How to fix your online reputation and get more customers part two. This time it is about reviews. We'll go do a little bit of review in a moment. I have dropped a link in the chat and, of course, if you're seeing this at a later date, we'll link it in the description so you guys will be fully prepared and everything is made available for you to be as educated on reputation as possible. All right, so let's get a little bit into who we are and what we're all about.
About R&R ROI & Mark
This is a little about section. We do partner exclusively with RV parks, resorts and campgrounds. We're an ARVC member. Glad to be a part of that organization. We talk about the M5. It's an RV park centric marketing system. The framework there is, as you can see, with the awesome graphic of "Scale the M5 Mountain." We have reputation resell, reach and retarget that we build out what we do on.
What about me? Who am I? What am I doing here? I'm from West Virginia. I grew up there on a campground that my parents started back in the 80s. That was a fun experience.
I've been helping companies with online presence for more than 20 years. I know it looks like I'm about 25, but that's not true. I've been running a marketing agency in 2014. I do have one wife, four kids, and one dog. While they are all wonderful and love them dearly, we won't really be talking about them today. Maybe later in another webinar, we'll see what comes up.
What You’ll Leave With Today.
Today we're going to leave with some information to be we equipped with, first of all, a better understanding of how to maintain a good online reputation. We have two areas specifically we're going to cover today that will improve your reputation if you do it right, and some action items you can walk away with and put in place today. We'll also answer any questions you might have, so please drop them in the chat. If you think of something that we don't cover specifically, whether that's live or in recording, comment on it on the video.
If it's broke, you need to fix it. Look at this sad little RV. It's seen better days. Hopefully, when it comes to your reputation, it's not that bad, but sometimes we got to work on that. And getting reviews is essential to all this, but it's not the only thing. It's way more than that. And that's why we had a part one and we discussed some of those. We'll go over those again here in a minute, just briefly.
Some of the reputation we run across involves a website that's just working against you. Not everybody's site is helping their guests navigate to where they need to. There might be other issues with the mobile responsiveness. There are several things that you can look at there. You're too hard to get a hold of. They'll make a bunch of obstacles for your guests to contact you.
That's another part of your reputation. You can always man the front desk if you're talking about your actual park, your resort. There's different technologies and things you can do. The reality is just not being able to do that well can also cause problems with reputation. And you never want to have incorrect information about your park online, so that could be a problem. One of the big things we're talking about today, not a consistent way to get reviews, not enough reviews, all those kind of things.
It’s An Opportunity To Impress.
All right, so we do have an opportunity to impress, though. And first and foremost, the campers visit starts way before they arrive at your park. The online experience is going to be just as important as an in person stay, because if it's in a bad way, they may never end up at your park or your resort. We want to bring the same energy that we want to create on site online. You're going to have a rest and relax kind of atmosphere when people come visit you. Let's try to do that same thing online.
Fix Online Reputation Part 1 Review
Here's a quick review from last time. There's a link for you to look at that. Here's a screenshot from when we talked about it. We talked about website, messaging and the front desk and how you can improve those areas. Watch Part 1
Two Areas of Improvement
You can go to YouTube, subscribe, smash those like buttons as the tubers, but go ahead and search, Rest & Relax ROI to find that, as well as the link that's in this description.
Now we're going into the meat of what we're talking about today, which is two areas of improvement include Google BP, and that has nothing to do with British Petroleum, but it is the business profile and then reviews. We'll talk about not only Google, but some other areas that reviews are often found in.
Google Business Profile
The Google Business Profile, the reality is most people known this as Google My Business, and they changed the name as they often do. It was named something else before that. What we're going to talk about is optimizing that, doing some call tracking, potentially having messages and business listings, having those correct. Those are the four main areas we're going to talk about.
Add, Claim & Verify
If you haven't already done this, we're going to talk about adding, claiming, and verifying just to go over some simple steps on how to do that. You got to start there. If you're a new organization, new campground, whatever the case may be, you may not have that. You want to add that as a new business or claim it if you haven't already. And you're going to verify that.
That could be done through phone, text, email, or video. And sometimes you may need more than one to actually get that verification to go through. And just so you know, it could take a little bit of time. Be prepared to have up to a few weeks. Most of the time that's not the case, but I just want to make you aware of that.
You see a little animation that we have here. You can go to maps.google.com to add a listing if you need to. You type your name and address, click that little hamburger menu that you see, and then add your business down at the bottom there. That is we're going to fill in your information for a brand new or one that somehow Google didn't find already.
