Why Your Business Needs an Online Presence

In this day and age, the digital landscape has permeated our daily lives. Whether it’s a useful tool for keeping yourself updated or a cause for a digital addiction, the large presence of social media is important for anyone to have a platform.

With that being said, not every small business has a digital storefront in this increasingly online world. There’s still many that operate by word-of-mouth and have a consistent loyal clientele.

But word-of-mouth can take a lot of time for newer businesses to start building a unique customer base. That’s why we recommend adding an online presence.

An online presence is important for reaching potential customers who might not know your business exists. Creating an online voice through social media outlets is critical in building sales. In 2016, businesses who had Yelp and saw a one star increase in their rating saw a 5-9% increase in revenue, according to Harvard research studying Yelp.

Basically, if your up-and-coming business doesn’t have an online page in the digital age, it’ll be much harder for your business to thrive.

That’s why we’re here to help.

At BeCreative360, we have multiple features to spread your business across online platforms. Our content management system lets you monitor reviews, update business listings, create a customer experience, and much more just on a single dashboard.

Our platform has generated over a hundred thousand reviews from thousands of locations. Our secret to a business’s success is building a healthy reputation.

To increase awareness for your business, BeCreative360 reputation manager Yash Patel suggests always keeping an open line of communication with customers.

“It’s very important for our clients to respond back to the customer reviews, even if they’re five stars or four stars, because it generates data,” Patel says.

No matter what content you post to your business website or social media platforms, that data gets picked up by Google algorithms, thus furthering your chances of being a front page search result when customers search your company. Each review from our partner platforms, ReviewMyDryCleaner or ReviewPlus.One, becomes aggregated on Google.

That’s why you want to make sure your business is engaging in professional online practices. If you get a bad review, you don’t want to have paragraph-long back-and-forths where everyone can see.

Patel suggests this type of template when commenting on negative criticism: “We’re sorry you had this experience. Somebody from our team will reach out immediately.”

And then once it’s been resolved, Patel usually tells clients to go back to the review and respond: “[Name], I’m really glad we got this issue resolved. When can we see you again?” This allows for your customers to be heard and keeps a line of communication open, despite the negative experience.

Now, keeping an online presence is important for attracting new customers. But also, businesses must make sure not to alienate their loyal base. This is why we suggest businesses to have homogeneity across their social platforms that resembles their physical storefront. This way, frequent patrons will know which online platforms belong to the business, and potential customers hailing from social media will recognize the physical storefront.

No matter what, your customers are top priority. You won’t get any promoter better than your loyal patrons. So make sure you’re managing your reputation right with BeCreative360. Click here to learn more about our services.