Reviews to revenue: Reputation management 101

Reviews to revenue: Reputation management 101

Reputation management is the process of monitoring how consumers perceive your business and taking action to improve your brand's image. Reputation management works closely with your online presence and protects your brand. It has a significant impact on the revenue generated by your business. In 2021, 77% of customers said they regularly read online reviews when browsing for local businesses, which is up 17% from 2020.

Online reputation management has four pillars: review generation, review monitoring, review management, and review marketing. Our panelists will help local businesses understand the importance of these pillars and how to leverage them to boost their online reputation. 

For local businesses, reputation may seem unpredictable. Your reputation is something that can takes years to build but a minute to break. And that’s true to a large extent if you need a reputation management system. 

This webinar will help you understand the significance of reputation management and the process of creating a system for that. We talked to Sara Weber, marketing director for Core Dental Group. This organization is a 45-location fast-growing business that has managed to build a stellar online reputation across all locations. The group boasts an average Google star rating of 4.9. And they have done it with a lean team of three handling marketing for them. 

So this webinar allows you to learn reputation management from someone who has built a brand's online presence from the ground up. 

While you wait for the webinar to download, here is a sneak peek at Core Dental Group's reputation management efforts and their significance. 

Excerpt from Webinar 

Birdeye: From your experience, Sarah, would you say that reviews significantly impact business credentials and online reputation? 

Sarah Weber: Absolutely. We know that Google often changes its algorithms, and constantly ranking according to them can be challenging. Businesses need to learn how best to get in front of people constantly. But having strong reviews and a strong reputation is definitely a huge factor in reaching customers. We really feel that it's a key area for us to make sure that all of our offices are doing well and rate highly on Google. 

Birdeye: Definitely. In the dental industry, we imagine that word of mouth is extremely important, and reviews are a form of word-of-mouth marketing in many ways. Can you share what value has reviews brought to your business specifically?

Sara Weber: It brings a lot of value. Even with word-of-mouth recommendations in the dental industry from friends and family, we have seen that people eventually Google the business. This is because the recommendation does not always come with a phone number or appointment booking facility. 

When they eventually land on our Google Business Profile and see that the office has a 4.0 or 4.8 rating, it validates the recommendation and makes sales much more accessible. 

Birdeye: That's true and takes us back to the four essential pillars of online reputation. In this case, review generation has come in handy for Core Dental Group. Generating more reviews strengthens the online reputation of a business. We have seen that the quality and velocity (the speed at which you generate reviews regularly) matter equally. So we want to know from you, Sara, Core Dental does an excellent job of bringing in reviews consistently. You don't get to 16,600 or almost 17,000 reviews overnight. That takes consistency. How were you able to do that?

Sara Weber: Yes, the review management process does matter a lot. At Core Dental, we handle this in many ways. Our primary review generation process is via Birdeye. We have automated review requests for all our locations. So as soon as a patient completes their appointment with us, we send a review request to them to collect their feedback. 

In the past, when we did not have the automated process, we saw that the reviews generated were far from this volume. It was mainly done by the office staff manually requesting customers who may or may not remember to leave a review. 

We also encourage our employees to get as many as possible. While it does work, it is less effective than the automated system we have in place. 

Birdeye: What channels are you currently using to send out review requests? 

Sara Weber: We currently send automated messages out at the end of the day to all patients who had appointments with us. We send these out via text and email. We also include links to review us on Google, Facebook, or our platform in our general emails and text messages. If a customer does not have the best experience with us, we also provide them a space to share their experience directly with us. This helps us talk to the customer instead of a potential negative review directly going to Google. 

Birdeye: That looks like quite a system. When it comes to texting and emailing, like with the patient management system, does that system talk with Birdeye? What about whenever you acquire new locations? What's the process for making sure that all of these programs/systems talk to each other? 

Sara Weber: Yeah. So Birdeye connects directly to our patient management systems, and we have a number of systems. We have EagleSoft; we have Dentrix, so we have several different systems, and Birdeye is able to connect with all of those, which is fantastic. And really, for the most part, I would say that bringing them on to Birdeye is sort of part of the acquisition process whenever we acquire a new practice. Earlier, we used to hesitate about the integration, but after using the platform, we made it mandatory for all new businesses to be onboarded on Birdeye.

This section was just on review generation. The webinar elaborates on how to respond to reviews, manage them, and even use them for marketing your business online. 

Watch the webinar to learn more about online reputation management.