Or you can claim it. It's already active, people are already leaving reviews, those kind of things, but you're not actually managing it, and it is yours. You want to make sure you're doing that. Same thing: maps.google.com, you're going to type in that name or address and then click that listing. Claim the business as you can, see where the nice little red arrow is, and then you can manage. Now that's the next step on that, and you'll fill out the information and go through the verification process.
Optimize Your GBP
Once you've done all that, that's your first step. You got it. You got on there, you added it, you verified all that. You're going to optimize. Here are some steps that you really want to focus on to make sure you have a fully optimized GBP. You're going to include all the details that you can. Fill out as much information as you can to leave no stone unturned, no question unanswered for your guests. Add keywords. That's a huge thing.
Google, it's about people being able to find what they're looking for. You want to add stuff that has to do with your own resort or things that are close to it that your guest could be searching for. Obviously, operating hours need to be accurate.
The operating hours are also part of what would be considered a NAP listing. Name, address, phone number. A lot of times it's found on someone's website and business listing sites. We want that to be accurate across all places that's found.
Adding photos, as you can see in this particular example, they have some nice photos of the facilities. You can put a lot of photos on there. Add as many as you want, make sure they're good, professional.
Then you're going to be able to manage and respond to reviews on that. That's a huge part we're talking about today. Enable the messaging. So we'll get a little bit into that in a moment and use a post feature.
Posting on GBP
Now the post. As you can see here is an example of our profile. What you can do is you can do this directly from the search profile on Google.com. This is one of the changes that came with switching from my business to business profile. You don't have to have a login to the business.Google.com. You can just go to the search engine and do this. If you have multiple locations, you'll still want to use the old way of doing it where you can go and select whichever business that you're managing.
But if you're a one location situation straight from search, it works. The thing you'll want to do with the post is do it regularly. Google used to have a social media. You guys may remember the Google Plus situation that was around at one point in the past that got deprecated because no one really cared that much. That is no longer is that available, but they do offer this functionality on their business profile. Treat it like you would, similar to like Instagram, things of that nature.
You want to do the high quality media here, just like it's on your profile. This is not your profile, though, just keep that in mind. The pictures that we looked at earlier, this is a separate thing from that. So just be aware of that.
Use keywords. Once again, like we said with the profile, these are search engine optimization type features you can have to help people find you when they're looking for relevant things related to when they're being your guest or looking to plan their vacation, things of that nature.
This can be done managed with a third party as well. For instance, this particular example is what we talked about with the M5 earlier. That's how we post ours. We schedule them out. That can be done with Google here or Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, schedule them all at once through M5. There are other options for that online, so it makes life a little bit easier as opposed to always going to Google.
Phone calls -- you can track phone calls from your GBP. Lets get into a little bit of that. Google business allows for two phone numbers. The first slot you would put in a number that you could actually track so it could be recorded for quality assurance and just so you get better data on it. The second slot would be your regular phone number that's always been out there.
When we talk about SEO juice, it's in relation to the business listings that we mentioned briefly before, you don't want to have different phone numbers out there, but Google allows for having these two slots. You don't have that issue where you have like a Yelp listing that has one phone number and Google has a different number and then there's confusion. You want to accurately track and report on calls by doing this. Then you can don't have it listed here, but you can have it recorded as well. Not on the Google profile itself, but once again with another software.
We talked about this a good bit in last month's webinar. You can look at that, the missed call text back feature. If you're one of those that's very married to the phone or making sure it gets answered and all that, and you miss one, you might miss an opportunity to book someone, those kinds of things, this could be very valuable.
Where someone calls, it doesn't get answered, but immediately send a text message and ask them how you can help. You can set up some automations on that, and it can be a big boon for your park if you rely on that.
Enable GBP Messages
We mentioned the messages. We're going to enable that as well. The reality is you're making it easy for your guests to contact you and to have communication with you. If you're trying to hide from that, the whole thing when we get into reviews, it's kind of a secondary issue. Because people get mad if they can't get answers to their questions.
We're going to turn on that chat directly from Google search. Once again, you can do that. Once you're logged in to your profile, you can go there and there's a little box that pops up and you can say, I want those messages delivered to me. Don't miss out on those. You can quickly respond to them and upgrade your customer service. People are looking to get quick answers more and more today. This is one way you can do that for your guests.
