Reputation Management & The Home Services Professional: You Are Exactly Whom They Think You Are

August 25, 2020

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As a digital marketing agency, our business revolves around maximizing our clients’ digital reach and brand awareness while working within their limited internet marketing budgets. Most of the prospective clients that come to speak with us in our Bucks County, Pennsylvania headquarters recognize the importance of the most popular digital marketing services we offer. They are familiar with the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Even those from pre-internet times recognize the need for social media marketing in our modern age. However, more often than not, their focus is solely on the digital services we offer. As such, they fail to consider something that is just as important today as it ever has been: Managing the online reputation of their businesses.

Top 3 Online Reputation Management Mistakes for Home Services Professionals

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It may cause you pain to accept this, but your business is no better than what people say & think about it. No matter how hard you work to make every client experience a positive one, there will be times when your best isn’t good enough. Nobody’s perfect, and everybody, including your customers, knows that. Your customers also know that on rare occasions, the service your company provides them with is not of the same caliber as the service they’ve come to expect. And when those isolated situations occur, they will often let you know by posting a negative review.

However, before you get all worked up over receiving this negative feedback, look at this as an opportunity to be actively involved in your business’s reputation management. It’s a reasonable probability that the motivation behind a dissatisfied client’s leaving you a negative review was not merely to tell the world how horrible you are. As we have become proficient in interpreting what customers in Philadelphia, Central New Jersey, and throughout the country are saying, trust us on this one. Some people will specifically tell you not to bother responding, as they have washed their hands of you & your business. But the rest that didn’t dismiss you outright. They took the time to tell you why they were dissatisfied and seek rectification of the situation. Now, it’s up to you to make every effort to repair the damage done before it spreads.

This opportunity is where reputation management comes into play. What happens next is almost entirely up to your next moves. Unfortunately, many home services professionals disregard the negative feedback they receive, which is one of the biggest mistakes they can make. We can’t share every error we see. Hopefully, we can help you avoid making what we see as the Top 3 Online Reputation Management Mistakes for Home Services Professionals.

Don’t Turn Bad Into Worse: We discussed this last week in our “Customer Reviews” blog, but just in case you missed it or worse, didn’t get the message, we’ll repeat it. The only thing worse than receiving a positive review & not saying “thanks” is receiving a negative review & not saying anything! Just because you’re not sitting in front of the client doesn’t mean the situation will cure itself if you do nothing. Take the lessons learned from prior customer interactions, both good and bad, and apply your crisis management skills to every negative review & post you receive.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss: One of the reasons our web design & social media marketing services are in such high demand is that business owners understand and respect both the online community’s power & influence. The more-relaxed settings of social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram are perfect for less-formal interactions with clients. It is a grave oversight not to maximize these opportunities thru active engagement with any clients leaving you reviews or messages. Furthermore, you can generate brand awareness with relative ease if you’re using your content for marketing purposes.

Be The Professional You Claim To Be: If you’re like most home services professionals, you’ve spent years working on fine-tuning your in-home professional demeanor & customer engagement practices. You’ve done this to paint yourself as the very embodiment of a consummate professional. These days, it’s just as important to apply those rules to your online presence. Work on making your social media interactions as smooth as you are at a client’s kitchen table. Focus on making your online engagements as comfortable for both sides as you can.

Suppose you worked half as hard at managing your business’s online reputation as you do in managing your home services business. In that case, you might recognize they are two sides to the same coin. Take the time to manage your business’s online reputation properly. You might find that your business grows and prospers from those efforts as much as it will from all other efforts you make.

Need some professional assistance in managing your online reviews and reputation? Contact 1SEO’s experts for a free digital marketing assessment today!

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