Maximizing Your Reputation: The Importance of Customer Reviews for Outdoor Power Equipment Dealerships & 5 Proven Strategies to Boost Them

February 2, 2023

by Bridget Winfrey with No Comment Digital Marketing Local Marketing

Why are Customer Reviews Important?

Customer reviews are essential for outdoor power equipment dealers as they can make or break a dealership’s reputation. Good reviews will help to build a dealership’s credibility, while bad reviews could damage your success. They are a powerful tool that provide valuable insights into customer experience, boosting credibility and visibility, and helping to build a strong reputation for the dealership.

The Benefits & Impact of Customer Reviews

Increased Visibility & Credibility: Customer reviews can help increase a dealership’s visibility and credibility by providing valuable content for the dealership’s website, social media, and review websites. This content can increase your dealerships online presence and help potential customers find your dealership more easily.

Positive reviews can improve the reputation of your dealership and attract new customers. Addressing negative reviews can help mitigate any damage to your dealership’s reputation.

Improved Search Engine Rankings Positive customer reviews can help improve your dealerships search engine rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find the dealership when searching for related keywords.

Reviews can provide additional, relevant and unique content on a website, which positively impacts your rankings. Customer reviews are a large part of local search engine optimization. If your customer includes location specific keywords and information, it can help you rank higher on search engines.

Boosts Customer Confidence & Trust: Customer reviews can help build trust and confidence in your dealership with potential customers. Positive reviews can show that your dealership provides quality products and excellent customer service. The way you handle negative reviews can persuade a customer to give your dealership a chance despite the negative review.

Reviews provide and open and transparent view of your dealership. This allows customers to see both positive and negative experiences. This transparency can increase customer confidence and trust and they can make a more informed decision based on actual experiences.

Valuable Customer Feedback: Customer reviews provide valuable feedback for your dealership. This feedback can help you to identify pain points or customer frustrations, and actively work toward making a better customer experience.

This feedback can also help you identify areas that customers have unmet needs or preferences which can help your dealership develop new products or services or improve existing ones to better accommodate your customer’s needs and wants.

Increased Social Proof: Positive customer reviews can increase social proof and help build a strong reputation for your dealership. This can lead to more positive word of mouth referrals and increased customer loyalty.

Reviews serve as social proof that others have had a positive experience with your dealership, which can increase customer confidence and trust.

5 Proven Strategies to Boost Customer Reviews

Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews: Encouraging customers to leave reviews for your dealership can be a challenge, but with the right strategies, it can be done effectively. Most customers don’t leave a review because they forget. If you aren’t asking people for the review, most won’t remember to do it.

You also want to make it as easy as possible for customers to leave a review. Provide clear directions on how to leave a review and make the process as simple and straightforward as possible.

Respond to Customer Reviews: Responding to both negative and positive customer reviews can help encourage people to leave more reviews in the future. Responding shows that your dealership cares about your customers have to say and is committed to providing a positive experience.

How you respond to negative reviews shows potential customers that you listen, and you will make it right with them, should they have an issue when shopping with your dealership.

Use Email & Social Media: Reach out to customers via email after they make a purchase and ask them how they are enjoying their product and to leave a review. You are much more likely to get a review when you ask at a time that is convenient for your customer and give them a chance to go back to it if they are busy.

Use social media to reach out to customers and ask for a review, or to showcase good reviews for your Facebook audience to see.

Personalize the Request & Offer Incentives: Address the customer by name and mention the product they purchased or other details about their visit. This will make the request seem more personal and less generic. Offer and incentive such as a discount or free accessory product for the review. Customers want to feel rewarded for their completing your request.

Review data can be used to make informed marketing efforts and help you target your audience more effectively. In turn, being able to personalize your review request even more.

Implement a Review Request Process: Implementing a review request process ensures that every customer is asked for a review. This also allows you to gather valuable feedback (both good and bad) from both customers and employees. This can help you identify areas for improvement and increase overall satisfaction.

