A lot of the time, you may have learned about how negative reviews helped sink another business. You may be wondering how you can do better as a business to deal with negative reviews and gain positive ones. Here is an overview of reputation management for businesses such as car dealers.

So what is reputation management?

In an age when people mostly search for their potential purchases online, it is more important than ever to pay attention to managing your online reputation. This is often in the form of reviews, whether they are merely starred comments or lengthy, detailed feedback. There are other ways your online reputation comes up, but if you are primarily engaged in selling products or offering services, reviews may be the most important tool for gauging your online reputation.

Reputation management is the way you influence and reshape people’s perceptions about your business. Good marketing is one way of doing this, and a good internet search will help you find out how to best market your business to boost your rep. However, engaging with those who have something to say about your business is also important, and that is what we are primarily talking about here.

How do you manage your reputation?

Reputation management assumes that you do not have control of what people think about your business, but with what they see. The best practices surrounding this focus on making sure that what people see online is what will help them choose your business.

The best way to manage your reputation is to do your business ethically and professionally and to be trustworthy in the process. No amount of damage control can save your business from sinking when people find out that you did something clearly wrong. If you are doing business right to begin with, you can be sure that people will see that other people notice. That draws more attention and, hopefully, more customers.

However, reputation management really involves having to deal with things that can potentially sink your reputation. Negative feedback is one area where we can engage with those making that feedback to address their concerns. The way we engage with them should reflect the way we want to be treated if we make similar feedback about another business. It should be professional and polite. Most of all, it should be honest and frank. If we did wrong, we should admit it, apologize, and ask for ways we could do better. After all, save for a few malicious commenters, most people in the end may want us to find out how we can do business better.

At the same time, good reputation management means encouraging people to give us positive feedback. It will be difficult to do this unless we are good at nudging people to leave comments on a review site or on our social media presence. There are tools to help businesses do this. A good online search will lead you in the direction of those you might find useful.

Will good reputation management help your business?

The short answer is, yes. In fact, the way you do business and the way people see it will build more interest in your business. People will see you as a trustworthy partner in making them make informed decisions about purchasing a product or using a service. As people do so, they will be happy to work with you and tell others the good news. This will grow your business and keep your online reputation positive. Reputation management is, above all, about making sure your business thrives in the competitive online space.

This has been an overview of what reputation management is, how you can do it, and whether it helps your business. We wish you all the success in making your business known for doing good things for your customers!