In today’s digital world, online reputation is more important than ever for small business success.
Companies with the highest reputation scores experience 15% faster sales growth than companies with the lowest reputation scores. With the rise of review sites and social media, consumers have more access than ever to information about a business’s reputation.
Negative online reviews and poor reputation management can severely hurt a small business’s ability to attract new customers.
Nearly 90% of consumers report not frequenting a business with a bad reputation. For small business owners, proactively managing your online reputation is essential for gaining trust, credibility, and new business in today’s competitive landscape.
Using Surveys to Assess Reputation
Surveys are a powerful tool for understanding your business’s reputation from multiple perspectives. There are several types of surveys that can provide valuable insights:
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Asking for direct feedback from customers through surveys uncovers areas for improvement in your products, services and customer experience. Satisfaction surveys should cover factors like quality, value, ease of use and how likely customers are to recommend you. According to SurveyMonkey, 80% of customers are willing to take surveys to provide feedback.
Brand Awareness Surveys
These surveys assess consumer perceptions, familiarity and associations with your brand. They can reveal how your reputation stacks up compared to competitors. Brand surveys quantify metrics like awareness, consideration and preference.
Employee Engagement Surveys
Your employees are on the front lines interacting with customers daily. Surveying internal teams can uncover weaknesses in company culture, morale, training and resources that may be damaging your reputation.
Competitive Analysis Surveys
Benchmarking surveys can compare your reputation versus competitors on key attributes like trust, transparency and customer satisfaction. This process identifies specific areas where competitors may be outperforming you.
Key Metrics to Track in Surveys
When designing reputation management surveys, there are several key metrics you’ll want to track:
- Brand awareness and familiarity: Questions that measure how well customers know your brand and whether there is broad awareness of your products and services. This process establishes your brand visibility and penetration.
- Product/service satisfaction: Feedback directly from customers on their satisfaction with your offerings, pricing, quality, etc. This metric identifies strengths and weaknesses to improve.
- Trust and credibility: Assessing the degree to which customers perceive you as honest, reliable and competent. Building trust is key for reputation.
- Customer loyalty/advocacy: Metrics around retention, repeat business, referrals and how likely customers are to recommend you. Loyalty is a strong reputation signal.
- Competitive benchmarking: Compare your metrics and survey results directly against competitors to identify gaps and opportunities.
Strategically Acting on Survey Findings
Once you’ve conducted reputation surveys and have results in hand, the next critical step is figuring out how to act on the findings. Survey data provides unique insights you can’t obtain anywhere else—it surfaces the true perceptions of your brand across various stakeholder groups. By illuminating weaknesses and problem areas, data gives you the opportunity to make strategic improvements.
Start by thoroughly analyzing the survey results to identify any areas of underperformance or negativity. Look for questions and metrics where your scores are lower than you expected or trail competitors. These are the parts of your reputation that need work. Common examples include dissatisfaction with product quality, lack of awareness or recall of your brand, and lack of trust in your business.
With the weak spots and vulnerabilities clear, you can then take targeted action to improve. This action may involve changing internal processes and systems to boost quality, rolling out marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness, or providing better customer service to improve trust. The specific actions will depend on what the survey data reveals as your biggest areas for improvement.
Importantly, you’ll want to conduct follow-up surveys to quantify your progress. After making changes, re-survey your customers and stakeholders to see if your scores have increased in the priority areas. The before and after survey comparison will demonstrate the impact of your reputation management efforts. It also ensures you fully close the loop—not just identifying weaknesses but actually fixing them based on stakeholder feedback.
Survey Platforms and Tools
There are many great survey platforms and tools available today to deploy reputation surveys across various channels and touchpoints. Here are some top options to consider:
- SurveyMonkey: One of the most popular and full-featured online survey tools. Offers templates, advanced logic, data analysis, and integration capabilities.
- Qualtrics: A powerful enterprise survey platform with sophisticated targeting, distribution, and analytics features.
- SurveySparrow: An intuitive tool praised for beautiful survey design and mobile optimization.
In addition to dedicated survey tools, you can also leverage social media polling features on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to survey followers. Embedding surveys on your website and sending email surveys are other easy options to reach customers.
Look for survey platforms that offer robust analytics and dashboards to easily track survey responses over time. This process allows you to monitor your reputation progress and quickly identify any new weak points that need improvement.
Continuously Monitoring Your Reputation
It’s crucial to make reputation surveys an ongoing, regular practice rather than a one-time effort. Consistently monitoring your reputation provides the benefits of active listening and quickly surfacing any new issues or changes in perception.
Set up a schedule to deploy surveys across all your channels on a recurring basis. Send website pop-up surveys to customers monthly or quarterly. Email reputation surveys on a bi-annual or annual basis. Use social media polls regularly to take the pulse of your audience. The key is to integrate regular reputation surveys into your business processes.
This ongoing monitoring across all channels gives you a comprehensive view of your reputation. Customers interact with your business in many ways, so cast a wide net. Deploy email, social media, website, and SMS surveys to connect with customers where they are already engaged. Track survey responses over time to spot trends and emerging issues early.
Consistent active listening through surveys will allow you to stay on top of your reputation. You’ll be able to quickly address negative reviews, change perceptions, and highlight your strengths. Don’t just survey customers once and move on—make it an essential part of managing your online reputation.
Competitive Advantage of Reputation
A positive reputation provides a major competitive advantage for small businesses in attracting new customers and driving growth. With the rise of review sites and social media, consumers today heavily factor in a company’s online reputation when making purchasing decisions.
According to a survey by Qualtrics in 2022, over 80% of customers read online reviews before choosing a local business. If your reputation is weak, with low ratings and negative feedback, you will struggle to compete against rivals with more trusted brands.
Actively monitoring and strengthening your reputation through surveys is critical. As surveys uncover weaknesses in your customer service, product quality, or brand image, you can make strategic improvements. Follow-up surveys will demonstrate progress, providing tangible evidence of your dedication to customers. The more you listen to feedback and fix issues impacting your reputation, the more consumers will trust you and view your brand as exceeding competitors. Strong reputation derived from continuous surveys will attract new business and generate referrals and repeat customers.
Key Takeaways
The key benefits of using surveys to monitor and manage your small business reputation include:
- Identifying specific weaknesses and areas for improvement based on customer feedback
- Uncovering negative perceptions or experiences you were unaware of
- Tracking metrics like brand awareness, trust, and customer satisfaction over time
- Benchmarking yourself against competitors to understand your positioning
- Making strategic changes to address issues survey responses raise
- Following up to measure impact of reputation management efforts
With online reviews and social media conversations playing such a big role today, actively monitoring and managing your reputation through surveys provides a competitive advantage. Listen to your customers and prospects, uncover problem areas early before they spread, and continue making improvements.
Don’t wait any longer—your reputation is too important. Start surveying your customers right away using free or low-cost tools. The insights you gain will be invaluable in strengthening your reputation, delighting your customers, and growing your small business.
Conclusion
In today’s digital world, online reputation is more important than ever for small businesses looking to succeed. Positive online reviews and strong brand perception can be the difference between landing a new customer or losing them to a competitor.
Deploying surveys across your channels provides incredibly valuable insights into how your customers and prospects perceive your business. By uncovering weaknesses through survey feedback, you can take strategic action to improve and strengthen your reputation over time.
The time is now to start actively monitoring and managing your online reputation. Don’t wait for negative reviews or experiences to pile up. Take control by deploying comprehensive reputation surveys to understand where you stand. Then leverage those insights to attract more customers and outpace your competition.