A review request process shows that a business values the opinions of those who shop with them. It also shows that you are interested in their experience, and can lead to stronger, more positive customer relationships.

An Essential Tool to Boost Business Growth

Customer reviews are an essential tool for businesses looking to build and maintain long-term success. They provide valuable feedback, boost customer confidence and trust and can even boost those search engine rankings! For Outdoor Power Equipment Dealerships, collecting and utilizing customer reviews can have a significant impact on your success.

By gathering honest insights from customers, dealerships can identify areas for improvement, prioritize their efforts, and help to make targeted changes to their products and services. Positive reviews can help improve your dealership’s reputation and credibility, attracting new customers and boosting customer confidence in your products and services.

Implementing a review request process can show customers that a dealership values their opinions and experiences, leading to stronger, more positive customer relationships. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing.

Outdoor Power Equipment dealerships should make customer reviews a priority and actively seek out and utilize customer feedback to drive long-term success. By doing so, you can continuously improve your offerings and enhance the customer experience, setting yourself apart from the competition and build a thriving business.

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Harnessing the Power of the Customer Journey to Drive Business Growth

January 26, 2023

by Bridget Winfrey with No Comment Digital Marketing Local Marketing Search Engine Optimization Social Media

Mastering the Customer Experience

Managing customer experiences is crucial for any business looking to drive business growth and retain customers. After reading reviews about a business, almost all potential customers will take their next step in a space that the business has complete control over. This means that the majority of customer interactions and experiences are within your control. Whether it’s through your website, physical location, or communication channels, the power to shape the customer experience is in your hands. By effectively managing these spaces, you can turn leads into paying customers and create a positive, lasting impression that will keep them coming back. In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into the importance of managing customer experiences and provide you with tips and best practices for optimizing your website, creating a positive in-store experience, and managing communication channels to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

The Customer’s Journey: By the Numbers

96% of adults read Local Business Reviews
91% of consumers take the next step in the buyer’s journey.
51% of those people will visit your website.
27% of those people will visit your physical business location.
13% of those people will contact you (phone, text, email, live chat)
8% of consumers move from reviews to your social media profiles.

Source: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior

Owning the Customer Experience

It is more important now than ever to create a positive and seamless customer experience across all touch points. By effectively controlling your website, physical location, and communication channels, your dealership can create a consistent and cohesive brand image and message. Additionally, you can use customer data and insights gathered from these spaces to personalize and optimize the customer experience, improving the chances of conversion.

Maximizing your control over the customer experience starts with identifying and addressing pain points. Utilizing data from your website, physical location, and communication channels can help you do just that. By analyzing website data, you can pinpoint areas that need improvement and enhance the user experience. Similarly, data from your physical location can be used to optimize store layout and improve the in-store experience. And by monitoring communication channels, you can improve customer service and address concerns in a timely manner. By utilizing data from all these sources, you can create a seamless and positive customer experience that drives business growth.

Let’s take a deeper look at each touch point.

Utilizing Your Website to Drive Business Growth

Having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses in today’s digital age. A website can be a powerful tool for attracting and retaining customers for lawn mower, tractor, and outdoor power equipment dealers. A well-designed website can provide customers with information about the products and services offered, as well as detailed specifications and pricing. It can also allow customers to easily browse and purchase products online, making the buying process more convenient for them.

Your dealership’s website can also be used to create a sense of trust and credibility with your customers. By including customer testimonials, photos, and videos of products in use, and detailed information about the company’s history and experience in the industry, a website can establish the business as a reputable and trustworthy provider of lawn mower, tractor, and outdoor power equipment.

A website can also be used to provide customers with ongoing support and education. For example, a dealer can provide information on how to properly maintain and repair equipment, or tips on how to get the most out of their equipment. This can help to build customer loyalty and encourage repeat business.

If your dealership has no website, or it isn’t quite up to par, we can help. Dealers Digital can help you maximize your online exposure and boost sales. We are the green industries digital marketing experts with over twenty years of digital media experience. Contact us today to get started.