Accurate Business Listings
We've already mentioned it a few times. There's a ton of sites out there, Yellow Pages being one. While Google is kind of the primary one we focused on, and it's huge for you to have that, there are many others. You want to make sure, as we said, that that information is correct across the board.
You have that consistent business name, you have the correct address, the correct phone number across all those. When you have those accurate listings, it can improve your search engine results.
63% of the people in this Bright Local survey said an incorrect listing would stop them from using that particular business. Keep that in mind. Make sure all your info, your data about your business is right all over the place.
If you start having conflicting information, it can not only just cause distrust with people that are going to be trying to stay with you, but Google could potentially knock you down a few notches if they're unsure what's right.
Take Action on Google Business Profile
Here's some action that we can take, folks. We're going to add photos and posts to our Google Business Profile. That's something you can do right now. If you weren't on this webinar. You go out there, if you've already claimed it, verified all those kind of things, start doing that. It's going to improve your search engine results. You're going to be able to engage with your potential guests. It's going to increase your brand awareness, and it's free promotion. Who doesn't like some free stuff? That's why you're here today, I'm assuming. It's free and hoping you're getting some great free information.
That's your action item, obviously. I think everything that we just talked about is something that you should do if there's missing information. Take action on all that. This is being recorded. If you're like, wait a minute, I missed something, you'd be able to go back and look at it, which is great.
Effectively Managing Reviews
We're onto our second main topic that we're going to cover today, and that is reviews ... Finally. So we're going to talk about Google, Facebook, and the other sites.
Importance of Reviews
We'll go over a few stats to kick it off if you don't already realize the importance. We're going to hammer that right now with some more information that maybe you weren't aware of. 72% use Google reviews to find businesses. We know that well over two thirds of people are finding information, information about you because they jump on Google. I don't think it's super surprising. I think at one point people were thinking, oh, Google's doesn't have the market share like you used to. They're pretty much still the dominant one out there. Focus on that as the your first area of battle for online reviews.
Here's a good stat for you. Businesses with at least 200 reviews generate two times the revenue. That's a cool stat. If you have 199, you just need one more and you're going to blow up. 😉 In general, probably a lot of places have a lot of work they could potentially do to increase their reviews. Once they get to that magic 200 number, that could be a big boon as well.
I think this is another thing that we all understand on some level already. People are 21% more likely to leave a review after a negative experience. We know that people like to complain in this world, and that happens with all of our businesses from time to time. We got to be aware of how to combat that effectively.
To back that up, 94% have avoided a company due to a bad review. If you're having bad reviews and you're not addressing those by doing some of the things we're going to talk about next, you're going to obviously lose more business in the future, potentially. Let's not do that. That's bad.
Google Reviews Best Practices
Let's look at some best practices. We talked about verifying the business profile so you can show up on maps, search and other services that Google has. You're going to want to remind customers to leave reviews. Now, keep this in mind, there'll be some information later that sounds like this is contradictory, but reality is you need to make it aware that you want reviews in different ways.
You're going to reply to those to build customer trust. You have to value all of those reviews. Negative, positive -- the negative ones are the ones that everybody is like ehhhh. If you're leaving those blank, that's problematic because it's not building trust, building distrust, that's the opposite.
Benefits of Google Reviews
The benefit of Google reviews, we talked about trust, it's going to increase that. We're going to have better online exposure and local SEO. You can see that this is a recurring theme with what we're talking about today. Google profile reviews all that. It's going to affect your especially local search engine results, which is when people are traveling through the area where your resorts and your parks are, this is why that matters.
You receive feedback and customer intelligence for good and bad. What's going on here is if you get good feedback or bad, that information obviously can be taken and help you improve what you do with your business. That can improve click through rates to your website as well as better conversion rates.
Facebook Recommendations
Now we're moving on to Facebook. The reason we're going to talk about Facebook is it's another major place that people are going to be leaving reviews. It's almost one fifth of the reviews that are online or found on Facebook.
18% in the US made purchases on Facebook in the past year. Once again, that's a healthy amount of people that are having buying decisions making purchases because of their Facebook usage. 66% visit local business pages once a week. So your Facebook page can be a very big hub of sorts online for people to learn more about you. Of course, the reviews and recommendations are a big part of that.
55% use it as the most common way to learn about a business. That's a lot. Over half the people will find out more information about your resort or your park through your Facebook page. What are you doing with that? That's a little bit of a different thing. Are you actually doing anything on your Facebook page or is it stagnant? People are going there.
