The Power of 5 Star Reputation for your dealership

Your dealership’s online reputation plays an essential role in your overall success. For car dealerships like yours, the ability to manage and even bolster your reputation strategically is essential if you want potential customers to regularly choose to do business with your company over others. Regardless of the type of vehicles that you sell or where your dealership is located, you need to take every possible step to develop a 5 star reputation online. These are six essential steps to follow to improve your dealership’s reputation online.

1. Establish Goals for Car Dealers – Reputation

The first step in any online reputation-building strategy is to define the goals that you want to achieve. You obviously want online reviews to be positive, but consider the ideal quantity of reviews as well. For example, from your own personal experience as an online consumer, what is your impression of a company that has only a couple of online reviews versus a company that has dozens or hundreds? You understandably may wonder why so many people have not chosen to do business with the first company or why few people received such amazing service that they wanted to take time out of their busy day to write about it. A smart idea is to review your competitors’ online reviews to establish a benchmark. Even if you want to get a traders insurance policy, or get new clients frequently you need to have a solid online reputation. Other businesses and clients usually look for that first. Also, remember that Google needs to see enough reviews about your company as well in order for it to recognize the reviews for search engine purposes. While it is great to have a lot of reviews, the recency of the reviews is also essential.

2. Develop a Plan – Dealer Reputation

After you have set a reasonable goal for promoting a solid online reputation, you need to create a plan for successfully achieving your goals. In many cases, you only have to ask a consumer to leave a review in order to convince them to do so. Therefore, a critical aspect of your strategy should be to regularly ask your satisfied customers to spend a few minutes writing an online review, and this should be incorporated into the purchase process. When you wait too long to ask a customer to write a review, they may be less inclined to do so. For better results, consider sending them a follow-up text or email message within a few days of the transaction.

3. Select Review Sites Carefully – Reputation Plan

When you have many 5 star reviews spread out across numerous review sites, the result is that each site will only have a minimum number of reviews. If you want to maximize the benefit of online reviews, locate the review sites that may have the most impact on your consumers or that may be used by more consumers. One strategy to accomplish this is to conduct a Google search and focus on the top review sites that are in the search results. When you ask satisfied customers to leave a review, specify which review site you would like them to use.

4. Get Your Staff Involved

Because one of the best ways to generate 5 star reviews online is to ask for them, your staff members need to be recruited regularly make this request. Proper training regarding the tactful way to ask for a review is an important first step. You also may need to make this extra effort worthwhile for your staff members. For example, you can develop a way to monitor which customers leave reviews and which employees served them. You may offer employees a financial bonus when positive reviews are generated from their efforts. Remember that you cannot pay your customers to leave a review, but it is ethical to reward employees who work hard to generate those reviews.

5. Focus Your Customers’ Attention

When you have many 5 star reviews created by your customers, you understandably want to maximize the benefit of those reviews. In the event that you’ve hired an online reputation management agency, they might promptly handle all these things for you. However, if you still rely on your in-house staff to do it, then you need to raise awareness about it in various ways. For example, you may add a few positive reviews to your website or incorporate them into your email marketing. If you are using resources such as marketing firms or applications to send product emails to your customers, customer reviews can become a part of your Complete email strategy that brings visitors to your website. Additionally, you can incorporate subscriptions and news letters to provide regular updates to your loyal customers. You can also create links on social media accounts to the independent review sites to draw attention to the reviews.

6. Take Advantage of Online Reputation Management Resources

Creating and managing a 5-star reputation is no easy feat, and the good news is that technology is available to streamline this process for you. For example, a reputation management software program may monitor reviews for you. It may also have an automated process that reaches out to your customers to ask for reviews. Some have a customer feedback system or other features that may benefit car dealerships like yours – learn here what else a reputation management service can do for you.

You understandably want your automotive dealership to have a 5 star reputation and to stand apart from the competition in this area. Car dealerships may gain a competitive edge by focusing on each of these steps to build a solid reputation online. Customer Scout offers specialized marketing services for auto dealerships like yours, and we have extensive experience developing and enhancing our clients’ reputation online. If you are ready to learn more about the many steps that the team at Customer Scout can take to boost your leads, contact our office today.