The way you respond to online reviews influences the perception prospects and customers have as they read them. The following are five tips for managing your online reviews to positively impact your brand.

Acknowledge Positive Reviews

When practical, acknowledge the positive reviews you receive. Many popular online review sites allow the business to respond. A quick “thank you” comment and message show that you appreciate your customers and validate your interest in them having a positive experience.

Avoid Defensiveness With Negative Reviews

Human nature often causes us to take a defensive posture when we feel attacked emotionally or physically. Thus, a business owner, operator, manager, or representative may feel the same inclination when a company or employer is criticized publicly.

Getting defensive in response to a review is certain to produce a negative outcome for your brand, however. There are two separate audiences to consider in your response: the reviewer and the people reading the reviews. If you get defensive, the people reading the reviews (who don’t usually have full context) will likely perceive that your company makes excuses and doesn’t handle customer problems well.

Invite the Reviewer for Further Conversations

The first thing to do in your reply to the review is acknowledge the reviewer’s concern and invite him or her to contact you (including the method) for further discussion. Doing so shows your genuine interest in finding a resolution, while also shifting the conversation away from a public platform.

Potential customers reading reviews recognize that companies are run by humans. They are often forgiving and accepting that occasional mistakes happen. Your acknowledgment of the concern and effort to work with the customer toward resolution demonstrates a more genuine brand character than defensiveness or blame.

Take a Genuine Interest

Even beyond the communication strategies you employ with online reviews, take a genuine interest in what your customers have to say. Over time, the reality is that all organizations will have some disgruntled patrons. It is difficult to please everyone. However, consider the overall sentiment in the reviews you receive as well as any detailed comments that warrant reflection.

If you experience consistently modest or negative reviews, it is wise to evaluate changes to improve your customer experience. If a negative review is an outlier, the objective is to defuse the situation and minimize the impact. Sometimes, mixed or negative reviews (even outliers) contain quality comments that offer insight into ways in which you can enhance your customer experience.

Encourage Positive Reviews

You don’t always have to play defense with online reviews. It is a good idea to encourage satisfied customers to post their experiences at popular online sites. Some companies include links to preferred review platforms as a follow-up to a sale. Health practitioners, for instance, often request that patients post reviews on popular healthcare directories or sites after an appointment.

Encouraging positive reviews is important because people are usually more motivated to post a review online when upset about an experience. For upset customers, a negative public review feels satisfying as a form of redemption.

Wrapping Up…

In the modern business world, businesses will experience online reviews from customers. It is better to accept and respond to these reviews than to ignore them or take a defensive posture.

Apply the strategies discussed here to leverage reviews for positive brand outcomes.

What Is Marketing?

Marketing encompasses market research and promotional activities. Before attempting to sell a product or service, you should typically conduct market research. A form of marketing, market research consists of identifying and learning about a target audience. You can learn the demographics of the audience to whom you are selling the product or service, and you can learn their pain points or needs.

With this market research information, you’ll have an easier time persuading your target audience to make a purchase. You can create ads and other messages that resonate with your target audience.

In addition to market research, marketing includes all promotional activities. Raising brand awareness is a promotional activity. You may want to spread the word about your business’s brand name so that more users recognize and remember it. Advertising is also a promotional activity. You can advertise products or services offered by your business. Marketing is a broad business strategy that revolves around market research and promotional activities such as these.

What Is Advertising?

Advertising is the process of explicitly promoting products, services, or brands using paid creatives known as ads. You can create ads for a product or service. Assuming they target the right audience, they can lead to sales. Users who see your ads may purchase the product or service.

Because it involves promotional activities, advertising falls under the general umbrella of marketing. Advertising focuses on the use of paid creatives. Paid creatives or ads are promotional. They showcase products, services, or brands while encouraging users to take action.

Common forms of advertising include:

• Search engine ads
• Display ads
• Social media ads
• Mobile ads
• Native ads
• TV ads
• Online video ads
• Radio ads
• Billboard ads
• Email ads
• Direct mail ads

Advertising activities can be categorized by their ad format or the channel on which they occur. Search engine ads occur on search engines, for example, while display ads are visual ads that appear on websites or in print.

What Is Sales?

The concept of sales is all about closing the deal. It occurs near the bottom of the conversion funnel. Conversion funnels are visual representations of a business’s efforts to sell a product or service. The top of a conversion funnel may include steps like identifying a target audience or raising brand awareness, whereas the bottom may include sales activities.