Optimizing Your Dealership’s Website

Here are a few tips and best practices to optimize your dealership’s website to drive conversions and improve the overall customer experience.

Navigation: Make sure that your website is easy to navigate. Use a clear and consistent layout, organize your content in a logical and easy to understand way.
Optimize for Mobile: Over 80% of people browse the internet via mobile and expect for their experiences to be seamless. Your website should be responsive, meaning it adjusts to fit the screen size of the device being used to view it.
Clear Calls to Action (CTA): Your site should have clear CTA’s that guide visitors towards the next step. Whether that is to make a purchase, request more information, or to schedule a consultation.
Contact Information: Make it easy for visitors to contact you by including your phone number, email and physical address and contact form prominently on your website.
Testimonials & Reviews: Use testimonials and reviews from satisfied customers to help build trust and credibility with potential customers.
Search Engine Optimization: Optimizing your website for search engines (IE: Google) can help increase your visibility and drive more traffic to your site. There are many free resources out there to learn about and implement SEO, or you can hire an agency, like Dealers Digital, to help. Get your Free Local SEO Report.

The Value of Your Physical Location

Reviews are a powerful tool for driving foot traffic to your dealership! Reviews provide customers with valuable information about your dealership’s products and services, and can influence their decision to visit your dealership in person. A dealership with a high number of positive reviews is more likely to attract customers, which in turn, increases sales.

Your dealership should make an effort to encourage customers to leave reviews, and respond to both positive and negative reviews in a timely and professional manner. The way that a company handles a poor review says a lot about who they are.

Cultivating a Positive In-Store Experience & Utilizing Your Physical Location

Here are some tips on how to cultivate positive in store experiences and utilize your physical location to drive sales.

Create a Positive In-Store Experience: A positive in-store experience can help to turn customers in loyal brand ambassadors and encourage them to leave positive reviews. By providing excellent customer service, having a knowledgeable staff and creating an inviting and visually appealing store layout can help you to achieve this.
Utilize Your Physical Location: You can offer promotions and sales that are only available in-store or highlight products that aren’t available for purchase online. You can create in-store displays, or by offering special discounts or deals for customers who visit the store in person.
Provide in-store consultation: Offer in-store consultation services like product demonstrations, product trials or shopping assistants. This will allow your customers to have a more hands-on experience and get more personalized recommendations, which can lead to increased sales.
Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews by providing a clear call to action, like a sign or card that directs them to the review. Respond to reviews in a timely and professional manner, and then use the positive reviews to help promote your dealership.

3 Types of Communication Channels

Effective communication is crucial for providing a positive customer experience and driving conversions for lawnmower and tractor dealerships. By managing phone, email and live chat effectively, your dealership can ensure that you are responsive to customer inquiries, provide accurate information, and address any issues in a timely and professional manner.

Phone: Phone communication allows for immediate, personal contact with customers. It is important to have well-trained staff who can answer questions and help quickly and efficiently. Business texting has become increasingly important in managing customer pickup and service notifications.

Email: Email communication can be used to provide detailed information to customers, such as product specifications, financing offers or promotions. It is important to respond promptly to customer inquiries and to make sure that the information provided is accurate and up to date. We offer automation solutions.

Live Chat: Live chat allows customers to receive immediate assistance while browsing your dealership’s website. It is important to have staff available to answer to chat requests in real time, or use a chat-widget, like Dealeramp to provide 24/7 automated responses.

Managing Communication Channels Effectively

By effectively managing these communication channels, your dealership can improve your customer’s experience and increase the likelihood of conversions. You’re also likely to increase your customer engagement and satisfaction while you are at it. Customers can reach out to your dealership in the way that they feel the most comfortable and convenient. This provides them with a greater sense of control over their buying experience.

