You’ve been reviewed online. It’s bad. You know people will read it because you have. To make it worse, who knows who wrote the review? A genuine disgruntled customer? An unscrupulous competitor? An internet troll? Who is this person trashing your reputation and putting your livelihood at risk?

It's never a good feeling.

Deal with it.

This doesn’t mean “find the serenity to accept it.” It means you should deal with so it’s not harming your business anymore. Make the bad thing go away.

If you have suspicions of foul play – that the review is a planted hit piece – then by all means follow up with a little detective work. But put a fire out before you move on to investigating what caused it. How you should respond to bad reviews, especially intially, should follow a specific formula that first minimizes damage, and ultimately gets rid of the review entirely – or the nearest thing to it.

Rid yourself of a bad review and you might look good in the process.

The right approach will help your business recover as quickly as possible and prevent any further damage. You might even come out looking better ever. A bad review offers the chance to show how well you deal with customer dissatisfaction.

To fix a bad review as quickly as possible follow these 4 R’s:

1. Relax

Don’t be a hothead. Don’t flail. You will probably make things worse. Take a deep breath and respond like the professional and dedicated person you are.

Take a moment.

Remember: people post negative content online for all kinds of reasons, including just to get a rise out of you. It’s what they call “trolling.”

Don’t get hooked! Never forget that your response will probably be just as visible as the review. Stay clear headed and follow the the next three R’s to rid yourself of the blemish on your online reputation.

2. Respond

Most review sites let businesses to respond to bad reviews. This is your chance to show how you respond to complaints and criticism. This is also your chance to get your word in. A bad review with a great response can actually be an asset – it’s proof that if things ever go amiss, you’ll still respond with excellence. You might even get a link and some web traffic out of it.

Offer to make things right and encourage the customer to contact you. Whether or not they do, anyone who sees the review also sees your response. And you’ll have had the last word.

Respond professionally and you'll look good.

Get someone to stick up for you.

A very potent response could come from a satisfied customer – someone who’ll defend you as a customer who found themselves in a similar situation and was looked after or a customer whose experience was absolutely nothing like the bad experience described in the review.

Whether or not you’re able to respond to the review, you should always make efforts to make things right with the customer. If handled properly they might even turn into an equally vocal supporter.

3. Remove

Some review sites also let businesses request removal of reviews if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly. Most don’t, but some do. It’s worth your while to find out about the review site’s policy.

See if they'll take it down. It's worth a shot.

4. Replace

This is the last step for a reason. It’s by far the most labor intensive and is best used in situations where you either weren’t able to respond to the review, or you really don’t want it read by or influencing other people. To prevent this from happening, you’ll replace the review with other content: You’ll drown it out on the review site itself and drive it down in the search engines.

Replace the bad review on the site

Get satisfied customers to write positive reviews on the same sites. Call in some favors. Make it easy for them and make it work their time. It’s considered poor form to solicit good reviews or to offer incentives, so don’t get caught doing it. Target your best customers and reward their kindness. Hire a firm to find review sources. Drown out the bad review with good ones.

Target the site with positive reviews.

Keep this in mind, though: many review sites flag reviews based on a variety of ‘suspicious’ criteria – one of which can be too many of the same kind all at once. So  don’t go too crazy with it. And do not make the mistake of hiring obvious shills. That’s much worse.

A bad review carries less far weight if it’s surrounded by good ones, so find a way to add them – carefully.

Replace the bad review site in the rankings

Drive it down in the rankings by taking up space above it. This is called “SEO for reputation mangement.” If you push it off the front page for the relevant keywords, you’ve pretty much taken care of things.

Boost the content you want people to see.

How?

• Get good reviews on other review sites, and help them rank.
  Help positive reviews appear on other review sites. Bolster those reviews, and the sites they appear, on in the rankings: Blog about them, bookmark them, and build links to them. Move positive reviews up to push the negative reviews down.
• Add your own content on your site and others, and help them rank.
  If they rank on the first page for your business name, start creating more presence online. For example:
  -Upload different forms of content: PDF’s, PowerPoint Presentations, Videos, to sharing sites such as YouTube and SlideShare. Videos are prime candidate for re-use across many sites.
  -Google Maps/Local/Places/Whatever. Many search terms now return maps listings first. Build a great places page and get it into the first page Maps results.
  -Social Media: Facebook & Twitter.  One advantage to social media pages are that they tend to rank well for brand names. Create yours and build some presence on them. They also integrate very wel with other sites, such as…
  -Free websites & outreach blogs about your business and its relevant keywords. Create free site accounts and write quality posts that link to other accounts.
  -Integrate and embed these accounts into each other to get more benefit

Tread lightly – don’t be foolish and get caught planting reviews or pretending to be other people. But it’s fine – beneficial, even – for a business to have lots of presence online. Build quality content and links to it to replace the bad review in the search engines.