Some businesses have a dedicated sales department consisting of sales reps. Sales departments are common in the business-to-business (B2B) industry. B2B buyers are far more cautious when choosing products or services than consumers. Consumers may make impulse purchases, but B2B buyers will typically perform their due diligence before making a purchase. Sales reps seek to convince B2B buyers that their businesses’ products or services are a smart investment.

Sales isn’t limited to the B2B industry. Whether your business operates in the B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C) industry, it can benefit from sales. Sales is simply a business strategy for persuading users to make a purchase. Some businesses have a dedicated sales department. Other businesses have marketers or other professionals who are responsible for closing deals.

Differences Between Marketing, Advertising, and Sales

They may share the same end goal of generating sales revenue, but marketing, advertising, and sales aren’t the same. Of those three business strategies, marketing is the broadest. Any activity that directly or indirectly promotes a product, service, or brand is a marketing activity. Sales, on the other hand, is the narrowest business strategy. It focuses strictly on persuading users to make a purchase.

Marketing, advertising, and sales occur in different areas of the conversion funnel. Marketing occurs at the top. Advertising occurs in the middle of the conversion funnel, and sales occurs at the bottom. Persuading a user to make a purchase is the final step in the conversion funnel. Therefore, sales is a bottom-of-the-funnel business strategy.

Marketing includes inbound and outbound promotional activities. Inbound promotional activities include social media marketing, blogging, video marketing, and similar content marketing activities. They are distinguished from outbound promotional activities by their ability to attract users.

Outbound promotional activities, such as advertising and sales activities, involve thrusting ads or other messages in front of users. Users may be forced to watch a TV commercial, listen to a radio ad, or view a banner ad on a website. Inbound promotional activities essentially revolve around content bait that attracts users. Regardless, inbound promotional activities are included in marketing. Advertising and sales, conversely, typically only include outbound promotional activities.

Advertising typically consists of paid activities, whereas marketing and sales consist of free and paid activities. You can advertise products or services by creating ads. Regardless of the ad format, ads are paid creatives. They are available to purchase through advertising networks. You can perform some marketing and sales activities for free, but you’ll have to spend money on advertising.

Sales is often performed one-on-one between a qualified user and a sales rep. Marketers may identify these qualified users, after which they’ll pass the users’ information to sales reps. Sales reps will then contact these users to see if they are interested in making a purchase.

Sales is easy to measure. You can measure the effectiveness of a sales strategy by tracking quantifiable metrics like total sales and conversion rate. An effective sales strategy will have a high number of total sales and a high conversion rate.

Marketing may or may not be easy to measure. Different marketing activities have different goals. If you’re creating ads — advertising is a form of marketing — you can measure the effectiveness of marketing by tracking similar metrics like sales and conversion rate. If you’re trying to raise brand awareness, though, you may struggle to measure the effectiveness of marketing. Raising brand awareness doesn’t support the same quantifiable metrics as advertising.

Marketing, advertising, and sales are three different business strategies. While there are some key differences between them, they converge while striving to achieve the same goal: to generate sales revenue.

However, this advertising method does not come without pitfalls. One of the biggest is click fraud. Research from the University of Baltimore concluded that click fraud costs digital marketers as much as $35 billion [1] in lost ad dollars per year. Here’s what you need to know to defend your ad budget.

What Is Click Fraud?

You’ve likely heard of fake traffic before, but if not, this usually refers to traffic generated by bots. In some cases, these bots are utilized to crash competitor websites, but on Facebook, they are used exclusively to cut you out of the advertising market.

These bots, or even sometimes click farms of low-cost human workers, spam-click on ads to drive up your costs and run you out of business. Many small-business owners are left scratching their heads as to why their advertising is not converting into sales, and consequently abandon the advertising channel.

These shady business practices crush smaller competitors, allowing larger companies with heftier wallets to control all of the advertising space. However, all is not lost, and there are ways for small businesses to fight back.

How Can Small Businesses Combat Click Fraud

While it’s impossible to eliminate all click fraud, there are a few things you can do to make sure your ads are getting to real consumers. Here are a few strategies to implement:

Optimize for Conversions and Not for Clicks

While using software that automatically optimizes your ads for the best converting audience is very useful, it’s not perfect. This is because software is only as smart as the human that trains it. If you tell the software that you want to maximize clicks on your ad, then that’s exactly what it will do. Unfortunately, it can also hone in on fraud clicks and create a profile that targets the very traffic that you are looking to avoid.