Set clear expectations: Let customers know when they can expect a response to their inquiry, regardless of the channel. This will help manage the customer’s expectations and reduce frustration.
Respond promptly: Respond to all customer inquiries as quickly as possible. This shows that your dealership values the customer’s time and is committed to providing a positive experience.
Train Staff: Ensure that your entire staff is well trained in your dealership’s products and services, as well as in communication and customer service best practices.
Personalize your communication: Address customers by name and make sure to use a professional and friendly tone. Your customer will feel more valued and comfortable.
Gather and act on feedback: Regularly gather feedback from customers and find ways to act on it. This can help the dealership identify areas for improvement and make changes to better meet customer needs.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing

Despite the statistic that only a small percentage of customers may move from reviews to social media profiles, managing and maintaining a strong presence on social media platforms is crucial for any dealership’s marketing strategy. While the customer journey may vary, social media offers a variety of opportunities for dealerships to increase brand awareness, engage with customers, manage reputation, generate leads and stay informed about industry trends and customer preferences. By effectively utilizing social media, dealerships can improve the customer experience, drive conversions, and gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Brand presence and awareness: Having a strong social media presence can help increase brand awareness and establish your dealership as a reputable and trustworthy source.

Customer Engagement: social media offers an opportunity for your dealership to engage with customers, answer questions and provide information about products and services. This helps build loyalty and trust with your customers.

Reputation Management: Social media can be used to monitor and respond to feedback from customers. This can help your dealership proactively address any issues and maintain a positive reputation.

Industry insights: social media can be used to track industry trends, competitors activity and customer preferences.

Managing Social Media Profiles

Let’s look at some tips for creating engaging and effective social media profiles that can help drive business growth.

Define your target audience: Understand who your ideal customer is and tailor your content to fit their interests and needs.
Create a consistent brand image: Use consistent branding across all of your profiles.
Use Storytelling: Use storytelling to create engaging content that highlights the dealership’s unique selling points and the benefits of its products and services.
Engage with customers: responds to comments and messages in a timely manner and use social media as an opportunity to build relationships with customers.
Create a content calendar: Plan and schedule content in advance to ensure that you project a consistent and organized approach to your content.

Harness the Power

Mastering the customer experience is key for any business looking to drive growth and retain customers. By harnessing the power of managing customer experiences, dealerships can take control of the customer journey and turn leads into paying customers. Through effectively managing your website, physical location, and communication channels, businesses can create a consistent and cohesive brand image, personalize, and optimize the customer experience, and improve the chances of conversion. By utilizing data from these spaces, businesses can identify and address pain points, creating a seamless and positive customer experience that drives business growth. By implementing the tips and best practices discussed in this post, businesses can maximize their control over the customer experience and drive business growth. Harnessing the power of mastering the customer experience is essential for any business looking to succeed in today’s competitive market.

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Brand Reputation Management: What is it & Why is it Important?

September 29, 2022

by Bridget Winfrey with No Comment Digital Marketing

What is Brand Reputation Management?

Your Online Brand Reputation is the image of your company seen by internet users. It’s how the public feels about your products and perceives your brand. A positive brand reputation- both on and offline- means that customers not only trust your business, but they are also likely to purchase your product or service.

Brand Reputation Management is the process of monitoring how consumers perceive your business and taking strategic action when necessary to improve your brands image.

The key to a winning reputation management strategy is recognizing that you don’t have to wait for people to form their own opinions of your brand. Instead, by building your brand’s experiences around your target customers’ needs, wants, values and opinions, you can also shape how they perceive your company.

Brand safety ensures advertisements, their content and any content shared by brands are appropriate and not associated with topics of consumer opinions that may be negative. By making sure your advertising is legitimate, your consumers won’t feel deceived by your brand and keeps them from having to second guess your business or distrust what you have to offer.

Various factors such as, online reviews, consumer forums, news articles, social media behavior and visibility in search results all impact your brand reputation. Your online brand reputation has become increasingly more important as the digital era continues to explode.

Building a strong brand takes a lot of work. Having a solid reputation strategy will not only help you on your goals of achieving your ideal perception but will also help when your brand inevitably must deal with a crisis.

Why is Brand Reputation Management Important?

