Drive business growth by offering an online brand and reputation intelligence platform that re-imagines customer connections through AI-powered deep listening, especially if you run an agency or are a reseller.
In today’s ever-evolving tech landscape, it’s easy for agencies to feel overwhelmed by the vast array of options and partners.
If you’re working with multi-location customers desiring modern marketing platforms, services, and products, the selection becomes even more complex.
This article provides six key points to consider when looking for the reputation management platform and partner that best serves both you and your customers.
1. Place A High Value On End-Consumer Insights To Gain More Retainers & Clients
As a marketing agency, the key to your clients’ success lies in how their online presence resonates with potential customers.
How are buyers finding them?
What steps are potential customers taking before they enter your client’s inbound marketing funnels?
Does the layout of your client’s website help or hinder their customer experience?
In addition to providing a successful marketing strategy and reporting campaign data, learning about each consumer’s experience can help inform a more accurate and insightful customer strategy and ultimately ensure greater client satisfaction and retention.
Brand Intelligence gives you the ability to provide deep insights into:
- User perceptions and sentiment.
- Discoverability.
- Visibility.
- SEO rankings.
- Location-based competitor data.
- Other major business opportunities.
Pro Recommendation: Offer Brand Intelligence As Your New Agency Service
Add Brand Intelligence (BI) to your agency offerings to help increase the value of your services.
Adding BI to your agency services will help your clients:
- Extract key business intelligence.
- Understand their competition.
- Maximize their strategic impact.
- Eliminate blind spots.
- Operate their business with confidence.
Compiling and analyzing data manually is nearly impossible, especially if you are working with multi-location clients and are looking for trends and insights that can provide real value.
Technology can help.
Look for a platform that takes advantage of AI and can give your customers the ability to:
- Aggregate data from multiple sources into a common dashboard to support comprehensive analytics and reporting.
- Access real brand intelligence from both unstructured and structured data sources.
The most valuable platforms will use deep listening solutions that ensure you are tapping into all of the online chatter about your client’s brand.
Tapping into this online dialogue can allow you to deliver actionable insights that provide a competitive advantage for your client.
Make sure that the platform you choose includes a customer success team so that you get the most value out of your investment.
2. Use Sentiment Analysis To Inform Future Strategies
You’ve just finished a string of campaigns that have helped your client reach their KPIs and goals.
What’s your next move to help your clients see the success they’re aiming for?
How do you continue to help them go above and beyond and build brand love and loyalty?
Pro Recommendation: Anticipate Future Opportunities By Uncovering Consumer Pain Points
Consumers have a lot to say and they’re not shy about leaving their opinions online.
Listen to and use this “chatter that matters” with a platform that leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to flag customer experience issues and reveal location-based trends in real-time.
This will quickly help your customers pinpoint issues before they get out of hand, as well as reveal opportunities for product promotions, new product introductions, brand reputation campaigns, and more.
By understanding how their brand performs against local competition, clients can gain a strategic advantage that you can help them leverage.
3. Increase Brand Loyalty With Timely Responses
When it comes to online comments, customers want to be acknowledged.
Whether the comments are positive or highlight an issue to be addressed, brands – and their agencies – need to be in a position to quickly respond.
In the online reputation management industry, the customer experience reigns supreme.
Brands need to ensure that from the very first touchpoint through product or service delivery, customer needs and expectations are met.
Deep listening to customer feedback provides valuable information about how your client’s brand is performing.
Yet, engaging and responding to customers at scale can be overwhelming when done manually, and issues can fall through the cracks.
Recommendation: Leverage Platforms With Generative AI
The strongest platforms make review responding easy through templates, suggested responses, and AI-generated content.
Key Considerations:
- What review response options does the platform offer and how do they ensure authentic content that represents and preserves a brand’s voice and identity?
- How does the platform handle reviews in a variety of languages and help you respond for global enterprises?
- How is AI integrated into the platform and what measures are implemented to ensure that the AI is integrated responsibly?
The benefits of generative AI make it a worthwhile investment for agencies servicing multi-location enterprises:
- AI makes it easy to flag rising issues and provide an automated workflow to get them quickly addressed.