You can alter this behavior and greatly improve your campaign’s performance by optimizing your ad campaigns for conversions instead of clicks. This means that instead of the end goal being getting someone to interact with your ad, an action that invites bots to take a bite out of your budget, you will instead be optimizing for those who make a purchase or perform another desired action such as an email sign-up.

This takes a bit more time to set up, obviously, but it’s well worth doing. Not only will this action help to eliminate click fraud from your campaigns, but it will also help you to see how profitable your ad campaigns actually are.

Use a Landing Page

In addition to optimizing for conversions and not for clicks, using a proper landing page can also reduce click fraud. This is because bots are often programmed with very simple objectives in mind. They know how to click on the ad, and that’s about it. They are not sophisticated enough, in most circumstances, to complete further actions like a human would, and even if your competitor is utilizing a human click farm, they likely won’t bother.

So, while you will still have to pay for any initial bot clicks, the software will begin showing your ad to the kinds of people who will interact with the landing page and not just click the ad. This landing page will also be useful in separating traffic you acquire through sources other than your paid traffic, such as organically or through social media. Using this information, you can make better judgments concerning your ad campaigns.

Be Wary Of Facebook’s Audience Network

The audience network is intended to push your ads to a larger number of people. While this sounds like a great idea at first, the system does not always push your ads to the right people. In fact, it often pushes them out to big pages, which are frequently populated by bots.

In most cases, having tighter targeting not only reduces bot traffic but also ends up being a lot cheaper for you. Laser-targeted ads get better conversion rates, and this reduces your cost per click on the Facebook ads platform significantly.

Target Multiple Interest Sources

It’s a popular and very effective strategy to target the audience of similar brands who are already successfully advertising on Facebook. Unfortunately, bots have taken up residence here as well, even on legitimate pages.

You can, however, help yourself to avoid becoming a victim by utilizing multi-interest targeting. This means you’ll be dialing in a very specific audience who matches several different qualifying criteria rather than just one.

For example, if you were advertising a new music festival, you might target the fans of other similar events. However, you might also cross-target fans of artists, both big and small, who have played at those shows and further qualify leads by the location of your festival. It’s far less likely that bots or click farms will meet all of these criteria, so you can get a higher quality advertising audience.

One of the great things about Facebook  is that they really allow you to narrow down your search parameters to just the right people, thanks to interest targeting. Make sure that you’re taking advantage of all the options that are available to you.

Make Liberally Use of the Block List

Did you know that in your Facebook ads account, you can block specific people, demographics, and countries from clicking on your ad? This one is a definite no-brainer if you only sell products in one country. Blocking traffic that can’t convert is easy and reduces fraud substantially.

However, even if you have a global business, you may still wish to block demographics or countries that just aren’t converting for you. For example, maybe your product is too expensive for them, or perhaps it just doesn’t resonate in that locale.

Whatever the case, there’s no reason to waste ad spending on this traffic whether they are bots or not. If you have any locations with a large number of clicks and no conversions, consider adding them to the block list to conserve your precious ad dollars.

However, just blocking countries like India or Pakistan will not eliminate click fraud altogether. Many bots are actually run in the United States by competitors themselves, or they are using user-agent spoofing, a process which masks the user’s true location. This means that rather than editing your ad campaigns using broad brush strokes, you’ll instead need to dig a bit deeper and learn how to cut where it really counts. 

Make Use of Custom Audiences

Do you already have a solid customer base on Facebook? If so, you can have Facebook specifically target more people like your existing customers. Facebook is great at using data, and this can be a fantastic way to attract more of your kind of people.

When combined with the other tips above, this method can be used quite effectively to expand your audience, and having the Facebook pixel installed on your website pulls double duty for you, as it allows you to retarget existing customers for future sales.

While retargeting won’t get you new customers directly, nurturing an existing customer and alerting them to new product offerings can be more profitable. In fact, an existing customer is 50% more likely to try a new product from you than a new customer is. [2] Retargeting is also a great way to make sure your ad dollars are contributing to your sales goals and not click farms because these ads target people who have already converted before.

Wrapping Up…

In conclusion, reducing click fraud is really about making yourself more involved in the advertising process. While being able to set it and forget it would be fantastic, a successful ad campaign needs proper management and fine-tuning to remain profitable. 

      [1] ubalt.edu/news/news-releases.cfm?id=3621

      [2] crazyegg.com/blog/customer-retention/

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