online reputation management company, says: "You co-create your brand with customers through review sites and social networks." Online reviews and social networks give customers a platform to talk about you, and their words have a higher value - in 2015, a survey by Influence Central found that 91% of shoppers consider an online review more important than the opinion of a salesperson in-store.

This means several things for branding: the service customer is an extension of the brand (more on this below), and good branding uses customer reviews. eConsultancy has some excellent examples of brands using customer reviews in their advertising, 11 inventive ways of using reviews beyond the product page, including Sonos, who asked viewers of their billboards to search for "Sonos review". It's a bold move, but they knew the search would return positive reviews, and customers talking to customers is powerful advertising.

The team marketing

A simple rule for the marketing team is to use positive online reviews everywhere. Both online, for example - on your website, homepage and other high-traffic pages, in e-mails and your own social media posts, and offline - in-store and in DOOH advertising. A great example of using in-store reviews is Italian electrical retailer Marcopolo. Customers could scan QR codes next to products to see more information and reviews. Searching for a product in-store is something we all do anyway, so this was a way for the retailer to take control and show the reviews they wanted the customer to see.

We talked in a previous post about the importance of online reviews for SEO visibility, including local search, but there are other ways the marketing team can use online review intelligence too. In a guest post for Mention, Joei Chan talks about using customer reviews to improve your PPC ads and content creation - to find keywords for your products: "refine your keyword targeting by analyzing how customers describe your products in their reviews. This gives you a clearer picture of how customers perceive and search for your products." You might be surprised by the difference between the way you think about your business and the way others categorize it. 

The product development team

This is an area where negative reviews are just as, if not more, valuable than positive ones. Online reviews are given freely - in fact, it's against Google's rules for brands to encourage people to give reviews - so they're honest experiences of your business. If you're careful, you'll quickly discover problems and be able to resolve them quickly. Where can you find this, without conducting expensive focus groups? By analyzing your own online reviews, you can find areas for improvement, and by analyzing your competitors' online reviews, you can come up with new product and service ideas to give you an edge, which you can then feed back into marketing. Online reputation management software helps automate this process - most platforms include keyword analysis and can show you the words and trends that appear most often.

The sales team

Bad reviews can ruin all advertising efforts and marketing. Mark Lange continues, "You can spend millions on the perfect advertising strategy, only to be completely sidetracked by poor ratings on Google or an industry-specific review site." Investment and training in service customer must go hand in hand with investment in marketing.

Online reviews and social networks are "unofficial" service customer channels that need to be monitored and managed; Reputation.com recommends responding to at least 20% of positive reviews and 100% of negative reviews. Some negative reviews are not disastrous for a company, and if managed correctly, can even strengthen your brand image. But customers expect you to respond, so make your sales team comfortable with this.

The service team

It's an extension of the sales team. A good service customer review is powerful advertising. Responding to negative reviews appropriately can help turn a negative experience into a positive one, both for the customer who left the review and for other customers who read the review feed. Even if you can't solve a problem, acknowledging that there is a problem and that you are addressing it can give you a point of contact with the customer and an opportunity for dialogue.

What's more, customers don't expect everything to be perfect. One study showed that 45% of online shoppers think it's okay for products to have a few negative reviews, as long as the majority are positive. If your customers see that you handle reviews effectively, they'll trust you more.