Creates More Loyal Customers: For Outdoor Power Equipment companies, the majority of earnings come from a long and loyal customer set. When you follow a brand management strategy, you can look more closely at what avenues will attract and retain the most loyal customers. Customer Loyalty programs work because people like to do business with people they like and trust. Maintaining your brand’s reputation helps to build that trust.

Quickens Your Response to the Competition: Having a marketing strategy in place will help you identify what marketing or sales tactics you need when dealing with a competitive threat. Your Brand reputation strategy can help you decide if it’s a better idea to prioritize a new marketing campaign that focuses on selling to your existing clients, or if it’s better to narrow in on acquiring new customers in a currently under-served area.

Stabilizes Employee Growth: If you articulate the way you want your brand to be perceived, it’s much easier to identify good hires that will promote the culture you are trying to create. People look for jobs where they feel fulfilled and can make a meaningful contribution to something they believe in. Companies that have a clear brand identity and a well-founded brand reputation are the ones who offer these types of opportunities to perspective employees. With a great reputation both inside and outside, a company will have a more devoted workforce and lower levels of turnover and turmoil.

Key Elements to a Winning Brand Reputation Management Strategy:

Build Your Brand Identity: Before you can even begin to think about a brand management strategy, you must first create a brand worth managing. Developing a strong brand identity ensures you have a clear understanding of what your company stands for and can help guide decisions in certain situations.

Your brand identity should include:

Logo, Colors & Imagery that are Cohesive
A Consistent Voice from the Brand
A Clear Company Mission, Vision and Value Statement

Establish Your Online Presence: Create a website that will allow visitors to experience your brand identity and form an accurate impression of your business right from the start. Setup and Manage your Google Business Profile and Social Media Accounts.

Actively Ask for and Respond to Reviews: The average consumer will read 10 reviews of your company prior to deciding they can or cannot trust your brand. Make sure to include a place for customers to leave reviews and include them as testimonials on your website. No matter the venue, make sure that you respond to every review as they come in, even the bad ones. If you address them honestly and quickly, many times you will find that you are able to turn a poor experience around and retain your customer’s business. Not only that, but it will show other people reading the reviews, that your brand cares about your consumers and that you will listen and resolve issues and complaints when they arise.

Listen to Feedback: Keeping an eye on what is being said about your brand is key to reputation management. Add a form to your website to create a place for customer feedback. The input you will receive is incredibly valuable.

Improve the Customer Experience: According to Microsoft Consumer Data, 58% of Consumers who feel like their experience falls short with a brand will sever all ties with them. It’s not just the lost revenue that you should concern yourself with. Customers who have had a poor experience are much more likely to leave a public facing review for a company than those who had a good one.

94% of consumers say a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business.

You must be ready to manage your brand reputation before others do it for you. A single bad review can deter multiple potential customers from doing business with your brand.

Company Culture Counts: Good things happen when a company promotes a healthy and positive internal environment. By giving your team members meaningful work and empowering them to take charge of their professional lives, they will become more confident and productive collaborators instead of individual contributors. This has a huge impact on your public reputation. When employees are more satisfied and fulfilled by their work, they will take pride in what they do, and as a result, do better work. Company culture also effects your internal brand reputation. The better supported your employees feel, the prouder of their work they will be which in turn will have a positive influence on your overall brand reputation.

Create a Brand Style Guide: As your company grows. You must always maintain the same identity and message across all channels with internal documentation. Creating a Brand Style Guide ensures that everything remains consistent when it comes to design choices, communication strategies, quality of customer service, etc.

Brand Reputation is critical to any growing business. A Positive brand reputation builds loyalty and increases customer confidence in your brand and product, ultimately, driving both sales and bottom-line growth.

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You suck! – Why your online reputation matters

June 18, 2020

by Brett Morris with No Comment Social Media

A business’s reputation used to be what they said about themselves in their advertising, and how far the voices of their customers could reach.

Now, consumers are pushing out a company’s reputation and image collectively by providing real-time feedback online through review sites, social media, forums and other channels. Essentially, if it is an online source and a consumer can say something about a business on it, then it is a channel where your business’s reputation should be managed.