We know this for a fact, if you've been on Facebook ever, people ask for recommendations, right? 66% are likely to share their experiences and opinions on Facebook. Two thirds are talking about you. Let's make sure that it's something good. If it is bad, let's do something about that as well.
Benefits of Facebook Recommendations
How about some benefits. Number one, you could increase organic reach. Once again, we're talking about some SEO benefits with this. Credibility and trust is another factor we've already talked about. Positive and direct customer service once again.
Some of these are same type of things with Google and you can get a top position for Facebook professional services as well. Those are some things that we can look into.
Facebook Recommendations Best Practices
I'm going to play a little video here in a minute on the next screen about best practices and we'll see how we can do these practical steps to make sure we're getting the reviews and the recommendations.
You can enable the reviews tab and then notifications and then copy and save that link so you can share it and then promote your Facebook reviews. Those are the main things we could do and also display it on the website.
Here's this video, no sound. You can see here, you go to that tab, you can go down to Reviews, make sure that's turned on there. Then go back and see that there is a Reviews tab. Click on that and you can copy that URL that would come up to be able to share. Go down to your settings and notifications and allow it. Make sure that your new page review is notified. That's basically how you would do that. Make sure you're getting those review notifications and it's all enabled.
Other Review Sites
The rest of the reviews sort of all right. Good Sam in this space, everyone's aware of these guys. They've been around a long time. Then you have RV Life, you have Campendium, RV Parky. I believe, Mark Koep, your site, CampgroundViews.com, I'm not sure if you guys do reviews or not. I didn't get you added here, but I'm glad to have you on today. Mark does have reviews. That's another one that people can submit reviews. Tell me, Mark, as well, can campgrounds and parks go on and can claim their park and they can respond to reviews. That would be the question because some of these Campendium, I know for a fact they don't have that ability to allow you to respond. It's just people are just blasting their information out there as far as the reviews. Mark filters out the BS. Thanks, Mark.
That's just the reality. Some of you are going to be able to obviously Google Facebook. You're going to have control of those other ones. Good Sam, you have to be a member, I believe, in order to be able to respond. Of course, that's a paid thing as far as being a Good Sam member.
There's a whole bunch more right of online review places for different things. A couple of just big sites in general, Yelp and TripAdvisor. People could be leaving reviews on those as well. The reality is, in this situation, there are tons of places that you could be paying attention to. You have to figure out what works for you. We're going to suggest spending majority of your time with Google and Facebook because that's where the majority of people are.
Then you have to figure out all these other sites. Do you join them? Do you try to respond to all of them? You only have so much time and energy to do these things, so just be wise about where you go as far as trying to respond back and that sort of thing.
Reviews Dont's
Let's talk about some don'ts. Don't do these things when it comes to reviews. Don't review gate. Does anybody know what review gate is?
Not having anything to do with Watergate is literally giving people the option: you message them and you say, "did you have a good experience with us? Yes or no?" If they say yes, you send them a link to your review site. If they say no, might you send them a form to fill out and you get the information back so you don't send them that link.
If some of these places like Google and Yelp and those if they were to catch you doing that, they could blackball you. I don't know what they would actually do, but they do not appreciate you gating the reviews. So don't do it.
Although I will say I don't 100% agree with it. As a business person, I like the ability to be able to respond to somebody before they go out and say, I had a terrible experience. Because you don't know the context of what happened. That's their software and what they want to do with it and get on one level what they're trying to do. It's generally frowned upon, just so you know. We'll talk more about how to combat that kind of stuff.
Don't pay anyone for reviews, obviously. If someone finds out about that from these sites, again, trouble. Don't try to fix reviews with third party vendor getting into the sketchy area. I'm sure there are people out there that are trying to do it. Probably associate with paying people, right?
This is more of a criminal activity. Don't pressure people into altering or removing critical views. Don't go to jail over your Google Business Profile, please. Don't do nothing or give up, please. Don't want to ever give up on anything. Well, some things you want to give up, like maybe smoking, don't do that. On something like this, you just need to keep being consistent and put a system in place. You can win the battle on having good reviews and a good online reputation.
Review Pitfalls
Here's some pitfalls to be aware of when it comes to reviews. Some sites are a pain. We kind of alluded to this. Honestly, not all will allow you to respond, might be good or bad.
