Confessions of a Digital Marketing Company Part 1: S*@t Happens!

It happens! Yes, we are talking about negative (or even nasty) reviews. Even the world’s best known brands like Apple, Amazon, and Google, deal with unhappy customers and reviews every day. And, 41% of companies that experienced a negative reputation event reported a loss of brand value and revenue.

As a digital marketing company, ResultFirst, helps customers maintain their visibility on the net, including services like reputation management. So, imagine our surprise when we received one of the nastiest reviews possible from a customer winking at us from the top of search results for one of our most important commercial keywords, “ResultFirst reviews.”  Here’s how we have tried to handle the situation so far. Hopefully, there are lessons for us and others in our experience.

Also Read: DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2018- TRENDING NOW

Horrors!

It all started with a prospective customer telling us that he was concerned about signing up for our services because of a negative ResultFirst review. We started by thanking them for bringing this to our attention. After doing some research, we found out that they were referring to a recent and particularly nasty review on ResultFirst on Yelp. In this particular case, we were able to explain our side of the story and saved the sale. However, we were sure that there were others who were not as forgiving. We had to do something because this review had the best possible visibility on search results as soon as someone looked for “ResultFirst reviews.” Moreover, the matter was crucial because “ResultFirst reviews” as a keyword had a high search volume. We couldn’t let a few bad reviews of ResultFirst take us down and wreck all the hard work we do every day.

Are we really that bad?

After a lot of soul searching, we realized that we had to start with a set of core beliefs to handle the situation:

1. Bad reviews don’t mean WE are bad

We have a hard-working team and 100s of satisfied customers who use our services every day. Although an indicator of a bad customer experience, we cannot let a negative review (or two) determine our worth as a company.

2. Bad reviews means we are “real”

Is a product or service genuine only if it just has five-star reviews? No product or service can make everyone happy. And we had support in this belief. One of our favorite quotes:

3. Bad reviews are a chance for introspection

We viewed the negative review as a chance to find out what went wrong. We are humans and, yes, we make mistakes. It is more important to accept our flaws and avoid future occurrences of the same mistake.

Armed with these set of beliefs, we embarked on building an online reputation management plan for ResultFirst reviews.

Stay tuned to uncover the challenges, strategy and implementation of our ORM to beat the s*@t that happened to us in the form of negative ResultFirst reviews. Read on Confessions of a Digital Marketing Company Part 2: S*@t Happens!

Also Read: TOP 10 DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS | RESULTFIRST. COM

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