Digital marketing and online reputation management for businesses

Online reputation management is a part of a greater digital marketing strategy. This strategy should work alongside review management, business listings, paid search/ads, social media management and SEO to help your business stay competitive and relevant online.

While your business should be managing each of these segments to maintain your online presence and (consequently) offline reputation, many businesses are not.

Four in five consumers surveyed use search engines to find local information from multiple devices to find store address, business hours, product availability and directions.

Online reputation management: your business has options

Your business’s reputation can be affected at any time, on just about any source across the web.

You can use products, third-party services or hire people to cut down on your personal reputation management time expenditure. Even if your business tracks and constantly checks on social media, there may be sources that your business is unaware of such as a new review site from a listing that your business never knew that existed.

Your business should weigh the pros and cons of conducting online reputation management in-house or outsourcing, but there are definite best practices when responding to reviews that your business should be aware of.

Maintaining your business’s online presence is one of the most worthwhile services you can invest in.

Why your business’s online reputation matters

An online reputation needs to be backed by reviews and ratings by consumers. Without them, there would be no reputation to manage and quite frankly, it would appear as if no one ever visited the business.

Ready or not, consumers are talking about your business

Whether a business chooses to manage their reputation online or not, consumers are talking about their favorite and not-so-favorite businesses. If a business simply ignores their reputation online, the consequences can be detrimental.

Unmanaged negative responses can create an angry mob mentality and bad word of mouth spreads like wildfire. While a business may not realize how exactly one instance can affect their online reputation, it is possible that only one negative post on a highly ranked site can actually be what shows up near the top of a search results page when a consumer searches for that business’s name.

Consumers Control the Conversation and Everyone’s Feedback Matters

Social media is a two-way conversation — businesses can no longer broadcast the message they want people to see. There is a democratic nature to social, with brands, consumers and everyone having an equal voice in a shared space. Customers can rave about a business or let everyone know they had a terrible experience. Social networks have dramatically changed the way businesses communicate. Today, consumers can converse with brands and vice versa as if they were talking to a friend. As a result, businesses have had to become more personable than simply a business entity and manage their social presence in a manner that reflects as such.
Reputation drives conversion

What people see online matters.

Approximately 74% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations—this is a huge shift in thinking that has become more prominent as time goes on. This trust in reviews translates to dollars, as customers put their money where their trust is. A Harvard Business School study found that a restaurant that sees a one star increase on Yelp will see revenues increase anywhere from five to nine per cent.

As discussed previously, many businesses find that cultivating their digital profile on their own is too time consuming. There are reputation monitoring tools that make keeping up with customers way easier, saving time and money. Whatever your business does, it is essential that you are not perceived to be ignoring your customers online. The worst thing your business can do is appear unresponsive.

What makes a good online reputation?

Being present (listed online) and having a good reputation (reviews and reputation management) go hand in hand. Not being listed on a reference site customers use is just as bad as having bad reviews on that site. Building a consistent online presence and a positive reputation is important for both consumers and search engines. Some of the most important aspects of the online footprint include:

number of business listings
consistency of business listing information (name, address, phone)
overall sentiment in reviews
frequency or current velocity of new reviews
overall volume of reviews
social activity and engagement (especially with reviewers)

Customers now view social recommendations and reviews as more authentic, expecting reviews to be a mirror of the actual customer experience that they would experience themselves. This means that maintaining your business’s online reputation is gaining importance as each review is a perceived snippet of what your potential customer expects to experience.

Online reputation management: the main sell

According to Google, 9 out of 10 of local searches lead to action, with more than 50% leading to sales. If businesses have a good web presence, customers will go to them rather than the competitor. Once they’re in the store, 79% of customer use their smartphones inside to look at reviews or compare prices and 74% of them end up making a purchase. Those numbers alone make the opportunity clear: online reputation management is essential for your business to get consumers in the door to make the sale.

If you think all this reputation management stuff sounds too complex, or too time-consuming, give us a call!

Dealers Digital offers Reputation Management services.

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