When I say some slots are pain, I'm really thinking about Yelp. I don't think anybody from Yelp is here. Maybe they'll see this. Sorry, but most people that have had to deal with Yelp, it's usually a little bit of a pain because I feel like all the angry people go to Yelp. I don't know if you guys have seen that. I think generally you seem to get a little bit more balanced feedback on Google and Facebook and all that. I don't know how Yelp became the complainer spot, but there you go.
Don't post reviews of your business or competitors. Now, if you're new and you don't have a lot, I think people will be like, "Hey, everybody on team, we need your reviews so we can start getting some reviews." You can see why that could be an issue, right? if somebody that works for you, they're not going to have an honest review necessarily. If they do, they afraid for their job. Of course, competitors, if you can give an honest review of your competitor, that's great. Some places are not going to want you to do that as a part of their policy. So watch it for that.
Some sites literally don't want you to ask for reviews, and that's Yelp. I don't know about all of them, but once again, I don't really agree with that particularly because what does that mean, don't ask for reviews? They're real big on just let the natural flow happen. Well, if people don't know to review, you got to remind people and ask people and things like that. Just be aware of it depending on what platform you're focusing on.
Another one, don't offer freebies discounts or payments for reviews. We talked about payments before. That is actually people like, "Hey, get a gift card or chance to win," all that kind of stuff to get some momentum on these things. That's also frowned upon in the industry, and I'm talking about the review industry.
Take Action: Get More Reviews
Here's our action item for this section. We're going to take some action by always be getting reviews: "ABGR." That slightly contradicts what some of the things were about pitfalls. We want to put a system in place, whether that's online or in person. Try to get as many people to send their feedback as possible. If you've got a good product, good park and resort, whatever the case may be and you're you're gathering the information from your guests, it will balance out over the long haul.
Now, if you're terrible at what you do, don't try to get reviews. Fix your problems first, whatever that might be. If you're only getting bad reviews then that should kind of help you figure out, okay, what are we doing wrong? But if it's just because three guys that all knew each other had one bad experience and those are the only reviews you have, you don't have a system. You don't have a consistent way of doing that.
There are online things to do, and then there's real life in person stuff. Do a QR code, have it at the front desk. While you don't want to necessarily do some of the things we talked about incentivizing (while many people do that) you can say, "Scan here, we love your feedback" that sort of thing. Try to find a way to incorporate this on a regular basis in your business processes.
Respond to the reviews. We alluded this earlier. This is a huge part of it. We got some more stats for you. 63% of people surveyed had at least one company that never responded. Don't be the people that just leave the reviews there and never talk. That's another place where people are maybe not directly messaging you, but they're communicating about you. Respond accordingly.
Especially respond to the negative ones, please. I've seen in the industry mixed opinions about negative reviews in the park space. Everybody that says, just ignore them, ignore those people, please. Because they're not marketing people necessarily. If you're getting that feedback, please don't listen to those people. 53% of people expect a business to respond in less than a week when it comes to negative review. One third of those people are expecting a response in less than three days.
30% are going to reverse the negative review if you address it. If there's some kind of misunderstanding, whatever the case may be, you go on there, be professional, be courteous, all those things. You can turn the tide, especially if they just didn't understand what was going on. Now, if you really screwed up, you got to own it and try to make it better. That's life, people. That's how things work. Also, if you need a system, we've got one. You can talk to us about that if you'd like.
In Conclusion
Just as a review: we talked about Google, British Petroleum. No -- Business Profile, and we also talked about the reviews. If you guys have any questions, you can feel free to drop those in now because that's what this slides for. It's for questions.
For those of you that might have jumped in a little bit later, reposting the first installment of Reputation Management how to fix that. If there are any questions, feel free to go ahead and drop those in any time here. We want you to connect with us, please. We're all about making friends, and you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all at restrelaxroi or just type the name in. You'll find us if you just search us.
Our next one, we're going to be talking about generating more revenue from guests who already love you. It's keys to effective reselling. We'll be talking about that towards the end of next month. So maybe the last week of August around there, but you will find out about it.
We really appreciate everybody joining us today. If you think of a question later, you're not allowed to ask it. This was your one time and you missed it, so sorry about that. Just kidding.
You can ask any question anytime, and that's why you can keep the conversation going by booking at book.restrelaxedroi.com. That's just to have a chat about whether it's what we talked about today, or maybe later on you have other questions about other marketing items or whatever. Maybe you have a question about how do you handle four children so successfully and also have a dog. I can fill you in on that as well.
Thank you all for joining and until next time, you guys have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the summer months as they wrap up. Until then ... Happy trails to all.