This can all be Taken Care of

Bad revies are a headache to any business owner – and when they happen online they happen in front of everyone. But they are manageable.

The 4 R’s are an effective solution to bad reviews. A good response can turn a negative review into a positive. And strategically targeted content and SEO can make bad reviews disappear from view.

Consider hiring internet marketing professionals to ensure it’s done right.

A good internet marketing firm can provide immediate solutions to bad reviews and a strong positive start to help nullify them – then provide the tools and knowhow for a business to completely own and maintain its brand online.

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below. We’d love to hear from you.

It’s looking like it will sell out at least 10 days prior, so get yourself registered now!!

www.iimaonline.org

See you there!

Seth’s top 4 are especially good:

1. Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.

2. Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.

3. Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.

4. I love selling. I particularly love selling great stuff, well marketed. Don’t let me down. Don’t ask me to sell lousy stuff.

Thanks for the intro Seth; so let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Sales and Marketing should be 1 system. It doesn’t matter what size your business is, if there’s people hiding out on one side of a wall generating leads and throwing them over the fence to the sales team, there is a huge disconnect. That disconnect could be costing you over 10% of your gross revenue.. and don’t even get me started on profitability!

A little more love and a lot more communication on both sides of the equation could mean millions for your organization.

1. Understanding what is working and what is not.

2. Understanding the campaigns well enough in advance that reps can have very relevant conversations with inbound prospects

3. Knowing what leads are ready to buy, which ones will have immediate objections, and which ones will need to be ‘warmed up’ first before an opportunity will even develop. (if a rep doesn’t know this going in, they may be telling a customer who is ready to buy why they should buy – this could equal a lost opportunity! On the flipside, reps that don’t understand the objective of your campaign will disqualify leads quickly that perhaps need some initial engagement from them but you anticipate will not close until further down the line.

Many B2B sales organizations today generate leads through multiple channels and they magically appear in the rep’s CRM system, salesforce.com, ACT! etc; which is great, and ultimately can mean that they are at least not going stale (many B2B leads are 50% less likely to close after 2 business days) but we still have the problem of sales reps not knowing if the lead is ready to buy, ice cold or even what their search term was in many cases. If you want your reps to close the most business at least ensure there is enough information delivered with a lead for them to open with the right questions and the right approach! Give them something to start the conversation off, and finally coach them; I coached my reps to think long and hard about the keyword, and create an opening question that contained an exact phrase match, their incedents of getting shut down dropped to almost nothing!

Most of us are finding that if we want to beat our competitors, we need to make the most of every visit to our site. If we’re a software company, we pay AdWords $3-$5 per click just to get someone to our landing page!

Why Marketing Automation?

1. Conversions – Squeeze More Out of Your Existing Site Traffic

If you are a serious online marketer and probably spending somewhere between $2000 and $100 000 in online every month. If you are, Marketing Automation is more than another buzzword. A marketing automation system is like the difference between a smartphone, and running around town with an email device, a camera, a cellphone and a little black book full of addresses – insanity!

2. Execution Time – More Campaigns in Less Time:

Most marketers are still spending days stitching together a simple email to web campaign and at the end of the day, are challenged to determine ROI. If you’re one of these, don’t worry, you’re not alone, but the tide is turning, and today’s ‘rocket science’ of A B testing landing pages, lead scoring, automated drip marketing, are tomorrow’s standard.

3. Analytics, Sitemaps, Split-testing, Landing Pages, and Email Campaigns All Under one Roof

Some marketers get turned off by the price of these systems, but once they’ve added in email marketing costs, custom programming for landing pages, excessive time spend building and submitting google sitemaps..it’s clear that there’s big returns to be had.

4. Align Sales and Marketing

People talk lots about this, but where the rubber meets the road is if sales reps are calling the right people at the right times and having releavant conversations with them.

5. Prove Return on Investment on Everything You Do in Real-Time:

A lot of marketers have started to pay attention to the ‘New Breed of Content Management system;” now dubbed “Marketing Automation.” To confuse things, my latest search on google, showed that everyone and their dog is now claiming to have a marketing automation offering.

