By Judyann Sonido, Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
From a global pandemic to economic unrest, many construction companies have struggled to stay afloat during the past years. Construction projects have been greatly impacted by worker shortages, delays, soaring material costs and stoppages, causing a significant decline in optimism among contractors and distributors.
As the construction industry struggles to deal with costly challenges, the last thing any business owner needs is a damaged online reputation. This particular challenge is bound to hamper your projects and stretch your resources even thinner.
Online reputation management (ORM) is a critical component of building and maintaining a successful business. Unfortunately, it’s something that construction companies neglect, thinking that reputation management serves only as damage control. After all, why invest in ORM services when you’ve already got a stellar brand reputation, right?
But the reality is: Construction reputation management is more than just reputation repair. It’s about building and maintaining a positive brand image, protecting your digital presence and proactively engaging in online conversations about your brand to stay in control of your reputation.
With this broader perspective of construction reputation management, find out why day-to-day management of your brand reputation is crucial to your long-term success.
Construction Reputation Management: Maximizing Your Digital Resources To Build Customer Loyalty
Contractors are only as good as their mistakes. One error can undo thousands of hours of hard work and years of good reputation. Incidents like delayed project fulfillments, ill-disciplined staff and poor customer service can cause disgruntled clients to leave negative reviews online, which can spread like wildfire across the web and taint your reputation.
This is why it’s critical to have a systematic brand reputation management system in place. With a holistic construction reputation management plan, you can:
- Protect Your Digital Real Estate
The Edelman Trust Barometer shows 65 percent of consumers rely on search engines when researching a business. As the modern clientele becomes more digitally focused and technology savvy, you need a reputation management strategy to ensure your digital assets deliver enough value to your prospects.
Construction reputation management combines search engine optimization (SEO) and ORM best practices to safeguard your digital properties. These include your website, social media platforms and Google Business Profiles. SEO and ORM strategically combined work together to protect your brand from negative customer reviews and malicious information that could lower your search rankings and tarnish your digital presence. - Gain Higher Trust
A BrightLocal study found that nearly 3 out of 4 consumers trust a company with positive reviews more so than one without. What’s more, 60 percent of prospects reveal that negative reviews discourage them from transacting with service providers.
By implementing tailored reputation management strategies, you get more happy clients to write a resounding review of your construction business. And with more positive reviews come clients who will actively reach out to your construction company and seek you to price their project. - Grow Your Network
Whether you’re aiming to expand your client base, attract top talents or win new projects and investors, construction reputation management is important to achieve your goals.
Everyone from homeowners looking to build residential properties to businesses expanding their facilities prefers contractors with lots of positive reviews. If they don’t see positive online reviews or relevant content about your company, they’ll skip your brand and choose your competition.
On the other hand, construction firms with excellent online reputations will attract the right people and close higher-value projects. - Rectify Your Mistakes
Even the most successful construction companies come across dissatisfied clients that can quickly turn into brand haters when not properly dealt with. Through reputation management, you can easily identify and manage negative online reviews about your brand and avoid escalations when customer issues arise.
If an unhappy client voices out their concerns online, you have the opportunity to address the criticism publicly in a polite and professional manner. This experience also allows you to learn from your mistakes, identify poor performing staff in your organization and improve your processes to live up to client expectations. - Improve Your Bottom Line
If you still believe that reputation management services are an overspend for your construction business, consider that for most business owners good online reviews result in more customers.
According to a Harvard Business School report, every additional one-star Yelp rating increases a brand’s revenue by as high as 9 percent. This means if your annual revenue is $1 million and your company acquires a 4-star Yelp rating from a 3-star rating the previous year, you can generate $1,090,000 revenue or about $90K more than your previous earnings.
It’s very important for construction businesses to maintain a positive online reputation. A negative brand image will leave you striving for more clients and investors. But a reputable online presence can make the difference between your success and failure.
5 Key Steps To Maintaining Audience Engagement
Construction reputation management entails more than just generating positive reviews from satisfied clients. You need to stay on top of conversations about your brand, leverage online resources to engage the right audience segments and facilitate meaningful brand interactions that would positively impact your bottom line.
Follow these steps to get started with construction reputation management:
- Claim Your Business Listings
Request ownership of your Google Business Profile to provide the best information about your construction company. GMB listings allow you to monitor and respond to Google reviews. Without it, you don’t have control over what people are writing about your business.
Besides Google Business Profile, other review sites you need to register your business on include Angi, Houzz, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack. - Monitor Online Reviews and Brand Mentions
From your website and social media profiles to your online directories, it’s critical to keep track of conversations about your brand across platforms to understand consumer sentiment and gather valuable insights on how you can better improve your operations and client support.
Invest in state-of-the-art reputation management software to streamline your review monitoring process, anticipate potential problems and solve them before they occur. - Promote Brand Trust
Leverage online reviews to establish social proof on your digital assets. Many reputation management companies offer a review widget on their ORM package, which allows you to aggregate and display client reviews from different platforms on your website.
You can also share written and video testimonials on your social media platforms to let prospects know about the quality of your work. Remember, people trust other people. By leveraging client testimonials, you humanize your brand and showcase a reliable brand image they can trust. - Subdue Reputational Crises
People are quick to focus on negative news and rumors. Protect your brand by having a reputation crisis management plan you can always launch in case of bad publicity.
Another important thing to remember is to sort your mistakes quickly and with minimal fuss. Admit when you’ve made a mistake and tell the client how you will fix the issue. A big part of your review response strategy is to understand consumer sentiment and provide an appropriate response to the complaint.
Lastly, apologize in public and rectify your mistakes in private. Doing so provides you with a better avenue to address the customer’s issue and leverage the opportunity to turn a disgruntled client into a brand advocate. - Engage in Online Conversations About Your Brand
Besides delivering a quality project, it’s also your responsibility to be responsive to clients’ demands and let them know you value their opinion. Respond to queries promptly and take advantage of social media platforms to know your clients’ expectations and demands.
Launch customer surveys and polls to keep a pulse on your local community. You can also hire a social media manager to handle your client concerns online and engage with your followers on social media posts. In this way, you keep an active online presence and maintain a consistent, favorable brand image.
Take Control of Your Construction Firm’s Public Perception
Construction reputation management is an ongoing process that constantly evolves along with your business. Invest in advanced ORM software and solutions to streamline your reputation management processes and implement data-driven strategies that will allow you to build an honest and intimate connection with your audience.
About the Author:
Judyann Sonido is a Lead Content Strategist at Thrive, an award-winning digital marketing agency serving startups, franchises and multi-location businesses across the United States. For more information about construction reputation management and digital marketing, contact Thrive at 866.908.4748 or visit https://thriveagency.com/contact/.