- AI helps improve a brand’s reputation through more personalized customer interactions.
AI-powered brand intelligence platforms can have a positive impact on the online customer experience.
Being able to engage with customers and truly understand their feedback is the difference between a brand that just survives and a brand that thrives.
4. Complement Unstructured Data With Structured Data From Surveys
Customer feedback in all forms is gold.
Unstructured data can be mined to provide real-time insights that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Using AI can uncover hyper-local customer information and insights that structured data formats can’t offer.
Surveys are a form of structured data that completes the customer feedback loop.
Well-crafted and timed surveys are ideal for feedback that delivers specific insights into what matters most to customers about your client’s products, services, and brand.
The best survey tools will:
- Provide a sizeable number of question types to choose from with easy drag-and-drop functionality
- Offer the ability to use survey logic to build developing branching question paths and setting “if/then” rules to govern question flows
- Give an opportunity to upload logos for instant brand recognition or a location-specific photo
- Integrate with BI tools such as Tableau, Domo, Spotfire, and Qlik.
- Offer end-customer sentiment analytics
- Assure that your AI implementation is responsible and provides a layer of risk management
- Help your client get ahead of their competitors when it comes to customer sentiment assessments, AI features, and structured data solutions
5. Build Trust With Accurate Listings & Local Pages
Boost your client’s visibility in local search. After all, they can’t create loyal customers if their customers don’t know they exist.
Starting the customer journey off right is key. Having accurate listings and local pages is the first step.
Pro Recommendation: Use A Tool To Maintain Local Business Listings At Scale
Your online reputation management platform should keep all of a brand’s listing data current and accurate.
End customers are more likely to view a business as credible when they find reliable, up-to-date information and well-thought-out local pages.
Key Considerations
- How easy is it to create listings and local pages?
- How does the platform solve for SEO, unbranded keyword visibility, configurable call-to-actions, voice search capabilities, mobile-friendly results, and highlighted photos and videos?
- Which, and how many, online directories can your customers integrate?
Attract and engage with potential customers across multiple online directories.
Use a listings tool to provide the single source of truth for all your client’s listings, whether they have 10 or 10,000.
Distribute accurate information across directories and review platforms to improve local search visibility and secure that elusive “top spot.”
6. Cultivate A Thriving Customer Community On Your Clients’ Social Channels
At the highest level, it should open your customers’ eyes to their social impact on local SEO, brand intelligence, and reputation strategy.
Monitoring, reviewing, posting, and publishing content across a range of social platforms can be easier and more efficient from an integrated dashboard.
Recommendation: Use An Integrated Solution
Your online reputation management platform should keep all of a brand’s listing data current and accurate.
End customers are more likely to view a business as credible when they find reliable, up-to-date information.
Key Considerations:
An integrated social solution should be a key component of any reputation management strategy.
Make sure that your solution meets the following criteria:
- Streamlines campaigns and operations, and integrates publishing calendars
- Provides issue escalation and approval systems
- Tracks metrics across a single location, region, and enterprise
- Enables customers to access metrics for store comparisons, high-ranking content, trending hashtags, and follower growth
The best platform and partner will enable you to fully ensure that your customers are optimizing their online presence.
Bonus: Watch Out for These Two Marketplace Shifts
As an agency that helps multi-location clients, you likely know that these two marketplace shifts are making it harder for your multi-location customers to deliver exceptional CX:
- Shift One: Unstructured data is growing rapidly, with some experts predicting that 80% of the global data sphere will be unstructured by 2025. All the unorganized chatter from social posts, online reviews, chats, blogs, videos, etc., often remains untapped by your customers. AI is critical to ensuring you’re not missing the true voice of the customer.
- Shift Two: Customer loyalty is at a low point. According to a study by PwC, 26% of consumers stopped using or buying from a business in the past year. Consumers want the best and the brightest at the lowest price point, and they aren’t shy about actively looking for the brands with the best deals. A streamlined customer experience and customer engagement at scale are more important than ever.