Tommorrow’s post will explore purchasing a marketing automation system in more detail

A Comprehensive Marketing Automation Technologies – Download FREE report:

1. Regular & Plentiful Content

Not that volume alone will make you a star, but it’s a good start. Chances are, as long as you’re sure what business you are in, you will be climbing the right rankings wall.

Most marketers simply don’t post enough content with enough frequency!

2. Relevant & Useful Content:

Even if google can’t figure out with its spiders that your content stinks, you won’t generate many inbound links from others if it is not useful to them and their readers.

As a marketer, and a consumer I love little tidbits that I can consume in some meaningful way.. like the old standby – “10 Tips..” “5 Rules of..” etc..

3. Link to people that are ranking well, often they will reciprocate

Link to other recognized authorities in your industry, wikipedia articles, etc.. and don’t forget to use trackback urls!! These tell others that you have linked to them so they can (and most will) reciprocate.

4. Narrow your focus on your keywords

Make sure your headers, titles and copy have your keywords. Remember, google is smart, so don’t “spam the search engines” it will backfire and get you de-listed for up to 6 months.

5. Get Guerrilla!! Pick a Narrow enough term that you can own it..

Narrow even more!! It’s a jungle out there, get picky .. that’s why I’ve chosen to work only with software marketers.. not because we haven’t done more.

Once you’re on a roll, make sure that you’re not biting off more than you can chew; for example, unless you’re Seth Godin, don’t try to dominate “New Marketing, or Web 2.0″ it won’t work!!

Link / Reference

PART 2 – Coming Next Week! Register / RSS

1. Seth Godin

Where to start with Seth.. while there doesn’t seem to be any debate amongst the internet marketing community, he’s one of the best. He’s not an analytics whiz or a an SEO champ per se, he simply covers the basics.. principles that we can’t fight in marketing – knowing our audience, picking our niches, looking for long tails.

His site with key publications, all worth reading – www.sethgodin.com/

Seth’s Blog – sethgodin.typepad.com

2. SEO Book

SEO book is written by a guy named Aaron Wall. Admittedly, when I joined the board of the International Internet Marketing Association, I’d never heard of the guy.. man that got some funny looks! He’s since become one of my top resources for the nitty gritty of search marketing.

www.seobook.com

3. John Hossak, VKI Studios

A friend and colleague, every time I talk with this guy, I respect him more; he’s the almanac of internet marketing and analytics. They are an Omniture certified shop and have been in the game for a while now. John Hossack has filled rooms at a few conferences accross North America, and he never dissapoints.

John’s Blog

4. Web Analytics Association

www.webanalyticsassociation.org

5. Google Analytics Blog

analytics.blogspot.co

6. Marketing Sherpa

Definitely some of the best money I’ve ever spent!! Great articles and case studies.

www.marketingsherpa.com

We’ve all heard of sales funnels, and we all know what happens when a crummy sales rep is in there:

Nothing!!

A first contact, and half of the prospects are looking elsewhere, maybe even motivated to look elsewhere..

If they survive to a needs analysis stage, they’re likely just to hear all kinds of features and functions..

Okay, enough about that rant.. let’s talk about how us as marketers can waste thousands!

1. Realavent AdWords Text

“Top 10 Ways to solve .. [insert keyword here]

“Three things you should know before considering [insert keyword here]

“Complete buyers resource guide for [insert keyword]

REALAVENT KEYWORDS are #1

2. One page for every problem?

Have you ever called a service line at say .. oh your telco, and before your done sharing your beef with the $10 / hour person on the other end of the line, they’re giving you the answer to the wrong question??

We as marketers are better than that!!

where are your customers coming from? if they asked google for “how to drive the ball further” are they getting the “How to Drive the Ball Further” Landing Page if not, they’re Bouncing!

LANDING PAGE RELEVANCE BOUNCING is #2

3. Clear Call to Action

Congrads! They’re staying on your page for more than 10 seconds.. quick, do something!! So far, all we’ve done is spent a small fortune to get someone to stay on our page for more than 10 seconds! If you’re in the software or marketing services world like I am, we probably spent upwards of $3 for this visit.. so what??

$3 should get you a lead!! who cares about quality, get them opting in to something!!

Now most of you have been to webinars, you’ve heard of targeted landing pages, but I speak with companies with $10,000-$40,000 / month in AdWords spend that don’t have a targeted landing page for every campaign group!!

Now if you’re not in that catagory, the only way you will ever successfully compete with the bigger budgets out there, is to out-convert them, so it’s probably even more important to use and optimize landing pages.

Part 2 to follow! – Register for RSS or Email alerts!